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why is hollywood maKiNG a sequel to the NaPster wars?
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and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of
willingness is in short supply.
Most of the tech “companies” with an interest in commercializ-
ing Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios.
They’re either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free
hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos,
and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it),
politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish Bit-
Torrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with non-
interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices
by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online),
or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed
their DVD counterfeiting operations.
It’s not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video
recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of
the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a man-
aged TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who
fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and
the studios would much prefer the public to transition to “bun-
dled” PVRs that come with your TV service.
These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who
have absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known
to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD
ships, and many operators have started using “flags” that tell re-
corders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording al-
together.
The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than
ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they’re the easiest way for the
public to get what it wants — the video we want, the way we want
it. We use these services because they’re like the original Napster:
easy, well-designed, functional.
But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out,
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