Mini-book chapters

We stand at a historic moment when we're witnessing the transition to a fundamentally new kind of media.

Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years.

Darknet is not another book about the excesses of copyright law -- not really. It's a look at the future of future of movies, television, computing, music, games, art and more -- and the choice we face as a society.

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. (Sorry, Wiley won't let us post the entire book online, but they're letting us go farther than they've allowed any other author.)

We think this is the first time this kind of "mini-book" -- containing both installments from the book and new material -- has been done on the Web.

That's appropriate, given that "Darknet" was the first mainstream book written with the help of readers on a wiki (as well as input from blog readers). Moreover, it was the Darknet blog's readers who settled on the final title for the book (see "Name this book" on the Darknet and New Media Musings sites).

Here, then, is the Darknet mini-book:

Front flap (from Amazon's Inside the book)

Back flap  (from Amazon's Inside the book)

Back cover  (from Amazon's Inside the book — please ignore the note that says "Copyrighted material")

Index (full index of book, which you can search on, copy and print out, unlike the version on Amazon :~)  )

Table of Contents of the print book

Foreword by Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs (published June 6)

Introduction (published May 16)

Acknowledgments

Story: The teenage filmmakers — You'll have to live into your 100s if you want to see their remake of "Raiders of the Lost ArK." (published May 16)

Concept: Darknets — What are these secret places all about? (published May 23)

Story: The tech and CE industries get cozy with Hollywood — How the technology and consumer electronics industries are selling you out, little by little (published May 23)

Story: The Prince of Darknet — The first-ever look inside the movie underground (published May 30)

Interview: A major pirate in the movie underground — The first published interview with the head of six major movie release groups (published May 30)

Interview: Andy Wolfe, former CTO, ReplayTV — He reveals what the Hollywood studios and television networks were really after in their lawsuit against Sonicblue's ReplayTV: control of your television. (published May 30)

Story: Fair use in the digital age  — Philip Gaines' insatiable appetite to annotate Firefly, and to walk into the grey zone of fair use. (published June 6)

Interview: Jack Valenti, former CEO, Motion Picture Association of America — This is perhaps the most wide-ranging interview on record of the MPAA's views on piracy, fair use, the DMCA, DRM and technological innovation. (published June 8, 2005)

Story: Your locked-down digital future — All about renewability, certification, and other ways Hollywood plans to lock down your digital gadgets. (published June 13, 2005)

Story: The tech exec who broke federal law (and why the law is broken) — How the vice president of Intel Corp. violated the DMCA without realizing it — by making a home movie of his son playing Pop Warner football. (published June 20, 2005)

Story: When the studios won't give permission  — A blow-by-blow of the author's written request to the seven major Hollywood studios for permission to borrow 10- to 30-second snippets from years-old Hollywood movies for inclusion in a home movie project  — including the studios' formal refusals (published July 8, 2005)

Story: Hollywood's visionary outcast —  Warren Lieberfarb, the hard-charging former head of Warner Home Video, almost single-handedly invented the DVD. So what does he see for the future of television? Surprisingly, it's a distributed, on-demand, grassroots model that Hollywood, so far, has shown little interest in. But Hollywood's digital future is inevitable. (published July 18, 2005)

Story: Pho, Cole Porter and Tarzan economics —  Digital media pioneer Jim Griffin  —  founder of the influential pho mailing list  —  looks at the future of music. (published Aug. 8, 2005)

Interview:  Roger McGuinn on the folk tradition vs. the record labels (Ourmedia) — McGuinn —  a renowned solo artist who was lead singer of the Byrds in the mid-'60s —  talks about McGuinn's Folk Den, a Web site devoted to continuing the folk tradition of storytelling, which he says is in danger of being obliterated by commercial interests. (published Aug. 16, 2005)

Embracing Our Digital Destiny (AlwaysOn Network) —  Here's a 10-point blueprint for transitioning from the analog to the digital world. (published Oct. 25, 2005)