That was a very nice presentation, a Hollywood studio chief said to a delegation from TiVo after seeing the device in action. Now go set yourselves on fire. What happens when the irresistible force of technological innovation meets the immovable object known as Big Entertainment?  For starters, Hollywood moguls start shooting themselves in the foot.  The big media were against VCRs, and they didn't like CDs.  They're currently working on taking away your TIVO, iPod, and DVD burner.  J.D. Lasica argues that all the future creations we can imagine might already be here if we were better able to balance the needs of Hollywood and the public it supposedly serves.    Instead, we've entered an age like Prohibition in the 1920s, with laws so senseless, everyone  is  breaking them.  Darknet tells the stories of the fascinating personalities and colorful characters on both sides of this culture clash, and details the growing clampdown on our digital freedoms.  Darknet goes behind the scenes to pull back the curtain on Big Entertainment insiders, technology innovators, and digital provocateurs lurking in the darkest corners of cyberspace. We meet the double-agent who stands at the highly specialized hub of movie pirating while consulting to Hollywood studios on piracy; the teenage boys who spent seven years refilming Raiders of the Lost Ark; the Columbia TriStar executive who helped develop the movie industry’ s region-coding system and the hacker who thumbs his nose at it; and many others who traverse the changing technological, ethical, and legal landscape of the network age.  But the rise of digital culture has created apowerful backlash: Under the banner of fighting piracy and protecting copyright, influential companies are threatening to turn back the clock on our laws and our technology until our computers become crippled, our televisions dumbed-down, our consumer electronics devices handcuffed— and the Internet crushed as a free and open medium. Darknet shows that there’ s a sensible middle-ground between corporate media and digital thieves, but both sides refuse to see it.

"Rapid-fire advances in technology have transformed home entertainment. Not only can we store hours of television programming and music on hard drives, software has made it easy to create our own movies and songs, splicing and sampling professional-grade material into amateur productions. Entertainment conglomerates are understandably concerned, but in online journalist Lasica's reporting on the culture clash over digital distribution and remixing, corporations are simplistically portrayed as dinosaurs intent on stifling the little guy's creative freedom in order to protect their profit margins. The characterization is not entirely unmerited, but the deck feels unfairly stacked when 'Big Entertainment' honchos are juxtaposed with a preacher who illegally copies and downloads movies so he can use short clips for his sermons. Similarly, Lasica infuses the allegedly inevitable triumph of 'participatory culture' with a sense of entitlement and anti-corporate bias that he never fully addresses. Lasica's interviews are far-ranging, and he provides a cogent analysis of the broad problems with America's outdated legal framework for dealing with intellectual property rights and the need for the entertainment industry to adapt to new technologies. Too often, though, he falls back to an alarmist tone. With so many other works addressing this issue from both sides, it will be hard for Lasica's book to stand out from the pack." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

They hated the VCR. Ditto on the DVD, the iPOD and TiVo. It seems, according to grass-roots media expert Lasica, anything that allows independence of choice of thought, any technology that will reduce the market for what Hollywood has to offer generally gets into the hands of the consumer only because someone else figures he or she can make enough money on sales to ignore what entertainment execs have to say about said technology. He explains how the personal media market actually works, which cool toys Hollywood wants to ban or replace with their own products, and the dangers of allowing corporate control of media of any sort, even that considered pure entertainment.
Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Praise for DARKNET

"Darknet is both fascinating and important. J.D. Lasica provides a detailed inside view of a culture many Americans are barely aware of, and vividly describes struggles that are already shaping the long-term balance of economic, creative, and ideological power around the world."

— James Fallows, National Correspondent for "The Atlantic Monthly"

"J.D. Lasica skillfully tells the story of the critical battle between free speech and copyright in the age of the Internet. If an intellectual property lockdown ever comes about, Darknet will remind us of the creative bounty we're missing."

— Steven Levy, author of "Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government— Saving Privacy in the Digital Age"

"Over the next several years, there will be no more important issue for the future of the Internet and, indeed, all media than the battle that will be fought between corporate giants and consumers over who will control the information future. J.D. Lasica's new book, Darknet, is an indispensable primer and guide to the copyright wars for those who want to protect their digital rights from the dark forces of big media that seek to take them away. So, rip, mix, and burn, and most of all, read his book if you want information to be as free as it should be."

— Kara Swisher, author of "There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future"

"Lasica pulls no punches in this compelling report from the front, as he introduces us to the technology, politics, and people who are right now deciding the future of entertainment and ideas. A terrific read."

— David Weinberger, author of"Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and coauthor of "The Cluetrain Manifesto"

The first general interest book by a blogger edited collaboratively by his readers, Darknet reveals how Hollywood's fear of digital piracy is leading to escalating clashes between copyright holders and their customers, who love their TiVo digital video recorders, iPod music players, digital televisions, computers, and other cutting-edge devices. Drawing on unprecedented access to entertainment insiders, technology innovators, and digital provocateurs-including some who play on both sides of the war between digital pirates and entertainment conglomerates-the book shows how entertainment companies are threatening the fundamental freedoms of the digital age.