E-book mentions in J.D. Lasica’s Darknet–and a radio interview and first impressions of the book

By David Rothman

E-books are among the examples of DRM-and-copyright-related stupidity in Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.

J.D. Lasica‘s new book comes across as well-reported, informative and hyper-readable

Deservedly it’s the topic of an audio file from an On the Media program heard on pubic radio stations this weekend. Bob Garfield interviews J.D. and serves up a riotous excerpt from an underground MP3. It wickedly mixes in political-debate snippets and Bush speeches with the Rolling Stones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil.”

In this post I’ll share a few first impressions of Darknet, and more thoughts will follow shortly.

The darknets of e-bookdom

So why the title? J.D. defines “Darknets” as “underground or private networks where people trade files and communicate anonnymously.” To give examples not mentioned in the book, TeleBlog readers already know how J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Tom Clancy’s techno-thrillers can be merrily pirated in OCRed form even if their obtuse authors won’t make them available to legitimate e-stores such as Fictionwise and eBooks.com. Darknets in action!

But as J.D. notes, “Darknet” metaphorically can also refer to “the burgeoning pool of weblogs, independent sites and groots media well outside the limelight of big media.”

Hollywood’s ICBMs

Needless to say, Darknet the book takes some pokes at the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act–two ICBMs in the greedsters’ war against the DigiGens. Among other things, J.D. sums up the DMCA-related Adobe/ElcomSoft case and tells of the war on fair use and of the horrors that libraries must endure now with e-books. He writes:

“…Librarians are trying to protect the public’s access to new books and articles against the efforts by some pubilshers to push a pay-per-view model so that whenever a reader wants to access information on an electronic device, it becomes a billable event. Many e-books forbid copying or making printouts, even for books in the public domain. Copy protection also impairs a library’s ability to archive and preserve materials that may disappear within a few years. Over the long term, such practices could jeopardize the very underpinnings of the free public library system.

Elsewhere, J.D. quotes Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge:

This debate is about whether the content industries will be able to use technology, backed by the force of law, to control waht you can do with the content that you own. If you buy a DVD or e-book, the content owner can determine how you use it. [One of the earlier e-books was a textbook that expired and became unreadable at the semester's end so that students would not be able to resell it.] Never before has there been postpurchase control by the content industry. They’d like to make you think it’s about piracy over peer-to-peer networks, but piracy is almost beside the point.

As noted, more impressions of Darknet will appear here soon, but meanwhile just go out and buy the book. It’s a must for cyberactivists. If you want your civilian friends to understand the great policy debates in tangible terms, this is the book to help them decode the gobbledygook. J.D. lays out the details of the Hollywood campaign to dumb down or abort inventions like iPod and TiVO and BitTorrent along with future innovations.

Hollywood dwarfs rigged game against tech giants

In revenue, the tech and telecom industries dwarf Hollywood and the other content providers, but guess who carries the most weight in D.C. I just can’t stomach Hollywood’s bilge that copyright is about jobs. So is the freedom to innovate. Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen were hardly the sole villain in the dotcom bust–the Silicon Valley hype artists and Wall Street analysts misled honest people, both inside and outside the industry–but those two and their ilk didn’t help. Hollywood-bought legislation significantly increased the risks for investors in key areas such as P2P networks. J.D. nicely documents the collateral and not-so-collateral damage from Tinsel Town’s anti-competition bombs.

The black hats have also reduced the earnings of many unknown but gifted writers, artists and musicians, not just Silicon Valley. Encouraged by the DMCA, the use of DRM has been toxic to e-books–making them far, far harder for consumers to befriend and use.

While the Tower of eBabel and the limits of today’s technology are factors, Hollywood lobbyists also merit blame ( just as as their Bono Act does for stealing The Great Gatsby from today’s public domain).

Dark suits vs. fodder for darknet

I hope that J.D.’s book will induce enough people to reach the mad-as-hell stage, especially after they read the opener. J.D. tells how two home-video buffs in “a flyspeck town in Southern Mississippi” worked almost seven years on a stellar adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark but couldn’t get the rights to make money from it, despite Steven Spielberg’s enthusiasm for the results. “In the teenagers’ version of Raiders,” J.D. writes, “the actors grow older in the span of a few minutes. Voices deepen. Chris sprouts chin whiskers and grows six inches. He gets his first-ever kiss by a girl, captured onsceen. The girl who plays Marion, the Karen Allen character, develops breasts.” What a melding of Hollywood and the grassroots! J.D. says critics consider the results “a filmic tour de force,” and based on his description of the film, I believe him. Why must lawyers come ahead of creators?

The same concept would would apply to e-books. The Margaret Mitchell estate sued the author of a p-book parody of Gone with the Wind, which, under old copyright laws, would not only be available on the Internet, but also free from legal threats if people wanted to do take-offs. E-books, with production costs far below p-books, are a natural medium for this kind of expression. But thanks to the sleazy D.C. crowd, the law too often will get in the way of parodies and even friendly adaptations. Time to repeal or at least mitigate the Bono Act? The rational can’t read Darknet and feel otherwise.

A few shortcomings

Darknet, to be sure, has its shortcoming. For example, if you go by the index, J.D. mentions Sen. Orin Hatch by name just once even though Hatch is or comes close to being cyberactivsts’ Public Enemy Number One on Capitol Hill. I don’t even see a single mention of Congress member Mary Bono, Sonny’s widow, who, like Jack Valenti, wants near-eternal copyright. And I’d love to read at least one reference to “populist” John Edwards, a probable 2008 presidential contender. Despite aggressive and laudable attacks on the drug industry, Prof. Edwards has yet to defend the Net against Hollywood–perhaps because of the its generosity to him. Likewise, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, among Edwards’ likely rivals, are hardly promising as the most gung-ho defenders of the many-to-many approach. Yet not one word appears on either one except for a mention of Kerry in the context of the wonderful This Land satire.

No, it isn’t enough to write about Jack Valenti and refer twice to Dan Glickman; I’d like to know more about the recipients of buckets of campaign cash that Hollywood has thrown at Capitol Hill. Just which rascals should we vote out–or at least lobby hard?

First-rate groundbreaker despite its flaws

But, look, in terms of J.D.’s book as a whole, those are nits. J.D.’s story of a delegation of congressional aides–sent to Intel to bully it as much as to find out about technology–is priceless. Moreover, J.D. never lets you lose track of a major point. In protecting one-to-many media, Hollywood is delighted to use bought laws and economic clout to cripple competition from the many-to-many variety. Because of all the threats, legal and political, home electronic equipment is harder to use to create content, not just enjoy it. Even Intel is climbing into bed with Hollywood–as shown by its new DRM-friendly chip. I actually wish Intel would spend a little less money on R&D and more on lobbyists to fight back Hollywood. Yo, Ernie Miller. Are there even some interesting laws would that high-tech types could use to countersue in some way, not just counterlobby? Maybe not, given today’s legal climate. But one can dream. In a different universe, for example, Washington would care more about the anti-competitive ramifications of Sony and other companies being involved with both high-tech and the content for it. Once the tech companies could be counted most of the time to be pro-consumer in these batters. No more, as J.D. warns us.

Without doubt, Darknet is both essential and memorable, a groundbreaker within its genre. Dan Gillmor’s We the Media is different–focused on the news media and less of a diagnostic and more of a prescriptive book than J.D.’s. As a reporter’s book laying out the problems, Darknet nicely complements Free Culture, the ultimate lawyer’s-book on the copyright wars. Darknet makes me wish I could slip a copy under John Edwards’ door and hypnotize him into reading it and heeding J.D.’s warnings. Forget about Jack Valenti, Professor. Worry more about tech jobs in Carolina and creative opportunities for the boys from that fly-speck town in Mississippi.

Disclosure: I’ve been somewhat involved in OurMedia, which J.D. and Marc Canter founded to provide a showcase for grassroots media. Believe me, though: I’d be just as enthusiastic about J.D.’s book if I didn’t know him from squat. It’s that good.