Want a glimpse of how things really work? Follow the battle between the tech industry and hollywood to stop ‘piracy’. Michael Eisner of Disney Corp., who has suggested executing pirates, is up at Capitol Hill trying to force the government to come up with mandated technological barriers to prevent copying. There is no representation for the public. The entire debate is between the manufacturers and the content producers. At issue, is the reality that people don’t check with Hollywood before changing things. Despite their best measures to control everything big media is seeing that people all over the world are doing what comes natural thing…sharing. The internet has freed books, music, and video. Why should people be compelled to pay for something which they can borrow or copy from someone else? I say, fuck Michael Eisner, Jack Valenti, and all the other leeches like them. Piracy will continue even if people have to use camcorders to copy movies. Their is no hope to protect books. Text is what computers do best. You can download a book that someone scanned and ocred and it will be anywhere from 50-100 Kilobytes. That’s nothing. You could have 1500 books per 700 MB Disc. Movies are more of a problem, but there is no way to stop it without preventing people from creating videos entirely which would be nearly impossible.
Online one can find anything. Millions of people are involved in a large-scale process to share what they have. People are collaborating to create a virtual limitless library of culture. You can find sewing patterns, crochet patterns, recipes, television episodes, movies, music, music videos, books, comic books, and even scans of magazines like Playboy. All of these things shackeled by copyright. It is an exciting time to be alive.