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In this Issue WHEN ANNALEE NEWITZ first started telling me that Microsoft had carefully built its Xbox to prevent people like her from opening it up and altering it (see "Liberating the Xbox," 9/10/03), I was deeply offended. I'm not a geek like Annalee, and I don't spend a lot of time playing computer games or doing any of the other cool things Xbox fans do, but something about it all really disturbed me: I mean, if I bought one of these things, it should be mine, right? And if it's mine, I should be able to do anything I want with it – smash it to bits, take it apart, paint it green, or change the chips on the inside to make it do things the manufacturer hadn't intended. This is not a harmful piece of hardware. You can't shoot anyone with it. You can't use it to blow up a building. It's not even like a car that could run somebody down if you put experimental brakes on it that didn't work. It's a computer that plays games. But that was just the start. Here's the latest: As Annalee reports on page 18, the federal government, in concert with the electronic equipment manufacturers and the entertainment industry, has decided to block you from recording TV shows. Really. If the consortium that Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media, calls the Copyright Cartel has its way, the days of taping The West Wing and sharing it with a friend who missed that episode are over. When the new generation of high-definition TVs come on the market (give it 5 or 10 years, and almost everyone will have one), all HDTV recording devices will include special equipment that will block you from "unauthorized" copying of broadcasts – which means you'll be able to record stuff on your TiVo (or whatever the next version of that is), but you won't be able to make a removable version to take out of your TV and watch somewhere else. You won't be able to record all your favorite movies on DVDs and build a library of them. I won't be able to record my next appearance on Hannity and Colmes and let my kids watch it 10 years from now. When corporations and the feds start to control every aspect of our communications technology, we're in serious trouble. |
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