Darknet

McGuinn on the folk tradition vs. the record labels

For the past three months, I've been publishing a new excerpt or interview from "Darknet" here nearly every week. Here is this week's installment:

Roger McGuinn on the folk tradition vs. the record labels (on Ourmedia)

I spoke with McGuinn -- a renowned solo artist who was lead singer of the Byrds in the mid-'60s -- 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.

What's your opinion about the whole file-sharing phenomenon?

As an artist, I think it's just like being played on the radio. It's good publicity. I went to the Senate and testified on that. The only money I ever got out of the record deal was the advance, which was pretty small when you boil it down, and the money I made secondarily, through playing concerts. The record labels have very creative accounting. At Aristra Records, I sold half a million copies of "Back to Rio" and never got a penny in royalties.

It sounds like sour grapes, but it's a fact of life. The labels say, well, we need to do that because not all the albums sell and we have to subsidize the others. But nobody has ever audited the record companies and come away empty-handed. ...

This guy Cory Doctorow [of the EFF], he points out that every time a new technology gets in the way of copyright, they try to break the technology. They have to drag the copyright people kicking and screaming to the money tree, because they always make more money. It happened with piano rolls, it happened with radio, it happened with VHS videotape. The studios make more money off video than they do in the theaters. With the Internet, they haven't figured it out yet, but they're going to make money there, too. The blanket license might be one approach.

Interview: A major pirate in the movie underground

record labels themselves are due to die. the artists are the ones who will eventually control their own productions, as they should — beneaththecobweb

Following is the transcript of an Apple iChat between J.D. Lasica and the head of six movie release groups — the first published interview with a major movie pirate. This transcript (which does not appear in "Darknet") is appearing here for the first time in this Web exclusive as an unfiltered look at the mindset of a leader of the scene.

JD: wanna introduce yourself pleez?

well, why not.. i'm beneaththecobweb
my birth given name means nothing, so ill stick to that one

ok. tell me about your background and main interests

sure, im currently living in europe, and based on the reason for this conversation in the first place.. i am very interested in the "scene"

ok. what attracted you to the scene?

the amazing part of the scene is that it represents an inner-circle
its a place where people in hundreds of different countries connect, and work for a common purpose

whats wrong with the way Hollywood and the music biz release their stuff now?

ah, good question, i've been thinking about this a lot lately
both hollywood and the music businesses are not adapting to changing times
for example, the music business is attempting to force consumers to pay ridiculously high prices for cds, even when realistically the cds cost them nothing to make, and only a small fraction of the money made goes to the creators, the artists

what would you say to Jack Valenti if you had the chance?

interesting question, perfect timing too.. if you've been paying attention to his recent policy, his attempt to ban dvd screeners, you'd see exactly what i meant in the above 'lack of adapting,'' .. dvd screeners are NOT what cause piracy, or even make dvd studios or movie industries lose money, dvd screeners if anything promote movies, especially the limited or low budget films that many people wouldnt otherwise hear about
and for what its worth, i have an evergrowing dvd collection, and i pay for the movies that are worth the money to pay for
if i'm not willing to pay for Dude Where's My Car 2, i apologize greatly
lol

if you arent uncomfortable, could you mention some of your more important releases of the last year

i can't go into specifics, because it would be easy to pinpoint certain things if i went into a long list of specifics
however..
if i mentioned movies either of equal or greater revenue to matrix and/or lord of the rings, i wouldn't be making an understatement

ok

and of course, the low budget quality films, Hollywood cannot compete with such films
perfect example: memento.

can you simply lay out how something is released

i can give you a basic outline, of course avoiding specifics
basically you have a dvd, let's call it dvd x
when you put it into your computer, the dvd is composed of several 'vob' files, defined as basically the meat of the dvd, the data
what you basically need to do, is rip those vob files, decrypt them, and downsample both the audio and the video to a smaller, more containable and transferrable size
you can perform that using several forms, SVCD, VCD, XviD, DivX, 4 major and commonly used encoding types
in the end, you turn an 8GB (8000mb) dvd into .7GB (700MB), a much easier to transfer file
with minimal or no loss of quality
thats basically it

after it's made, you mentioned 'releasing'

releasing is simply making it available
whether it is by Kazaa, IRC, word of mouth, or whatever method shows up along the way, thats how you get it out
because people WANT it, its not hard to get them what they want

thats great
ok about members of a release group - what are the average demographics? Male? College age?

the 'scene' consists of a greatly mixed demographic
to put it simply
i've seen people as young as 14
and as old as .. 62
if i were to pinpoint an average age, i'd say 21
mostly male

now, do some group members do it just for fun or do they make a profit doing this (like blanket sales on NY streets)

most group members i come across do not do this for profit
ill give you an example
you're a high school student and you're 16
you're trying to become 'known' in your school, so you decide to design your schools website
problem comes across, you have no suitable a) html editor and b) photo editor
is someone of your statute capable of paying for the likes of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Frontpage?
*stature, it think thats how its spelled
so you go to Kazaa and you download it, knowing its not 'right,' but also knowing you don't have a choice
you have no intent to sell or use it in any form but helping yourself

hm ok
do you consider copyright infringement ethical in this particular application?
movies, etc

in my mind, copyright infringement is a loose and unadaptive policy
pretty soon, everything will be on the internet
if it isn't already
the only reason major corporations are arguing the merits of copyright infringement is because they themselves haven't adapted to changing times
but me specifically, i buy what i can buy, and i download what i cannot
i do not make enough money to pay for Adobe Photoshop or Windows XP
but i dished out the money for office XP and windows 2000

ok what do you say to the studios when they argue that piracy will make it harder to create big budget films

i'd have trouble saying anything at all, i'd be busy laughing my little head off.. but what i'd try to say is that any quality movie, such as return of the kings that premieres in december, will be paid for. the crap will not be paid for and will inevitably lose money. it's competition, its what america was made for and its what europe is going towards

can you say how many people are in a typical release group

realistically, the scene is not a very big place
the largest group i've seen is around 30 members
and the smallest i've seen is 2
avg lets say, 15

cool
very broadly, in what area do you work legitimately?

you mean my personal occupation in life? or in the scene?

your personal occupation....like student, businessman, IT guy....

i'm a network administrator

good enough
broadly....what part of europe are you in...eastern, western, northern....

western

do you look at this as more of a enjoyable pursuit or a philosophical cause

to say the scene isn't at least a small 'movement' would be a lie, becasue much of the scene does disagree with 99% of the policies issued by the riaa/mpaa/etc, but as the scene grew it became much more an enjoyable situation with a hierarchy that you can climb up

what should movie studios and record labels be doing now?

ill go into one of them, its basically the same plan for both
record labels themselves are due to die
the artists are the ones who will eventually control their own productions, as they should
the artists should start meeting up with large corporations that deal with consumer products, for instance.. snapple.. and make a deal with them
'we'll give out your music for free, and you'll get a percentage of our sales and we'll promote your concerts'
selling cds isnt really all that important anymore, most of the cash gets pocketed by the record labels themselves, its about time the artists see more of their money

whats the greatest misconception about release groups and filesharing

ah, good question
the news/media/mpaa/riaa paint the release groups as kniving [conniving] thieves
(sorry if spelling is wrong on that word)
basically, we don't go out to steal peoples money for their hard work
its not about theft, its about, to put it simply, equal opportunity
if you want me to elaborate on that i can, but i think based on what i've said before it should be pretty clear

just tell us a little more about 'equal opportunity' -- does that mean early access to movies, easy access to affordable music in digital format, or what else is involved?

i think everyone should be allowed to experience great music
(for example)
throwing a $20 price tag on a great album is limiting your audience
if you give it to them for free, whether it be by downloading or free promotions, everyone will be able to experience it
no matter their social class, taste, or budget
the key is removing the middle man, in this case the record label

so far the riaa and mpaa have not identified a single movie release group member, much less gone after them legally. why is that? are they incompetent or do you all take extreme precautions?

i'd take the position
of alot of both
they are extremely incompetent, they have no idea about what is going on around them
but, equally as much
group members take every precaution available to them
they do not speak on public networks, they use encryption to speak to each other
they often don't even give specific life information to their fellow group members
constant paranoia would be putting it lightly

are your release group members in the us, europe or both?

everywhere
as i said earlier, the scene is international
you'll find group members in asia, europe, the US, and i've even seen a few from africa and south america
oh, and i'm forgetting the aussies

i've heard that often release group members have never met one another. is the work done in these groups largely independent, with people working alone/solitary?

you'd be correct
very few members have met each other
(that part was correct)
but the work itself is done as a group
a cooperative mission if you will
some members are fit for certain parts of a task, and some members are not
it becomes the equivalent of an assembly line

is there anything you can tell me about the different facets of that assembly line ... rippers and distributors and couriers?

what do you want to know? rippers rip the DVD (from DVD to compressed footage)
couriers are in charge of 'making the release available' for the enduesr
distributors? i've never heard of that word in this context

distributors like on irc. but: i don't want to use my terms. just thought it would be interesting to hear from someone on the inside how it all works, what roles the different people play. is it all just rippers and couriers, and the occasional donator?

yup
different forms of donating though
whether it be money, supplies, etc
ripping is very CPU intensive, you need to have the latest gear

how does someone hook up with a release group (someone who legitimately wants to help the cause and join the scene)?

not going there, i apologize

cool
wondering why you've agreed to give this interview today.

well, first off, i'm happy i was able to convey my outrage with the common misconception
the misconception that we're evil little thieves
if all i needed to do was answer a few questions to clear that misconception
i'm all ears

where do you see all this heading, in a year or 5 years? who'll win, how will the music and movie industries (and TV?) change or evolve?

refer to music is free
that's where i see us
as soon as a year, and as late as 5
ultimately, the record labels are fighting a losing battle
subpoenas for kazaa downloaders get the RIAA nowhere
banning dvd screeners gets the MPAA equally as far

so they need to work on their digital distribution model?

that's putting it lightly
they need to change their entire business model
they need the 'dynasty leaders' out
and the youth in
running their companies based on antiquated models has brought them close to extinction

but they still have a right to make a profit, no? or should the distributors be removed from the process and only the artists receive compensation?

the latter
the labels are thieves
they are complaining of cd sales dropping and money losses
but its not their money
they consider their advertisements and promotions of artists to be almighty and powerful, you don't need to give the labels 99% of your cash to achieve the same purpose

but you're mostly involved with releasing movies, not music, and we can't get the movie studios out of the movie business, right? Isn't the problem with Hollywood the release windows and their current business model?

i don't think you can completely eliminate movie studios from the business
that's absolutely correct
release windows and their current business model need changing

ok. anything else you want to add, or that we haven't covered, or that you'd like to get out to a national audience?

basically, above everything else, i'd like to make it known that the RIAA and MPAA are accomplishing nothing for the studios of both media businesses, and i dont understand why the studios are cooperating with any of their policies

cool. appreciate your forthrightness.

no problem, its been a pleasure to meet you JD

Interview conducted 2:42 PM to 3:55 PM on Oct. 27, 2003

Interview: Andy Wolfe, former CTO, ReplayTV

[The Hollywood studios] essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed. — Andy Wolfe

Andy Wolfe was chief technology officer of Sonicblue, the company that acquired ReplayTV and shipped the first units with video-sharing capabilities. He reveals what the Hollywood studios and television networks were really after in their lawsuit against Sonicblue's ReplayTV: control of your television. He spoke by telephone with J.D. Lasica.

Are you familiar with the term file serve television?

We actually think we invented it. The Replay 4000 shipped in 2001. It was the first networked PVR. You can connect two of them together and you can file serve from one to the other. A year and a half before that, in 2000, we did the first file serve music with a device under two names. We put it out as a Real receiver under the Dell brand. And that was a thin client that you could put on your network and go back to your computer to serve MP3s. We built that as a theme across a number of our products.

We also did a dedicated product called the Rio central, named one of the best in show at CES 2002. Seeing that product was one of the reasons that led us to buy ReplayTV. They had a proposal to do this networked video in the home on the next platform. They didn’t have it designed yet, they didn’t have it developed, but they developed some core technology, and that was why we bought ReplayTV and that was the product we brought to market. Internally, to us, that was always the killer app.

I have 3 of them in my house — two 4000s and the 4500 – and they’re all networked and they all talk to each other.

Tell me the backstory of ReplayTV.

ReplayTV was a dotcom that had raised $150 to $160 million funded by Anthony Wood and Kleiner Perkins and others. And then the networks came in: NBC and AOL and lots of industry partners. In the end there were over 100 investors. They burned through all their capital. We came in, late 2000 at Christmastime, and they were close to bankruptcy, and they had stopped manufacturing products and they were gonna become an IT house. They asked Anthony Wood to come back in and sell the company. Anthony rallied the troops around the idea of building this network platform, client-server technology into the product. We actually had been working on the same idea. We worked with another company, Sensory Science, a Linux based Intel architecture box that played DVDs and was really a home server, but when ReplayTV came in we saw they were further along in software development and held patents on personal video recording, we bought both companies. By December 2002 Replay was up to a 35 to 40 percent share of the PVR retail market.

TiVo was the other big dog.

They both showed up together at CES in 1999. TiVo shipped a month or two before. In March 2000, TiVo got a big influx of cash by going public. Replay was scheduled to go public in April 2000, but the market suddenly soured and the IPO got canceled.

And file serve TV was one of Replay's big selling points.

That was the model, file serve TV, and it was inside and outside the home. So we designed the Replay platform to be able to serve from one to another; we designed it to be scalable with a thin client so you could record it on one Replay and access it on a thin client built into a TV, and we designed it using ichannels, an outside-the-house file serving technology. The idea was to build servers that would operate commercially and you could purchase content. It would be downloaded to the box in your house. And that’s where we got into fights with the industry. When we went out and proposed our own DoD servers around the ichannels, that’s when things started to get nasty.

We went to the content creators proposing to use their content, with them getting 65 percent of the revenue, and they basically said no. The same thing happened in the early days of the digital music era, none of the music labels wanted to license their music.

Why were the studios so opposed?

I might talk about it after the lawsuit dismissed. But a lot of it is, they just don’t have these rights. The truth is nobody has the rights for Internet distribution for a lot of this stuff. The contracts they have give them the rights for certain kinds of distribution, and they’ve also given away certain kinds of rights exclusively. For example, they’ve given HBO and Showtime exclusive rights for subscription services, so they can’t license their content to Internet subscription services. If you wanted to have a service where you pay 20 bucks a month and get 10 movies, nobody has the rights to do that because they’ve given HBO and Showtime the rights for subscription services. I haven’t seen the contracts. At least they’re worried that it would.

The other thing is that in a lot of cases, it’s not that they don’t have the rights to the show — they don’t have the rights to the music. Because when they signed the contracts, it was originally intended only for broadcast TV.

Eventually that’s going to change, they’ll realize there’s a business in licensing this concept. But the big issue for them is, they don’t want you to have stuff archived in your house. And that’s the model we are starting to get to. I could record everything I want to watch and decide later which I want to watch. I could record 50 shows a day and watch only one of them. The truth is, very soon you won’t have to throw away the 50, you can store them for a year. Or forever. And that scares the hell out of the studios.

If you’ve ever talked with them, they know you’re not gonna watch the commercials for recorded material, for anything that’s not live. But the other thing is, if you talk to people in the industry, they’ve got this buggy whip problem. For 50 years they’ve been taught that their brilliance is in programming, and programming is the art of deciding what shows get watched when. They get you to watch shows that come on after other shows, or to attract a particular demographic to increase the value of advertising dollars. If you sit down with TV execs, that’s what they think their skill is. Not creating quality television, somebody else does that. Their art is in programming, and that’s going away. And they haven’t learned how to make the adjustment. You’ve taken away their tool for manipulating the public or their tool for extracting the value of their assets. They haven’t learned how to make that adjustment.

Did you chiefly deal with the networks or the Hollywood studios?

It’s interesting. The New York people were always interested in new business models, and the L.A. people would tell them to shut up. You always expect New Yorkers to be the arrogant ones, but the people we were dealing with from the relatively younger companies like HBO, Showtime, and MTV always wanted to listen. It was the L.A. people from Disney and MGM — relying on a business model developed more than fifty years ago — who ultimately said, ‘You don’t understand our business, you’re a threat to our business,’ and they set about to crush us.”

I thought the main thrust of the lawsuit was skipping commercials and network sharing.

Not true. If that had been what the lawsuit was about, it would have been settled in a few weeks. That was a smokescreen. They knew those things could have been negotiated.
we believe to this day we would have won in court. The real issue involved a couple of things. They wanted to be able to control what you could record — the same thing involved in today's clash over the broadcast flag. They essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed. They wanted to limit the total amount of the stuff you could record. They came up with a number, but I can’t tell you what it is.

Have we already surpassed it today?

On my laptop.

So those were all things that we felt were non-negotiable. They conflicted with existing usable models. Nobody makes videotapes that self-destruct, right? Or that lets you record The Simpsons only once a week. And we just didn’t want to get into regulating customer behavior in those ways, and we didn’t think there was any law that backed it up at all.

As far as sharing files with others, they had an argument. At least there was some level at which those things were legitimate. We were pretty clear that somebody could use Send Show in a way that wasn’t permissible. But that’s never been the basis for getting rid of something.

As for commercial skipping, it’s never been clear that they have any defensible position there – at least it’s a very obscure argument. Because they were saying that if they were suffering economic harm, it was by default unlawful. I’m not sure they even got close to making their case there.

But the other stuff was just — we want our way. That their business models were being threatened. We couldn’t imagine a judge sitting there making a ruling that nobody will ever be allowed to have hard disks recording video bigger than this many gigabytes.

In ReplayTV's Send Show, how did you settle on the figure of limiting it to 15 people?

There were two functions. There was streaming in your house, and that was limited to eight units, and there was Send Show, where you could email a show to somebody else, and that was limited to 15 people and only second-generation copies. If I sent it to you, you couldn’t send it to anyone else. By the time we made that final decision, we knew there was a possibility of a lawsuit. We wanted to make sure there weren’t people running commercial video distribution services on our platform. That wasn’t what it was for. It was for: Hey, I saw this episode of this great new show and I’m going to send it to my friend, or look, my kid was on the news today, I’m going to send a copy to Grandma.

Fifteen was just a number that prevented any commercial use.

An average customer sent one show per month. We never knew of any commercial applications built on top of our platform. Why bother with it, when with the Internet you can just send what you want?

That’s why we were amazed there was such rigamarole around this. We sold 60,000 of these things. ATI sells a million cards a year that lets you record shows and attach it to your email. They still do. Sony sued us, but they let you record stuff on your Vaio and burn it to DVD and email it to anyone. AOL lets you attach a show to Instant Messaging. It’s amazingly hypocritical, with these companies and their software that are out there and can do all this stuff on the PC, they took it for granted, but when we came up with this device that ordinary people could use, they panicked.

Is ReplayTV a computer?

It’s a computer but it’s all proprietary software. You couldn’t get into it and run your own software. It had a hard drive and processor and a PCI card.

How do you see the file-sharing wars playing out?

My theory has been, the only way to get away from the free-for-all piracy situation is to have these boxes where you have access to value-added services. Put all the back B shows up for sale, or have movies on demand, or have streaming music with the latest bands, and have that so it only works with boxes that have somebody’s logo on it. And then people will use the boxes with the restrictions as long as they’re not too unreasonable.

It’s easy to get stuff online. People aren’t going to want to swap shows in great numbers – they’re on these file sharing networks because they can’t find the stuff through legitimate means.

Some of the other stuff we went through was kind of silly. The networks have this concept that nobody ever records their programming. And yet, right in the middle of our discussion, the FX Network showed all 24 episodes of 24 from midnight to midnight, and we asked them, You think that many people sat through it? I mean, you guys program knowing that people will record this stuff, it’s your business model.

Were you dealing with the CEOs?

Never. The lawyers and the business development people. In the early days, we dealt with the presidents of HBO and Showtime and the small networks.

Where do you see all this going?

Three possibilities. One is that everything becomes centralized, and the cable companies are gonna win and they’ll offer services delivered to your set top box. A least common denominator thing. They own the content, they’ve got their own servers, and you subscribe to pay per view and get the shows from the cable provider. It's low quality, low service level, very few choices in terms of product, but they have the relationships in terms of licensing contracts. Your box will offer only a few features. We're starting to see some of that with Time Warner.

The second possibility is that Microsoft drives it, that everything lives on your PC as a client server, and there’s a cheap thin client box that connects your TV to the PC. They’re pulling strings in the industry to make that work.

The third possibility is a retail play. Now it’s likely that tier 2 or tier 3 guys like Apex or another company in China tries to copy what ReplayTV and TiVo have done. And they build boxes that have no rules, that are feature heavy. They don’t care what the networks say, they can change brands or owners. An Ethernet is a $3 connector these days. We did it the first time and it was hard because there were performance issues and software complexity, MPEG decoder chips were complicated and buggy, but all that stuff has been worked out. The guys who make DVD chips are now all making PVRs on a chip and now they can pressure TiVo and Replay to decide what goes in the product. But once there are 50 different brands out there … Apex became one of biggest DVD brands by getting the parts, slapping them together and selling them cheap.

So you don't see TiVo or a DVR-driven DirecTV as part of the equation?

DirecTV maybe. They’re in chaos because of the merger. They and Echostar will be part of the story. In the end they’re the same as the cable providers. They can’t cross any lines or else they start losing programming from the networks. So they’ve got a tough line to walk. They will generate some of the PVR volume, but they can’t do too many innovative features. They can’t do video on demand because they’re satellite, they don’t have enough bandwidth. All they can really do is in-home recording. Will they allow you connect together in a client-server environment and build your own libraries? There’s not much incentive for them to do that.

But they can download stuff to your box, right?

They can, and they might. There's no indication yet that they’re thinking that way. But they have copyright issues. They have a contract with the networks and for them to save stuff on the box may be in violation of their contract. There's a difference between me deciding to save stuff on the box and a satellite company. I have a fair use right to do that as a consumer. For them to do so, they need specific commercial rights to do that, they can’t save stuff on the box without permission.

TiVo is in a tough spot. They have the brand, but very quickly other people are sneaking up in terms of price. They had network executives on their board of directors. At certain levels we had an open relationship with them. They would tell us we’re stupid for picking fights with the studios, and we would tell them they’re stupid for spending $400 million on advertising. Because we didn’t have $400 million to spend on advertising we needed some other way to get the attention of customers, and we did that by putting in features that customers were demanding and no one else had.

Did the entertainment companies' lawsuit bankrupt Sonicblue?

Not even close. At the end, the lawsuit cost $1 million a month, and general expenditures were $7 million a month over that. What bankrupted the company was that we grew from an $18 million CE company to a $400 million CE company in 24 months and we never built the infrastructure to support it. We were leaving millions of dollars in the supply chain left and right. We had millions and millions of dollars in supply chain problems. Plus we were $56 million in debt from the purchase. But lawsuit was almost irrelevant, it represented only 3 percent of the expenses over a two-year period.

What do you make of the file sharing of TV shows on the Net?

Intentionally, we made certain that we didn’t have a clue about that stuff. I’ve never seen it, I’ve never tried it. We occasionally talked to people who were involved. But we didn’t know much of what was going on.

You look at what gets file shared, it’s not what’s on TV. It’s to rip off movies still in theater that are not yet on DVD. Occasionally I have some sympathy for these guys. You can’t say to them, hey, the day after something appears in the theater you should put it on DVD so that nobody steals it.

What about grassroots programming?

We did a marketing study and found that two things were in high demand: porn, and Bollywood, because Indian films are not widely distributed in the U.S.

That’s part of why this whole thing got a little threatening. We think that if there was a real service, that independent content would become an important part of that service. We didn’t think people would sign up for a service if it only had independent content. They’ll sign up for Harry Potter or Terminator 3. It’s the blockbusters that get people’s attention.

We got a call from churches who wanted to distribute their sermons on Sunday mornings by sending videos around. There are also surveillance applications. We found lots of people who were interested in building new things on top of this. We felt these other things would follow, but the entertainment had to drive it.

Will file-serve TV happen in our lifetime?

It’s gonna happen in the next 5-7 years. If one of the powerful guys gets out there first and gets momentum, it’ll be corporate. If they don’t, then the equipment will get spun off and it’ll happen anyway without any structure around it.

You mean some facet of this on-demand service, but you’re not talking about universal jukebox.

Well, what I’m saying is if it doesn’t happen legally, I think somebody will do it offshore as an internet service.

Interview conducted June 23, 2003

'Darknet' interviews

Jack Valenti
Jack Valenti, former CEO and president of the Motion Picture Association of America, gives perhaps the most wide-ranging interview on record of the MPAA's views on piracy, fair use, the DMCA, DRM and technological innovation.

Andy Wolfe
Andy Wolfe was the chief technology officer of Sonicblue, the company that acquired the groundbreaking technology ReplayTV. He reveals what the Hollywood studios and television networks were really after in their lawsuit against Sonicblue's ReplayTV: control of your television.

Movie pirate
beneaththecobweb was the name chosen by the head of six movie release groups. He describes how "the scene" operates for this first published interview with a major movie pirate. Web exclusive.

Roger McGuinn
Roger McGuinn, the acclaimed 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.