'Darknet' foreword

If you look at my earlier books, Tools for Thought, Virtual Reality, and The Virtual Community, you might notice that there are more quotes, and longer quotes, than in my most recent book, Smart Mobs. The explanation for this is that “fair use”—the fundamental scholarly tradition of building upon the (accurately attributed) work of others—has been chipped away by large “content owners.” Publishing used to be a more genteel enterprise, with a great deal of slack granted in the service of culture. As long as we used quotation marks and/or block quotes and/or italics and attributed each quote to its author in a standard footnote and/or bibliography, authors were free to make our cases by referring to the work of others. The rule of thumb was that if the quote was under 500 words, explicit permission was not required.

However, when I wrote those previous books, publishing was a very different enterprise. For example, I could have proposed my book to Random House, Knopf, Doubleday, Dell, or Bantam. Today, all those publishers are part of Bertelsmann. Publishers are no longer solely in the business of producing books; they are profit centers for large entertainment companies. And those companies protect their property through threat of lawsuit, at the expense of fair use. My editor for Smart Mobs told me that I had to obtain written permission for every quote over 250 words. Although there was no case law about this, my publisher’s lawyers didn’t want to court intimidation by the legal departments of the companies that owned other publishers.

If you can afford an assistant, writing a dozen or a hundred permissions letters isn’t a problem, and for the most part, you won’t have to pay a large amount of permissions costs. However, the problem is a larger one. First, it’s just one early restriction of fair use in publishing. Since publishers have given up without a fight, what is to keep large-content owners from pressing forward in future years, requiring all authors to obtain and pay for permissions for all quotes? Second, it isn’t limited to publishing. If you want to make an independent film these days, you better not do it on a shoestring. Every brand, every poster, every possible copyrighted image in the background of your film now requires permission—which is not always granted, nor are those that are granted always affordable. The situation is already out of control and getting worse.

This is no longer a matter that concerns only authors, filmmakers, or other “professionals,” for we are all members of the media now. It has taken a decade for people to accept the notion that every computer desktop, and now every pocket and camera phone, is a global printing press, broadcast station, and organizing tool. The early years of the World Wide Web marked a historic shift of power from big institutions to individuals, from those who horde information and ideas to those who want to share them.

No wonder the media powers are in a froth about the Internet.

Now the next phase of digital transformation lies before us, one that involves democratized media, peer-to-peer networks, collaborative tools, social software, and the ubiquitous computing of camera phones; mobile devices; and cheap, tiny chips embedded into our stuff. The outcome of this next phase of the disruptive Internet is much less certain, as battles rage over control of the social, economic, and political regimes that these new technologies will make possible.

How we resolve this culture war will have far-reaching consequences for all of us. Five or ten years from now, who will be able to create and share media—individuals, or only powerful interests? When hundreds of millions of people walk down the street carrying connected, always-on devices hundreds of times more powerful than today’s computers, what will they be allowed to do?

These decisions, being made today in Washington and in private industry forums, could shape digital culture for generations to come. The battles really boil down to a simple choice: whether we want to be users or consumers.

In one vision, individuals will be free to create and distribute movie shorts, personal musical works, and homemade video, occasionally borrowing bits and pieces from the culture around them. Individuals, acting as personal media networks, will build on earlier works to create and distribute compelling digital stories, true-life dramas, fan fiction, pieced-together television shows, modded computer games, and rich virtual worlds. Some users will go further, creating not just new content but also entirely new forms of media.

The second vision, pushed by entertainment interests and their Washington allies, seeks to preserve the status quo—a constricted view of our digital future that relies on formulaic broadcast content sent along one-way pipes to a passive, narcotized audience. Under this regime, consumers will have the power to choose among five hundred brands offered by the same handful of vendors, with little or no power to create their own cultural products.

Like everything in life, the choice between digital society and consumer culture is not an either-or proposition, for on any given day we juggle our roles as content creators and couch potatoes. But increasingly, we resist one-way media. We reject the megaphone of the broadcast era and turn to the many-to-many collaborative strands of the Internet.

And as we do—as we grow comfortable in our new roles as publishers, producers, designers, and distributors of media—we begin to bump up against a legislative regime that threatens to lock down our digital freedoms and turn millions of us into felons. That’s when the lightbulb goes off and we begin to see the threat posed to innovative grassroots technology.

Some point to our shiny new toys as evidence that all is well. Michael K. Powell, who just recently stepped down as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, addressed the National Press Club in early 2004. He told the group:

The visionary sermons of technology futurists seem to have materialized. No longer the stuff of science fiction novels, crystal balls and academic conferences, it is real. . . . Technology is bringing more power to people. Computing and communication power is coming to people because the forces of silicon chips, massive storage, and speedy connections to the Internet are combining to produce smaller and more powerful devices that can rest in our hands, rather than in the hands of large centralized institutions.

It boggles the mind to see the fantastic products available to us today. A simple survey suffices to make the point: Digital cameras and photo printers have moved the dark room into the home. Music players, like the iPod, have taken the rows of CDs out of a music store and placed them in your pocket. Personal Video Recorders, like TiVo, have given us more control of what we watch and when. We want movie theaters in our family rooms. GPS satellite receivers come on farm tractors. DVD players let us watch high-quality movies almost anywhere—just look through the back windows of the minivans pulling out of your neighborhood on Saturday morning and you can catch up on the full season of SpongeBob SquarePants.

It is not that we have access to electronics that is earth shattering, it is that we have access to pocket super computers that not long ago would have been the exclusive domain of MIT, NASA, or the phone company. The economics of these mean that they will keep getting more powerful and cheaper, thus the future will stay bright. In short, we are accelerating our ride into the future.

In his speech, Powell overlooked a few things. He neglected to mention the corporate efforts to lock down the Internet and limit the ability of ordinary people to produce cultural works that compete with media conglomerates. He failed to mention Hollywood’s attempts to replace the open Net with a secure content-delivery system that resembles television. He didn’t mention efforts made to control the flow of information online through a fundamental revision of the PC architecture for the sole purpose of serving the short-term interests of the entertainment industry. He forgot to mention Hollywood’s successful efforts—before his own FCC—to impose a tightened regime of control over digital television that strips away rights enjoyed by viewers during the analog era.

When I see my college-age daughter, I think about what kind of media world awaits her. It’s imperative that young people who have grown up with the freedom that the PC, the Internet, and the mobile phone granted them won’t settle for being put into a passive box.

In Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation, journalist and open-media advocate J.D. Lasica offers the first comprehensive look at the restrictions being placed on our digital freedoms by the major media powers. He also offers a positive vision of the opportunities open to the people who use tomorrow’s technologies—if only fearful entertainment executives and misguided lawmakers would get out of the way.

In less capable hands, this might have been a book about the excesses of copyright law, or about the public policy wars over piracy and file sharing. But the author reaches for something larger: an accessible collection of stories about people whose lives are at the center of this epic struggle over digital culture’s future. You don’t have to be a technology geek, law student, or policy wonk to keep up with the important issues described in these pages.

Here is why all of this matters profoundly: online and many-to-many technologies can shift the locus of the public sphere from a small number of powerful media owners to entire populations. In the years ahead, Internet-based media will exert more and more influence over what people know and believe, how they interact with each other, and how they stretch communication and entertainment in new, creative directions.

Spread the word—much is at stake. Right now is the time to act intelligently on behalf of our shared future. We can create a world so much richer than the wasteland of today’s mass media.

Howard Rheingold
Mill Valley, California