Excellent essay. I feel smarter for having read it.
I would say that I think that there are some breaks in the clouds
you describe so well.
1) If most of these copy-protection schemes are schemes, and not
laws, then the free market will route around them (The free market
is about as adaptable to censorship as the Internet is). For example,
if the major disk manufacturers begin selling only hard drives w/
encryption built in, some upstart company will become extremely
rich selling hard drives that do not have encryption built in.
People will set up Napster-like sharing systems offshore - in China,
Libya, Iraq, Sealand, etc - anyplace that loathes the US and would
love to cause economic chaos. Since P2P systems are nearly
infrastructure free, it will be possible to run huge file sharing systems
w/out huge infrastructure investments. And, of course, music is only
the first of many formats that is vulnerable to this. Divx ;-) and Divx ;-)
II
are both going to make it harder for content providers to fully protect
the content.
Frankly, I also suspect that the quality of HDTV will be lost on the vast
majority of people - if they can get something that operates at their
convenience, and is still of decent quality, they will almost overwhelmingly
choose that over an inconvenient, obnoxious, expensive high-quality system.
As far as I am concerned, technology set up content for a checkmate about 4
moves
ago, but it is still about 12 moves before the content providers realize it
and concede.
Ebay, and Ebay-like solutions will allow the "peer to peer" transport of
"illegal"
goods, in a way that is impossible to track in a "free" country. All it
takes is
_one_ person breaking an encryption scheme, and with the use of technology,
that content will be available worldwide in days. Some enterprising
content providers
will recognize this and get fabulously rich off of _not_ screwing over the
customer,
and everyone will eventually realize that they were idiots, and things will
continue
to muddle along.
This is not even counting the likely fact that over time, the content
produced by
modern content giants will become quaint and curious, like silent movies and
radio pictures.
Of course, this assumes that a free market continues to exist. W/out a free
market,
it will be possible for content providers to control content, but no one
will be able to
afford to buy it.
jb
