Hollywood control vs. creative culture

Here's a book review just published in the June issue of macCompanion -- I'll publish excerpts from it because the reviewer, Robert Pritchett, took the time to get in touch and fact-check his review:

Man, you are going to so love this book!

DARKNET: Hollywood War Against the Digital Generation by J.D. Lasica gingerly balances Hollywood media controls against the concept of shared multimedia.

The premise for the book is based on the age-old concept that we own what we buy and that once bought, we can freely give away what we obtained. The laws as they stand now and for the foreseeable future point to lobbying efforts by mass-media moguls making all acts illegal that they don’t control. ...

DARKNET tells stories. Stories of folks who never dreamed their efforts would be labeled as illegal in earlier times. Dissent has always met with control issues. Now that control has permeated the digital environment with a vengeance. Revealed are the attempts by business and governments to control what you watch, when you watch it and catalog what you see, hear and read. Big-brotherism to the max!

We see within these pages the multi-dimensional Digital Generation and its attitudes towards the media industry consortium’s view of monolithic one-dimensionalism. Read this as “culture clash” between fair-rights entitlement revolutionaries, creative freedom and participatory culture against corporate bias and customer alienation in the entertainment industry and the battle for intellectual property rights.

Corp-think treats customers are thieves, not deserving of capturing information, repurposing it and redistributing it without compensation – over and over and over again, my friend.

Computer systems, both Mac and non-Mac alike, give us the ability to mix, remix, copy and paste and re-author media. The Hollywoodite naysayers are forcing installation of both hardware and software shackles to prevent that. J.D. Lasica shows time and again that the corporate alarmists were and are wrong each time new technology was and is presented to the entertainment-hungry public, grabbed with both hands and instead of sinking an industry; raise it to even greater heights. “Hollywood” hates technology it cannot control.

Lasica even outlines some guidelines that would help industry prosper, if they would but treat the public with trust instead of distrust and lowering their prices and opening their constrictive policies. He points to Apple as an example of how it is done ( but even Apple has been pressured to put cobbles on their software and hardware horses so they don’t wander too far – and they have complied). And maybe that is why I was picked to review this book. Apple pretty much leads, and the other computer and software industries of the world follow. And these issues may be why Apple has not revealed an Apple solution to media centers just yet and why SONY’s CEO was recently replaced. Meanwhile, Microsoft is eagerly taking on the role of copyright cop.

The book is full of memorable one-liners. The darknet is a one-touch digital jukebox made from shared digital content. We are our own media. You don’t own stories, you share them. The only thing holding broadcasting together today is inertia, marketing and copy protection. As Broadband succeeds, broadcasting will fail. Consumers won’t care. Users will. ...

The digital tools we have today allow us to make our own shared, collaborative entertainment. “Hollywood” is taking that right away from us. “We” tell stories and train traditions. “Hollywood wants us “spoon-fed.” The multimedia environment expects interaction. “Hollywood” wants a passive, their-way audience based on media coercion.

The endnotes alone are worth the price of the book.