page213
all comPlex ecosystems have Parasites
191
digital TV signals — you’ll have to go on bended knee to get per-
mission to deploy it. You’ll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a
panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and consumer
electronics toadies that the thing you’re going to bring to market
will not disrupt their business-models.
That’s how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD
player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization
called the DVD-CCA. They don’t give permission if you plan on
adding new features — that’s why they’re suing Kaleidescape for
building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a
hard drive archive instead of the original discs.
CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites — entrepreneur-
ial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent
a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs
would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, par-
asites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the
products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering
you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s,
MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thou-
sand percent more music — and on and on.
DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in
a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a man-
ageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars’
worth of ten-year-old DVDs are good for just what they were
good for ten years ago: watching. You can’t put your kid into her
favorite cartoon, you can’t downsample the video to something
that plays on your phone, and you certainly can’t lawfully make a
hard drive-based jukebox from your discs.
The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people
who want to “fix” some problem of bad actors on the networks.
Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the ex-
pectation that I’ll only communicate with it using your authorized
Content 2nd gal final.indd 191
7/4/08 9:57:37 AM