Here’s part eight of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
In my latest column for Information Week, I talk about the Hollywood attempt to re-create the Napster Wars, suing all the funded, legit companies that want to do Internet video, like YouTube. When the record companies did this to Napster, all it did was ensure that the P2P market was saturated with companies that had no interest in doing deals with the record companies — instead, we got rogues like Kazaa and AllOfMP3, whose business-model was built around the difficulty of being sued offshore, not paying the record companies for the use of copyrights.
Now the TV and movie people are following suit — and there’s every chance that they’ll succeed at scaring off all the legit Internet distribution companies. Which will just make ThePirateBay into the world’s biggest, most successful video distribution system.
Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, Napster kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that’s not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and then working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they’d built their fortunes on.
Napster’s plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months — more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US presidential election! — and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What’s more, Napster’s architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock out non-paying users.
Voices for the Cure is a Lulu press anthology of science fiction stories published to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Many writers — including me — donated stories to the book (I gave them my story Craphound).
Some of the greatest voices in speculative fiction join forces in this one-of-a-kind anthology to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Join Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, and others as a cop-for-hire solves a murder aboard a space station…a Chicano science fiction writer takes mind-blowing (literally!) ride through the Singularity…a third-rate superhero with useless powers finds a place to belong…an antique collector learns that one alien’s junk is mankind’s treasure…a geologist discovers that pretending to be a god isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…a journalist learns how to fend off zombies using Linux and a dead badger… All this and more await you in… Voices for the Cure: A Speculative Fiction Anthology to Benefit the American Diabetes Association
Here’s part seven of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
I’ve started writing a column for the MediaGuardian, the British website for media professionals, critiquing DRM and explaining “copy-friendly” business models. My first column is up today, explaining the way that DRM is like the Soviet Union’s Lysenkoism, a form of ideologically correct junk science.
The companies that sell this stuff are, at best, bunkum peddlers and, at worst, out and out fraudsters. Their wares simply can’t work – not without changing the laws of physics, maths and information science.
DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists. It’s inevitable, because every time you give someone a locked item, you have to give them the key to unlock it too.
Here’s part six of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
A t-shirt I helped to design is up for sale on Shirt.Woot — a new t-shirt site from the Woot! people. The shirt’s inspiration was this post about the British “Keep Calm and Carry On” tees.
My shirt features the text, “ZOMG TERRISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG!” around a modified DHS logo, with the eagle clutching an empty water bottle and a pair of shoes.
Shirt.Woot has a funny pricing model. On the first day — today — the shirts cost $10 (including shipping!), but only 1000 of them are sold. Starting tomorrow, the shirts go up in price to $15 until August 6. After that, only the top selling Shirt.Woot designs will be offered for sale.
Woot and I have released the shirt’s art under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license for your remixing pleasure.
