Doctorow on digital ecosystems and acceptance of parasites
It’s real spooky when CIOs advocate locking down the internet and greatly restricting access and the freedom to make even little scripts:
Let’s make all end user devices nonprogrammable. No one can connect to the Internet on a machine that creates code. If you want a computer to do programming, you would have to be licensed. We could license software companies to purchase programmable machines, which would be completely traceable along with the code created on them.
Like I said, spooky, although certainly far from realistic.
Fortunately, we have folks like Cory Doctory to provide great arguments for why the problems are something we just need to learn to deal with. “All complex ecosystems have parasites,” he says, and these “parasites” are natural and unavoidable. The truth is that we can never get rid of these problems and draconian policies won’t do anything but hurt the public instead of the “parasites.” Also note:
In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a few power-brokers who have signing authority over the two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this:
“With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband access… EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!”
Heaven forfend.
It’s completely out in the open that these companies are explicitly interested in restricting the rights of content creators. One moment they cite the pain and suffering piracy causes content creators and then turn right around and state that they only want a world where content creators play by their rules. It kind of makes you wonder who the “parasites” really are…