Dan Gillmor interviewed Jack Valenti last week in his column and did the impartial thing, representing Valenti's beliefs as fairly as possible. This week, Dan takes Valenti's arguments apart, looking at what Hollywood's agenda really entails:
So the movie and music companies are going back to Congress for another helping. They are asking for laws that would force technology innovators to restrict the capabilities of devices — cripple PCs and other machines that communicate so they can't make copies the copyright holders don't explicitly allow. Amazingly, the entertainment industry also wants permission to hack into networks and machines they believe are being used to violate copyrights.
Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement — and some things that aren't infringement at all — an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.
