Darknet mini-book: Introduction

In the next two months, I'll be publishing stories and analysis from the book here in regular weekly installments. Look for them every Monday.

Introduction

DARKNET TELLS THE STORY of the digital media revolution. The future of movies, music, television, computer games and the Internet are all on the line in this clash between the irresistible force of technological innovation and the immovable object of the entertainment media powers.

I wrote this book for two reasons: to tell the stories of the strong personalities and colorful characters at ground zero of this momentous battle and to spotlight the threat posed to digital culture.

Darknet will draw you into the secretive world of the movie underground, where bootleggers and pirates run circles around Hollywood and law enforcement. But piracy and file sharing are only subplots. Instead, this book profiles people from the future. To see where society is heading, futurist Watts Wacker once advised, find people from the future and study them. You will meet many people from the future in these pages—early adopters of the digital lifestyle, pioneers of next-generation television, gamemakers creating virtual worlds, all of them wrestling with the law or confronting powerful forces that seek to maintain the status quo.

Darknet goes behind the scenes to pull back the curtain on Hollywood insiders, tech innovators, and digital provocateurs lurking in the darkest corners of cyberspace. You’ll meet a Boston pastor who uses illegal clips from Hollywood movies in his Sunday sermons; the double agent who is paid to engage in movie piracy by a large media company; the vice president of the world’s largest chipmaker who may have unwittingly run afoul of federal law; the teenage boys who spent seven years refilming Raiders of the Lost Ark; the nightclub video jockey who uses dance scenes from old Fred Astaire movies in his routine; the former Byrds singer Roger McGuinn, who is using the Internet to help keep folk music alive; and many others who traverse the fast-changing technological, ethical, and legal landscape of the digital age.

All of these stories—reported here for the first time—speak to how technology is shifting the balance of power between big media and regular people. The rise of “personal media” is throwing the old rules into disarray.

We are no longer couch potatoes absorbing whatever mass media may funnel our way. We produce, publish, reinvent, and share personal media. We make our own movies. We create digital photos, animation, niche news sites, hyperfiction, and online picture albums. We program our personal video recorders so that we watch programming not on the networks’ schedule but on our terms. We capture TV shows and stream them from one room to another on home networks. We listen to Web radio or satellite stations that cater to our personalized tastes. We download music from the Net to our MP3 players and burn music to our own CDs. And some of us record music and distribute our works on the Internet.

We make our own media. In many ways, we are our own media.

But digital culture faces pushback. Under the banner of fighting piracy and protecting copyright, influential companies are threatening to turn back the clock so that our personal devices become handcuffed, our televisions dumbed down, and our computers hamstrung. This is not a distant threat; it is happening today.

Despite one-dimensional coverage in the mass media, the digital media revolution encompasses much more than piracy or file sharing. I hope to enlarge the debate by bringing into focus some of the important new developments in digital culture: personal media, participatory culture, space shifting, edge TV, open media, digital rights, and Darknets.

Now, about the title. Throughout this book, “Darknets” simply refer to underground or private networks where people trade files and communicate anonymously. But I want to suggest two deeper meanings as well.

First, the Darknet is a metaphor for the hidden-away matter of the Web—the burgeoning pool of weblogs, independent sites, and grassroots media well outside the limelight of Big Media. Collectively, this “long tail,” as Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson put it, far outweighs all the bright material of the commercial Web sites with their seemingly impressive vast swaths of traffic. The dark tail is where the hope and promise of the Web resides.

Second, Darknet serves as a warning about a world where digital media become locked down, a future where the network serves not the user but the interests of Hollywood and the record industry. More and more activity
on the open Internet will be pushed into the underground if current anti-innovation trends continue.

The next few years will be pivotal. As Joe Kraus of the public interest group DigitalConsumer.org warns, “This battle will affect consumers’ rights for the next fifty years.”

In this culture war, the major entertainment companies and their political allies are trying to exert control over digital technologies, while users do everything within the law—and sometimes outside the law—to escape those restrictions. The clash, intensifying by the day, is playing out in legislative chambers, courtrooms, and increasingly in the design of the consumer electronic devices, media players, personal computers, and digital television sets coming into our lives.

Only one player’s voice has not been heard: yours. The sensible middle ground has been lost in the noise. But now that the battle has reached our living rooms, the public is beginning to stir. What once was an obscure set of public policy discussions may be burgeoning into a populist movement.

I was attracted to this subject from the start, fascinated by the sparks given off by this culture clash. I’ve spent my career straddling the worlds
of both creative professionals and technologists. As a journalist who has covered both entertainment and technology for newspapers and magazines, and later as a member of management in three tech start-ups, I’ve seen the enormous gulf in worldviews between media people and techies. They don’t just talk past each other. They speak different languages.

My friends here in the nation’s technology capital (Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area) immerse themselves in the bleeding edge, working on weblog software, wi-fi, social networks, wikis, e-commerce, personal video recorders, and other cool stuff that will soon become part of our daily lives. Their mantras include user control, flexible systems, and many-to-many media models.

Many of my friends in New York and Los Angeles work in the content community—musicians and artists as well as writers, editors, and managers at national newspapers, magazines, and other media companies. Invariably, those in charge assume a broadcast model of one-to-many, top-down control, with little audience interaction. It’s a recipe for friction and customer alienation.

Those two fundamental worldviews animate every aspect of this war of ideas, which pits digital culture (inclusive, participatory, bottom-up) against big media culture (exclusive, controlling, top-down).

I began this undertaking with my own predispositions: I love movies, books, and television shows. I’m also a gizmo freak who loves computers, gadgets, and tech toys. I believe in the traditional principles of copyright—the trade-off in which society grants musicians, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people certain rights and incentives in exchange for public access to their creations. At the end of this journey, my belief in copyright as the bedrock of our culture remains stronger than ever. But it also has become clear that recent excesses in law and private industry have created a new imbalance in the public’s digital freedoms that threatens to shackle creative culture.

The two years I spent researching this book took me on a winding road from major media centers to remote hamlets, from the entertainment capitals of New York and Hollywood to the political corridors of Washington, D.C., and from Silicon Valley to tech outposts in Texas and Maine. I interviewed scores of people on all sides of the debate and was struck at how this issue cuts across conventional ideological lines. Progressives worry about corporate interests restricting free expression and chipping away at fair
use rights. Conservatives fear that overly restrictive government rules will hamper innovation among entrepreneurial start-ups and harm large companies exposed to frivolous copyright claims by competitors. At the same time, songwriters, producers, and artists of all political stripes fear that their livelihoods may vanish if the Darknet continues to grow.

Other books have tackled this subject through the lens of copyright law. I was more interested in writing about people caught up in the crosscurrents of fundamental cultural change. I’ve tried to approach the subject with a journalist’s eye, though not with the cool detachment of an objective outsider. Although reporting makes up most of this book, you’ll also find plenty of opinion. Here’s one: I part ways with those who defend unfettered file sharing that leaves artists out in the cold. People who care about the public’s right to participate in media culture ought to stand up against misuse and misappropriation of others’ creative works. The digital revolution promises so much more than a banal pleasuredome in which people can rip off music tracks or movies.

At the same time, when movie studios and record labels brand a pirate anyone who uses content in unauthorized ways, and when they attempt to lock down content with digital armor in a way that eviscerates traditional fair use rights, they are alienating customers—and pursuing business practices contrary to their long-term interests. They would be much better off devoting more energy to building legal, customer-friendly celestial jukeboxes for movies, music, television, and other media.

We need new rules for the digital age—not the free-for-all goodie bag of Internet piracy, but sensible policies and business models that reward and honor creative people without snuffing out the vibrant interchange of remixing and reinvention at the heart of digital culture. We need to prevent digital pilfering, but we also need to acknowledge that young people who go to movies, listen to music, and play video games approach those media in vastly different ways than did their parents. They expect to be able to interact with media, talk back to it, reshape it in some way. Media need to flow in both directions, not just through Hollywood’s one-way pipes. On the Internet, the prime directive is to share experiences. Businesses and laws need to adapt to that new reality.

Darknet raises one central question above all: What kind of media world do we want to live in? The outcome of this protracted struggle will determine how we innovate, educate our children, create and share information, communicate with friends, tell stories, and leave our own marks on the larger culture. Ultimately, the questions raised in this book go to the heart of what kind of society we want to become.

NEXT: The teenage filmmakers