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haPPy meal toys versus coPyriGht
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Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright:
How America Chose Hollywood and
Wal-Mart, and Why It’s Doomed Us,
and How We Might Survive Anyway
(Originally published as “How Hollywood, Congress, and DRM Are Beating Up
the American Economy,”
InformationWeek,
June 11, 2007.)
Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry
for exposing America’s impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs,
and rock-and-roll. Today, the Attorney General is proposing to give
the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement.
Through most of America’s history, the U.S. government has
been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as
purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the U.S. Trade Rep is
using America’s political clout to force Russia to institute police
inspections of its CD presses. (Savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia
forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and
Universal!)
How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top
trade priority? I blame the “Information Economy.”
No one really knows what “Information Economy” means,
but by the early ’90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed
her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an “infor-
mation economy” was and to figure out how to ensure America
stayed atop the “new economy” — America sent in the futurists.
We make the future in much the same way as we make the
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