Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Note: This is Part III in a series; Part I is here, Part II is here.
Even today, I canât tell if the entertainment execs and their tech collaborators that I sparred with in the DRM wars were brilliant schemers or overconfident fools.
When these menâââalmost all menâââset out to create laws that would give their corporations a collective veto over which programs all computers could run, and which real-world data could be captured by computers, were they really doing it all for the sake of controlling how we watch TV? Or did they grasp just how this power over our digital tools would translate into control over our lives in an increasingly digital era?
I still donât know. Itâs easy to believe in unlimited corporate hubris, but itâs just as easy to believe in unlimited corporate foolishness. Whatâs more, itâs possible that some of the players were along for the ride, while others had a very precise understanding of the stakes.
What were those stakes?
Well, for starters, how about the definition of âthe family.â
Note: This is Part I in a series; Part II is here, Part III is here
âA polite marketplace.â
Thatâs what the movie studio executive said he wanted to create.
It was my first day at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of our supporters had been at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas the week before; coming back through the Convention Center late at night, he stumbled on an âopen meetingâ being held by the Motion Picture Association of Americaâs Copy Protection Technical Working Group. It was an âopen meetingâ in the sense that anyone who knew about it was welcome to attend, but they didnât actually tell anyone it was happening, and they held it in the dead of night.
On the spur of the moment, that supporter decided to attend. What he heard was genuinely bizarre, and would have been absurd if it wasnât so alarming.
That dead-of-night NAB meetingâs purpose was to announce the formation of a new interindustry consortium: the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), which would hold its inaugural âopen meetingâ the following week, at an LAX airport hotel that would be convenient for tech reps who flew in from Silicon Valley and for studio and TV reps based in LA.
BPDGâs purpose? To steal the future.