Hollywood Faces Online Piracy, but It Looks Like an Inside Job: When "Hulk" hit the small screen early, Hollywood hit the roof. Two weeks before this summer's film adaptation of the angry green giant opened in theaters in June, copies started showing up on file-sharing networks around the world. The film cost Universal $150 million to make and distribute, but anyone with a fast Internet connection, a big hard drive and plenty of time could see it free.
Hollywood is desperately worried that it will soon face the widespread illegal copying that has bedeviled the music industry — and that prompted record companies to file lawsuits last week against 261 people accused of illegally distributing copyrighted music online. Piracy of works in digital format, like DVD's or high-definition television is, in theory, so simple that whole movies could be zapped around the globe with a click of a mouse
Fighting the Idea That All the Internet Is Free: The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers. But the emphatic message of the music industry's two-step program announced yesterday is that the days of plucking copyrighted songs off the Internet without paying for them are numbered.
Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet: Since Gutenberg's printing press, new technologies for creating, copying and distributing information have eroded the power of the people, or industries, in control of various media. In the last century, the pattern held true, for example, when recorded music became popular in the early 1900's, radio in the 1920's and cable television in recent years.
But the heritage and design of the Internet present a particularly disruptive technology. Today's global network had its origins in the research culture of academia with its ethos of freely sharing information. And by design, the Internet turns every user in every living room into a mass distributor of just about anything that can be digitized, including film, photography, the written word and, of course, music. Already, Hollywood is trying to curb the next frontier, film swapping. The inevitable advance of technology will make reading on digital tablets more convenient than reading on paper, so the publishers of books, magazines and newspapers have their worries as well. "Nobody is immune," observed Michael J. Wolf, managing partner in charge of the media practice at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm.
"The cultural and technical principle embedded in today's Internet is that it is neutral in the sense that the people who use it have the power to determine its use, not corporations or the network operators," said Jonathan Zittrain, a co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. "The plan for the Internet was to have no plan."
