The internet boogyman

Of course you were going to get a rant on this paranoid rambling.

Actually, it's not so much paranoid as naive. Paranoid implies perceiving a threat that isn't there. That's not true in this case...the threat posed by the "carriers" (or the "pipe-owners" if you prefer) is real. People like SBC, Comcast, etc. would love to control far more than they do. Sure. Fine. We knew this.

But remember...they're not the only ones with money, and in this world, money talks. And guess what? The number of players out there who have a vested interest in keeping the underlying infrastructure of the internet relatively neutral far outweighs the number of players that have delusions of controlling it, and they have a hell of a lot more money. Hell, Microsoft alone could just sneeze and SBC and Comcast would spontaneously combust.

No, I'm not worried even slightly. Too many companies depend on the existing structure of the internet for it to change particularly drastically. It is _the_ communication medium of the modern world, and the behemoths of Wall Street will roar mightily if anybody dares threaten that.

Relax. Breathe. It will be ok.

The more focused question of one-way media is the interesting one. Sure, the RIAA and MPAA are utterly abusing their position as gatekeepers of media in a totally unjustifiable way. Proposed DRM schemes are far, far too draconian, and people are and should be pissed off about it. I don't, however, think DRM is necessarily a priori a bad thing, however. Just like every other control technology, it's a matter of how it's used.

The problem with people like Doc is that I have yet to see them propose an economically viable alternative artistic promotion mechanism. If one exists, I'd love to see it. Certainly the above-mentioned acronyms are overbloated, greedy entities, but there is nonetheless a certain basic cost for creating and distributing art, be it music, movies, or anything else, and that would be true even if they didn't exist. Sure, the internet drastically reduced the distribution cost, but that doesn't mean it's free to create art. Artists have to make a living somehow, and most modern movies require a non-trivial budget. Where is that money going to come from?

The NEA? Maybe. Theoretically, you could centralize all artistic funding. Personally, liberal though I am, I don't think that's a good idea. There is some benefit to having market forces act on the creation of entertainment. I think Battlestar: Galactica is a fantastic show, but it's fucking expensive to create. Do you think it ever would have gotten enough money to be as good as it is out of a government grant? Without any tangible results like a vaccine or a weapon? Just "something pretty?" No, I don't think so.

So, you have to be able to generate a revenue stream somehow. So how do you do it in the Information Age? I don't have a good answer if you don't let me use DRM. An "unencumbered" internet has the property that as soon as a piece of media, a movie for example, is digitized into a transferable format, potentially every possible audience member can watch it without giving a dime to its creator/distributor. Sure, the distributor can charge for the initial release, but once it's out, it's fucking _out_. Do you charge the first person to download the movie $10 million? Are _you_ going to foot that?

How do you make money if your revenue isn't directly tied to viewership? Without DRM, letting one person view something is equivalent to letting everyone view it. Do you somehow charge everyone who _might_ view it to create it? That's essentially the centralized (or *shudder* socialist) model since your audience is everyone. Hell, it's uber-socialist since your audience is potentially everyone in the world.

The only answer I've ever heard anyone come up with is advertising. That's why television is free (ok, relatively). The advertisers pay to have shows distributed as widely as possible because they piggyback advertisements on top of the entertainment, and the more people view the entertainment (and hence advertising), the more business they get. Okay, fine. But in a world where everything's just bits, some douchebag hacker is going to find a way to redistribute the entertainment without the annoying advertisements or at least create a viewer that will filter it out. So you're back to square one.

So please...tell me how you're supposed to support artistic creation in this magical new technological world. I would love to know. If you can convince me there's a way to do it without DRM, I will happily walk alongside your army, bazooka in hand, to the MPAA and RIAA headquarters and get rid of the parasitic fucktards once and for all. But intellectual property was created for a reason, and that was to promote the production of art and ideas. Just because that law mechanism has been hijacked by unscrupulous players doesn't mean the idea was flawed or is any less relevent in the Information Age. Quit yer bitchin'.