Hatch's Hollywood Hacking
If an egg must crack in order to hatch, then
egghead Orrin Hatch has surely cracked. The
latest
scheme that the senator-cum-composer has
hatched would essentially legalize Hollywood
hacking. Launching the latest salvo in the war
against illegal online file sharing, Hatch
suggested yesterday that technology should be
implemented that would "destroy" the computers of
those who illegally download music files and other
copyrighted material. "I'm all for destroying their
machines," said the senator. "If you have a few
hundred thousand of those, I think people would
realize" the seriousness of their actions.
As a friend noted, the logic of this outlandish
plan would roughly equate to a VCR that
self-destructed when you played a movie that you
"illegally" recorded off HBO or an automobile
engine that blew up when you exceeded the speed
limit. Time and again, the recording industry and
Hollywood in general has tried to stop the
inevitable with increasingly draconian measures.
Millions of people continue to download illicit
music files. Gone Napster may be, but other
peer-to-peer services have stepped in to fill the
void: Morpheus, Kazaa, Bearshare, to name a few.
The entertainment industry will have no more
success stopping this downloading than the CHP
would have stopping all Californians from speeding.
They may nail a poor sap here and there to set an
example, but peer-to-peer file sharing—legal
and illegal—is here to stay.
Hatch, the entertainment industry and others
will probably continue to dream up ever more
extreme enforcement measures. Perhaps Hatch will up
the ante with a special mouse that delivers 40,000
volts to liquefy your eardrums if you click to
download a pirated music file. But until they drag
themselves kicking and screaming into the
twenty-first century, they'll miss out on what
could be a lucrative revenue stream.
If the recording industry is really losing
millions of dollars due to illegal file sharing
(doubtful), then it should embrace technology that
will allow it to legally sell such files at a price
that users would be willing to pay (instead of
spending millions on anti-circumvention
technologies that don't work). Many people would
likely be willing to pay 50 cents to a dollar to
download a song encoded at the bit rate of their
choosing. If a music publisher had a user-friendly
Web site where I could quickly locate and purchase
a digital copy of a song for an inexpensive price,
I'd save the time that a P2P search would take and
fork over 50 cents for the latest 50 Cent. (Read a
friend's
take on this very idea.)
Perhaps Hatch, having enjoyed some success as a
musical composer, has decided to branch out into
comedy. More likely, however, he's just another
whack-job politician with a really dumb idea.
Whichever the case may be, the preposterous
suggestion of destroying the hard drives of people
who illegally download music files is illustrative
of the dinosaur mentality of the entertainment
industry. As it has done with every technological
leap (e.g. the VCR, DAT recorders, etc.), the
industry has chosen to fight for the status quo in
a world that left the status quo behind long
ago.
Here's a free download that won't destroy
your computer: a video
clip of me off-roading in Joshua Tree
National Park last April (14.5 MB).
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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