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Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation
An indispensable primer for those who want to protect their digital rights from the dark forces of big media.
-Kara Swisher, author
The first general interest book by a blogger edited collaboratively by his readers, Darknet reveals how Hollywood's fear of digital piracy is leading to escalating clashes between copyright holders and their customers, who love their TiVo digital video recorders, iPod music players, digital televisions, computers, and other cutting-edge devices. Drawing on unprecedented access to entertainment insiders, technology innovators, and digital provocateurs-including some who play on both sides of the war between digital pirates and entertainment conglomerates-the book shows how entertainment companies are threatening the fundamental freedoms of the digital age.
-Kara Swisher, author
The first general interest book by a blogger edited collaboratively by his readers, Darknet reveals how Hollywood's fear of digital piracy is leading to escalating clashes between copyright holders and their customers, who love their TiVo digital video recorders, iPod music players, digital televisions, computers, and other cutting-edge devices. Drawing on unprecedented access to entertainment insiders, technology innovators, and digital provocateurs-including some who play on both sides of the war between digital pirates and entertainment conglomerates-the book shows how entertainment companies are threatening the fundamental freedoms of the digital age.
- GenresTechnology
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2005
1 person is currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
J.D. Lasica
9 books52 followersJ.D. Lasica is the International bestselling author of four high-tech thrillers. He is also the founder of BingeBooks.com as well as a former columnist and journalist at a top 20 newspaper. J.D. has spoken at the United Nations, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cannes and at dozens of conferences on four continents. He has just moved to Puerto Rico (he loves the beaches and arts scene there) and is working on his next thriller release.
Do you belong to a book club? J.D. has spoken by video chat to dozens of book clubs on subjects from AI to thrillers to indie publishing.
Do you belong to a book club? J.D. has spoken by video chat to dozens of book clubs on subjects from AI to thrillers to indie publishing.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 10, 2023
This book is not at all what I thought it was going to be, partly because the term “darknet” has changed rapidly since the book was published in 2005.
It’s the latter definition that I was aware of, which made the title an odd construction. My initial hypothesis is that he was using a term ironically, to warn that the Internet might go dark if Hollywood has its way—and that is explicitly part of his reason for the title. But that’s not his definition of darknet:
He includes in this definition the old Usenet newsgroups and IRC, people sending files via IM, the physical places where people “copy, burn, and share physical media like CDs”, and the “encrypted dark networks like Freenets”.
His definition of the digital generation is similarly wide, although not explicitly defined as he did darknet: it’s anyone of any age who uses digitally-stored things, such as music CDs, downloaded video (streaming wasn’t quite ready at the time), online books, etc. His examples are of people throughout the age spectrum; what most have in common is an understanding of how bits flow and how they can be copied, modified and mixed, and shared.
But he also includes in “the digital generation” anyone who can benefit from that process, which is, ultimately, everyone. It could just have well have been titled “Hollywood’s War Against Us”.
Part of the fascination for me is the change in language over the last two decades. He still refers to blogs by three names: he starts out calling them web journals, then weblogs, and, eventually, blogs.
The iPod was a big deal, and part of the impetus behind the book, because it made digital music accessible beyond the tech-savvy. But the first iPhone wouldn’t be released for two more years.
It’s also always interesting reading about where authors of books like this thought we’d be now. By 2025, “we’ll be carrying around portable devices with 20 petabytes of storage”. This is according to Rodney Books, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He’s still got time to be right, but the largest portable external drives now seem to be around one to five terabytes. So it’s got a long way to go.
Lasica himself, not someone he’s quoting, says “the average home will soon go from having four computers to having four hundred.” Now, he’s not talking about having four hundred desktops. He’s already pointed out that if you have DVR, it’s a computer, and even your router may well have been running Linux or something like it. But that’s still a huge number. Even counting the bathrooms and garage, I have ten rooms. Do I have forty computers per room?
Camera, desktop, phone (in my pocket), router, DVR, battery backup, printer, scanner, cable modem, television set, Roku, TRS-80, typewriter.
That’s thirteen items, and the last two are not really what he meant by computers—his use of the term in this context required that they be on the network and repurposable if we had the freedom to repurpose them (or if we don’t have the freedom to stop someone else from repurposing, either a hacker or the company we bought it from).
Similarly, in my dining room (because I can see it from here) I have a HomeKit light switch, a boombox (it networks over bluetooth), and a HomeKit speaker.
He’s certainly right that the number of things that are computers, and could be used, if hacked, for more than what we bought them for, has increased. But four hundred was always an exaggeration. Look around you and think, of all the things in the room you’re in, how many would you like to be smarter, to react to you instead of you having to go to them?
Windows that open and shut, lights that turn on and off, maybe a thermometer, it would be very hard for me to hit forty items in this room, and it’s the largest in the house.
More interesting are the things he gets right, from the trivial to the important. Considering the kinds of television channels that could be created when bandwidth is unlimited, he segues from channels based on specific bands to “Why not a Puppy Channel?” On the spare television in my office, I’ve just pulled up “FidoTV”. It comes basically free as one of the extras part of the news channel I subscribe to. There are channels devoted to puppies on both YouTube and Rumble, and probably all of the user-contribution video services.
A couple pages earlier he’s talking about digital video recording your home cable (he was an early TiVo user).
This is how the search works on my AppleTV and on my Roku, and, I suspect, on other such devices. Testing it right now using the perennially-unavailable-in-widescreen All of Me, I discovered that it may now be available in widescreen on both the Roku app and the Kanopy app.
It’s not quite the system he envisioned—he preferred a system where everybody’s DVR shared with everyone else’s—but it is as useful as he suggested it would be.
And he was also concerned about the integrity of voting machines, highlighting the attempts by Diebold Election Systems to use the DMCA to “quash speech” about leaked internal memos and potential fraud using their machines.
But the overall theme of the book, that we are in danger of allowing Hollywood and big entertainment in general to turn out the lights of the Internet, to turn us into a “permission culture” where we need to permission to do anything with the entertainment or products we buy, is still an important one. When you listen to music on your phone that you bought on your computer, there are still people trying to make that illegal. When you use a DVR to timeshift your television watching, that’s also something Hollywood would love to make illegal, or at least to seriously control: force your device to automatically delete it after a few days, only allow you to watch it once, not allow you to fast-forward through the boring bits, let alone the commercials.
He opens the book with a detailed description of how a couple of kids created Raiders: The Adaptation, a scene-for-scene remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The rest of the book argues, sometimes persuasively, sometimes not, that this sort of repurposing of content, whether digitally or not, should be not just legal, but encouraged.
The Darknet is a relatively new concept. The term was coined in a scientific paper four Microsoft researchers released in November 2002… The researchers defined darknets as “a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content.”… [They] were referring to the vast, gathering, lawless economy of shared music, movies, television shows, games, software, and porn—a one-touch jukebox that would rival the products and services of the entertainment companies.
Soon afterward, the press… began using other definitions. The New York Times, for example, described darknets as private, invitation-only cyberclubs or gated communities requiring an access code to enter… Others refer to the Dark Net as the world of cybercrime, spammers, terrorists, and other underworld figures who use the Internet to avert the law.
It’s the latter definition that I was aware of, which made the title an odd construction. My initial hypothesis is that he was using a term ironically, to warn that the Internet might go dark if Hollywood has its way—and that is explicitly part of his reason for the title. But that’s not his definition of darknet:
I use darknet strictly as a catch-all term to refer to networks of people who rely on closed-off social spaces—safe havens in both the virtual and real worlds where there is little or no fear of detection—to share copyrighted digital material with others or to escape the restrictions on digital media imposed by the entertainment companies.
The capitalized Darknet refers to these networks in a collective sense.
He includes in this definition the old Usenet newsgroups and IRC, people sending files via IM, the physical places where people “copy, burn, and share physical media like CDs”, and the “encrypted dark networks like Freenets”.
His definition of the digital generation is similarly wide, although not explicitly defined as he did darknet: it’s anyone of any age who uses digitally-stored things, such as music CDs, downloaded video (streaming wasn’t quite ready at the time), online books, etc. His examples are of people throughout the age spectrum; what most have in common is an understanding of how bits flow and how they can be copied, modified and mixed, and shared.
But he also includes in “the digital generation” anyone who can benefit from that process, which is, ultimately, everyone. It could just have well have been titled “Hollywood’s War Against Us”.
Part of the fascination for me is the change in language over the last two decades. He still refers to blogs by three names: he starts out calling them web journals, then weblogs, and, eventually, blogs.
The iPod was a big deal, and part of the impetus behind the book, because it made digital music accessible beyond the tech-savvy. But the first iPhone wouldn’t be released for two more years.
It’s also always interesting reading about where authors of books like this thought we’d be now. By 2025, “we’ll be carrying around portable devices with 20 petabytes of storage”. This is according to Rodney Books, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He’s still got time to be right, but the largest portable external drives now seem to be around one to five terabytes. So it’s got a long way to go.
Lasica himself, not someone he’s quoting, says “the average home will soon go from having four computers to having four hundred.” Now, he’s not talking about having four hundred desktops. He’s already pointed out that if you have DVR, it’s a computer, and even your router may well have been running Linux or something like it. But that’s still a huge number. Even counting the bathrooms and garage, I have ten rooms. Do I have forty computers per room?
Camera, desktop, phone (in my pocket), router, DVR, battery backup, printer, scanner, cable modem, television set, Roku, TRS-80, typewriter.
That’s thirteen items, and the last two are not really what he meant by computers—his use of the term in this context required that they be on the network and repurposable if we had the freedom to repurpose them (or if we don’t have the freedom to stop someone else from repurposing, either a hacker or the company we bought it from).
Similarly, in my dining room (because I can see it from here) I have a HomeKit light switch, a boombox (it networks over bluetooth), and a HomeKit speaker.
He’s certainly right that the number of things that are computers, and could be used, if hacked, for more than what we bought them for, has increased. But four hundred was always an exaggeration. Look around you and think, of all the things in the room you’re in, how many would you like to be smarter, to react to you instead of you having to go to them?
Windows that open and shut, lights that turn on and off, maybe a thermometer, it would be very hard for me to hit forty items in this room, and it’s the largest in the house.
More interesting are the things he gets right, from the trivial to the important. Considering the kinds of television channels that could be created when bandwidth is unlimited, he segues from channels based on specific bands to “Why not a Puppy Channel?” On the spare television in my office, I’ve just pulled up “FidoTV”. It comes basically free as one of the extras part of the news channel I subscribe to. There are channels devoted to puppies on both YouTube and Rumble, and probably all of the user-contribution video services.
A couple pages earlier he’s talking about digital video recording your home cable (he was an early TiVo user).
Say you wanted to watch Hill Street Blues or I Love Lucy, but your local cable company doesn’t carry it. You could enter the title on your TV screen, and a directory listing would report back on ten places where you could download it for a modest fee.
This is how the search works on my AppleTV and on my Roku, and, I suspect, on other such devices. Testing it right now using the perennially-unavailable-in-widescreen All of Me, I discovered that it may now be available in widescreen on both the Roku app and the Kanopy app.
It’s not quite the system he envisioned—he preferred a system where everybody’s DVR shared with everyone else’s—but it is as useful as he suggested it would be.
And he was also concerned about the integrity of voting machines, highlighting the attempts by Diebold Election Systems to use the DMCA to “quash speech” about leaked internal memos and potential fraud using their machines.
But the overall theme of the book, that we are in danger of allowing Hollywood and big entertainment in general to turn out the lights of the Internet, to turn us into a “permission culture” where we need to permission to do anything with the entertainment or products we buy, is still an important one. When you listen to music on your phone that you bought on your computer, there are still people trying to make that illegal. When you use a DVR to timeshift your television watching, that’s also something Hollywood would love to make illegal, or at least to seriously control: force your device to automatically delete it after a few days, only allow you to watch it once, not allow you to fast-forward through the boring bits, let alone the commercials.
He opens the book with a detailed description of how a couple of kids created Raiders: The Adaptation, a scene-for-scene remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The rest of the book argues, sometimes persuasively, sometimes not, that this sort of repurposing of content, whether digitally or not, should be not just legal, but encouraged.
Genie: 1, Bottle: 0.
August 31, 2010
I really enjoyed this somewhat dated book about hollywood's fight against p2p networks. The second half of the book was definitely MUCH better. Soooo, if you can get through the 100+ pages, you are in for a decent read. After he tackles the movie industry, he goes on to explore the music and games industries as well.
Basically, p2p networks have taken off as Hollywood has tried as hard as they could to influence legislation to prevent consumers from viewing movies how, when and where they please. If you buy a movie, shouldn't you have the right to watch it on a portable device? Not according to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). This has hampered a lot of creativity as pastors are breaking the law if they show a short clip of a copyrighted movie or tv show in church on Sunday! Wanna make a mash-up(two different songs mixed together)? Well, that is also breaking the law! Using a ten-second clip of a Disney movie in your home video would make you a felon!
The author goes into how forward thinking business people from NYC are always trying to develop new business models, while Hollywood views this as a threat. It's only the newer companies like HBO, MTV, etc that are willing to listen. "As broadband succeeds, broadcasting will fail."
"Our country has a choice of two visions of what our media culture might look like. One might be 500 channels (owned by 6 corporations) and nothing on. The other might allow consumers easy on-demand access to a world of unique artistry of such power and grace as would melt the heart."
In the music world, the industry loves to blame the file sharing networks for their current woes, but many of their wounds have been self-inflicted. Artists receive less than 5 percent of CD sales! They average around 12 percent for online sales and 35-40 percent of concert proceeds. A new band gets an advance and after all is said and done, they usually end up OWING money to the label! They are not allowed to post any music online for their fans as it is prohibited. All the money is being made by only a few big artists, while all the other musicians are starving! "obscurity-not piracy-may be the greatest threat to the vast majority of creative artists." "Price it right and they will come."
He ends with a 10 point digital culture road map! Interesting stuff! Would definitely recommend!
Basically, p2p networks have taken off as Hollywood has tried as hard as they could to influence legislation to prevent consumers from viewing movies how, when and where they please. If you buy a movie, shouldn't you have the right to watch it on a portable device? Not according to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). This has hampered a lot of creativity as pastors are breaking the law if they show a short clip of a copyrighted movie or tv show in church on Sunday! Wanna make a mash-up(two different songs mixed together)? Well, that is also breaking the law! Using a ten-second clip of a Disney movie in your home video would make you a felon!
The author goes into how forward thinking business people from NYC are always trying to develop new business models, while Hollywood views this as a threat. It's only the newer companies like HBO, MTV, etc that are willing to listen. "As broadband succeeds, broadcasting will fail."
"Our country has a choice of two visions of what our media culture might look like. One might be 500 channels (owned by 6 corporations) and nothing on. The other might allow consumers easy on-demand access to a world of unique artistry of such power and grace as would melt the heart."
In the music world, the industry loves to blame the file sharing networks for their current woes, but many of their wounds have been self-inflicted. Artists receive less than 5 percent of CD sales! They average around 12 percent for online sales and 35-40 percent of concert proceeds. A new band gets an advance and after all is said and done, they usually end up OWING money to the label! They are not allowed to post any music online for their fans as it is prohibited. All the money is being made by only a few big artists, while all the other musicians are starving! "obscurity-not piracy-may be the greatest threat to the vast majority of creative artists." "Price it right and they will come."
He ends with a 10 point digital culture road map! Interesting stuff! Would definitely recommend!
January 7, 2010
Still reading this but I'm fining it to be pretty disappointing and may end up putting it down. The Chapter where he interviews the movie downloaders was great. But the chapter where he insists that just because there's cheaper camcorders and editing software that there will be a lot more Spielbergs and Coppolas out there is just bad. Yes there will be more film makers, and they will come from new places, but as much as I enjoy the "piano playing cat," I don't think it's really the same thing. There's an education that goes along to making films wich is ignored in the book.
After that he talks about how great the DVD technology that allows studios to put out DVDs that have multiple ratings, that chapter is just horrifying and unimaginable to defend. It's basically censorship not offering the fans a new product, but Lasica doesn't seem to see it that way. JD Lasica defends it but doesn't consider films and film making to be an art but more of a product. A fan or edit or cutting a few shots out to use in a presentation is not the same, that's great. That I would defend because it contributes to the culture. But a PG version of "The Hangover" is not the same as a Director's Cut, it's not even close. I have a 5 year old kid and I skip over Bambi's and Nemo's mother dieing every time, I still don't want a studio to do it for me. The parents who want to show their kids a PG version of Saving Privet Ryan are just nuts and I can't defend them. How about a G version of Schindler's List next?
Ultimately the book is outdated. It spends a lot of time on DVDs and upcoming Blueray player. DVDs are on their way out. Studios are spending too much money on copy protection (8 billion was spent protecting Blueray and it was cracked in less then a week). It's not a question of if digital downloads will happen, it's already happening and will continue to get better. The question is will Hollywood be involved.
After that he talks about how great the DVD technology that allows studios to put out DVDs that have multiple ratings, that chapter is just horrifying and unimaginable to defend. It's basically censorship not offering the fans a new product, but Lasica doesn't seem to see it that way. JD Lasica defends it but doesn't consider films and film making to be an art but more of a product. A fan or edit or cutting a few shots out to use in a presentation is not the same, that's great. That I would defend because it contributes to the culture. But a PG version of "The Hangover" is not the same as a Director's Cut, it's not even close. I have a 5 year old kid and I skip over Bambi's and Nemo's mother dieing every time, I still don't want a studio to do it for me. The parents who want to show their kids a PG version of Saving Privet Ryan are just nuts and I can't defend them. How about a G version of Schindler's List next?
Ultimately the book is outdated. It spends a lot of time on DVDs and upcoming Blueray player. DVDs are on their way out. Studios are spending too much money on copy protection (8 billion was spent protecting Blueray and it was cracked in less then a week). It's not a question of if digital downloads will happen, it's already happening and will continue to get better. The question is will Hollywood be involved.
July 7, 2010
The book has aged better than expected. I was prepared to skip though story after story on the RIAA and MPAA suing college students and housewives or installing rootkits. Thinking back to 2004-2005, the idea of DVDs and Netflix were still new technologies for most of America (Google had yet to release their beta of Google books when this was being written). So it's pretty amazing how relevant parts of this book still are.
What I enjoyed was that Lasica let hits interviewees speak without too much criticism. From Christians who see nothing wrong with "editing" movies to remove swears, violence and sex to the point of censorship to a preacher who downloads tv shows before they air, the book is filled with people who either aren't aware or don't care about the stringent copyright laws that have been passed since the 70s. This is still worth reading as it gives the reader a view into what media conglomerates were thinking 5 years ago and are starting to put into action only now.
What I enjoyed was that Lasica let hits interviewees speak without too much criticism. From Christians who see nothing wrong with "editing" movies to remove swears, violence and sex to the point of censorship to a preacher who downloads tv shows before they air, the book is filled with people who either aren't aware or don't care about the stringent copyright laws that have been passed since the 70s. This is still worth reading as it gives the reader a view into what media conglomerates were thinking 5 years ago and are starting to put into action only now.
Read
July 7, 2016A great book. The Darknet made national headlines after the police busted a Darknet site called The Silk Road. Rolling Stone Magazine published an article on the Darknet shortly afterwards. Anonymity on the Internet is of concern to everyone. I predict that the Darknet will eventually become as popular as the world wide web.
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