Hollywood's British counterparts (the British Phonographic Industry (BPI)) took a hissy fit and came up with the immortal slogan: "Home Taping Is Killing Music" some time in the early 1980s. This British music industry trade group was terrified that the rise in cassette recorder popularity would mean that people would record music from the radio onto cassettes, thus causing a decline in record sales. The logo of a skull and crossbones formed from the silhouette of a cassette, followed by the words “And It's Illegal”. This logo became infamous and entered the public's imagination. Much parodied over the years, the best parody featured a sewing machine.
Unfortunately the home taping logo is copyrighted (surprise surprise), but this parody of it is better.
Though they were never terribly happy about them and tried to sue anything with a record button whenever the opportunity presented itself, Hollywood did eventually get used to tapes. They had only just begun to chill out a bit when CD Roms came crashing along giving the music industry a shiny new medium on which to sell music. For a change Hollywood was quite pleased with this develiopment, and for a time it was all good.
This bubble was promptly burst a few years later with two big developments. The first was cheap CD writers coming standard with “Multimedia PCs”, while the second was a format called MP3. As we should all know by now, living this side of the millennium, before MP3s a music track was about 50MB in size, too big to share in the era of 56k modems (imagine having to wait a month for a song to download). MP3s knocked music files down tenfold making them small enough to share. The apperance of single fee tarifs for internet access (previously it had been pay as you go, 3p per minute on average), made downloading music economically viable for the end users.
If the media industries panicked when tapes first appeared, they went crazy with the advent of MP3 downloading, “file sharing” and peer2peer networks. Rather than tackle the issue at hand and create legitimate services where users could easily access the music they wanted, the music industry romped all over the trust they had built up with the fans over the years by adding Digital Rights management (DRM) to CDs to try and stop file sharing. Invariably all DRM did was get in the way of legitimate customers who had actually bought the product, preventing them from using the tracks in their MP3 players and other such devices (that were just appearing at the time).
Hollywood's campaign of calling fans criminals turned the music consumers against them. CD sales dropped while downloads shot through the roof. Meanwhile they sued every file sharing site they could find, to get them shut down. This effectively decentralized the file sharing community, making it impossible for Hollywood to destroy. For every site or service they did manage to shut down, thousands more sprang up in its place.
Rather than act in a grown up manner and embrace the new medium of the Internet, Hollywood still tries to palm their problems off onto everyone else at the slightest mention of the words “file sharing”. They forced Microsoft into putting DRM into Vista, and are trying to force ISPs to police their networks and prevent (and prosecute) file sharers. In this battle, those who are using copyrighted content legitimately (under legal fair use for example) are often caught in the crossfire. Hollywood however is loosing the battle. Every time they invent a more perverted way of stopping users from using their own content in the name of preventing piracy; the anti-piracy measures are cracked within 24 hours, by the first 14 year old to run afoul of the DRM.
Nefarious News
Bloggers have apparently toppled the monopoly the large media companies had on 'the news'. Nowadays reporters from the large news networks are much more afraid of getting something wrong than they once were. In the old days, apparently, a reporter could send back a report and even if it wasn't quite correct, that became the accepted truth anyway, after all, there was no one to challenge it.
With the rise of blogging, the Internet, global information sources, with the slightest slip in facts and a hundred thousand voices can rise up in the midst of the blogsphere to complain about the woeful injustice inflicted upon the truth. Because of this, a leading expert once said that the BBC had lost the plot, claiming that Journalists used to be sure of themselves, but are now much more aware of the many different possible viewpoints – and that apparently made them nervous. Meanwhile the large networks world wide have been closing down as many of their international field offices as possible in order to keep the short sighted corporate bean counters happy. News networks would rather report on Britney Spears et all 95% or more of the time, because quite frankly, it's a lot cheaper than going out into the world and reporting the 'real' news.
Naked News
Saving the best for last, TV studios around the world are starting up Naked News slots, because clearly people can't be trusted to take an interest in what's happening in the world without coercion in the form of beautiful newsreaders stripping off as they deliver the news. Must have been started by those crazy Japanese TV channels! Is this Keith Chegwin's revenge?
