7/28/00
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is legislation that was moved through Congress by the big money lobbyists on behalf of the major motion picture studios. It was not created to protect the rights of US citizens. It is an ambiguous document that supports the interests of Hollywood and the provisions for fair use and freedom of speech have no teeth whatsoever.
Technological leaps have always caused rifts in society and industry since the beginning of time. Many people refer to the cultural change in the first half of the 1900s, when machines began to displace workers. The labor unions didn't just sit by and let that happen. They fought in the courts, they went on strike and did their best to protect their bread and butter. Did labor unions become extinct? No. Has their role diminished? Absolutely.
The MP3 music business is threatened today in the same way that DVDs are threatened by the DMCA. Within 24 hours after Napster (the free distribution music web site) was shutdown on 7/27/00, 1.2 million people fled to Gnutella, (a network of systems devoted to file-sharing software) to get freely distributed music. This is a lot consumers! Clearly, market demand in the music industry is changing. The rock group Metallica and the big record companies represented by their lobbyists at the RIAA, are very worried about these implications.
Stephen King is writing an online book called "The Plant" in which he is receiving $1 for every chapter he writes from Internet users who want him to finish the book. Payment is on the honor system, but by the end of the first day (7/24/00), he received $93,200 in credit card payments from Amazon.com. King proclaims that that he only had to invest $124,150 to get the project going! He expects to write at least ten chapters! Needless to say, the publishing industry is extremely distressed. Ironically, the story is about a "vampire" vine that terrorizes a small publishing house.
These events provide valuable frontline information about how the customer base for entertainment products is evolving. Universal Studios, via their lobbyists at the MPAA, are trying to prevent this cultural evolution from happening by passing laws like the DMCA. They think they can legally stop their customer base from investigating and invigorating this new form of expression.
Filmmakers, musicians, authors and all of the other owners of entertainment properties will learn how to get customers directly via the Internet much more quickly than the movie studios, the record labels and the publishing houses. This will take a few years, but the artists themselves have much more economic motivation to do this than the established entertainment industry. It's easy to forsee a day when artists will create their own collectives to share production resources and split revenues.
When this happens, the DMCA will be forgotten and become irrelevant. My prediction is that the movie studios will ultimately sell the ownership of their aging properties to the American Movie Classics cable channel - the last stop for old movies.
- Jim Gleason
President, The New York Linux Users Group
jgleason@nylug.org
http://www.nylug.org