Most people have never heard of Slashdot. Those that have consider it to be a ‘geek website,’ and to some extent they’re right. Slashdot is a news site that predominantly features such ‘geek news’ as stories about Legos, pro-Linux (a free operating system Microsoft would prefer you didn’t know about) rantings, and ‘Jar-Jar Must Die’ headlines. What most people don’t realize is that Slashdot is also a place where we lament the impending doom that megacorporations and so-called ‘content providers’ are planning to unleash upon us.
Right now, you’re probably saying, ‘Okay Mike, what impending doom?’ Well, okay, you probably aren’t. But I’ll fill you in anyway. Every week, dozens of stories flood Slashdot’s ‘Your Rights Online’ section. Stories about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has already made free speech a crime, or the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a copy protection scheme that’s being built into increasing numbers of portable digital stereos preventing you from playing copyrighted music. That’s your MP3 player, folks. Did you really expect to be able to listen to music for free forever? You won’t, if the record companies have anything to say about it.
Copy protection is coming to computer hard drives too, in the form of CPRM. In the near future, your computer won’t even be physically capable of playing content it’s not ‘licensed’ to play. Did you want to rip MP3s from CD’s that you own? Sorry. And don’t even think of downloading copyrighted MP3s from Napster. They won’t be of much use to you when Winamp refuses to play them, thanks to your new computer’s ‘new and improved’ hard drive that can detect what’s copyrighted and what’s not.
And then there’s the VCR. Why stay home and watch TV when we can tape it and watch it later? It’s called time shifting – watching something whenever we want to, instead of when someone says we have to. Once HDTV’s, the new high-definition televisions that we’ll all have to buy within the next decade or so, become standard, time shifting, as we know it will cease to exist. Oh, we’ll all have brand new HDTV VCRs, but we shouldn’t be surprised when they only let us record what AOL Time Warner says they can. Remember that little disclaimer about re-broadcasting Major League Baseball? MLB won’t have to worry. You won’t even be able to record it for yourself, let alone rebroadcast it.
Of course, this all sounds ridiculous. Not only could some of these things never happen, they don’t seem all that important. You’ve never heard of CPRM, the DMCA or any of a million other evil acronyms I could throw at you. And they don’t seem to apply to you. But every time Amazon.com patents the mouse click, every time the big guys win a small victory over the little guys and every time one of our basic rights is taken away, Slashdot readers think, this is the one. This is the story that will get their attention. This is the story that will make the public wake up and see the wool being pulled over their eyes, to use a ‘Matrix-ism.’ The media never picks up on it, though.
Had you even heard of the problems ALANA students were facing until this past week? If you had, I salute you, but I know I hadn’t. And I’m glad that those issues have finally come to light, because maybe now they can finally be addressed. And just as those issues have been swept under the rug for too long, the clash between consumer and provider has been going on for years now, right under our very noses. Yet no one will take a stand.
Maybe this is the story that will get your attention. Someone is trying to ban libraries. Pat Schroeder, former Congresswoman and head of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), says that publishers ‘have a very serious problem with librarians.’ Schroeder sees herself as a sort of holy crusader for book publishers, trying to vanquish the evil libraries who let people read published materials for free.
‘Technology people never gave their stuff away,’ says Schroeder. Apparently she doesn’t realize that 90 percent of the Internet’s DNS servers (dedicated machines that make domain names, like www.yahoo.com, correspond with websites) run BIND, a completely free program. Or that her own company’s website depends upon Apache, a completely free webserver. All things which ‘technology people’ have given away. But now that we’re in an increasingly digital society, for some reason, fair use rights don’t apply anymore. You can’t photocopy a few pages from a medical journal to use as research for your thesis. You can’t borrow a book from the library without paying for it each time you read it. If the ‘content providers’ – that’s the big guns, like the AAP, or the Motion Picture Association, or the Recording Industry Association – have their way, our entire world will be pay-per-view. And this is a very real example.
I’m not saying that each one of these issues should matter much to you. But as citizens and consumers we need to realize that these mega-companies are out to get us. I don’t want to do business with someone who sees me as a potential thief first and a customer second. I don’t want to live in a world where my rights are disregarded in favor of the real or imagined rights of some corporation. I urge you to pay attention to what’s going on. Don’t let them treat us this way and get away with it. If you’d like to read about any of the issues I’ve talked about more in depth (and you know you do!), visit Your Rights Online at http://slashdot.org/yro or the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org.
Mike Nuss is a UMass Student.
