Darknet: Hollywood's War Against The Digital Generation J. D. Lasica
Published May 6, 2005. Hoboken, New Jersey. John Wiley & Sons

In Darknet, J.D. Lasica illustrates the choices between old media's "push" business strategy for serving up music, film, books, anything else: and, the 21st-century consumer's desire to choose the time, the place, the medium for using digital files; the "pull" culture. The author shows that the new consumer is not an illegal download junkie, but rather someone who wants convenience on his own terms and, yes, is willing to pay a fair price for creative content.

This is an excellent book. It is not a conspiracy theory book. If it were, I would not be writing about it.

Entertainment companies have alienated their customers. Their customers feel that media companies have shortchanged most of their creative talent, failed to produce what customers want to buy, and are now attacking their customers. The entertainment companies are still living the Hollywood studio dream of power and influence.

Until recently, technology companies were the consumer's best defense. Lassica reminds us of the beginnings of earlier innovations, radio, the talkies, television, the VCR. Each of these innovations brought out the entertainment lawyers to restrict their influence. Now many technology companies are also entertainment companies and vice versa. Even where technology is still independent, compromise of consumer choice is attractive to reduce pressure from entertainment companies who might later become business partners.

The entertainment companies seek to cripple innovation. Intimidation is working to stifle even legal uses of works and media. Copyright law is sometimes used as an anticompetitive tool. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may be only the beginning. Old media are persuading legislators to codify their old business models, even as the majority of their customers are disdainful of much of their current output of music and movies.

The restricting of technology innovation is well illustrated by the story of the father who made a video of his children. He then finds he is unable to download the video into his computer because of built-in filters, which block the file transfer as though he were making some illegal copy of a copyrighted film.