I want you to kill someone, said the man across the table. The room was dimly lit, the air obscured by cigarette smoke. I couldnt see the mans eyes under the brim of his fedora. It was almost as if I was in a cheesy noir movie pastiche.
Whos the target? I said, taking a slug of bourbon. He waited for my coughing fit to subside.
Hollywood, he said.
Yes, a hit has been put out on Hollywood, and its pretty serious. A firm called Y Combinator, which provides seed capital and help for web and technology startups, wants to destroy the entire conventional movie and TV industry.
Good for them.
Y Combinator put up a document calling for ideas, essentially offering money to put innovative schemes into practice.
Actually titled Kill Hollywood, it says the old system is already dying, but that its death throes over the next few years endanger the freedoms weve become accustomed to thanks to the Internet.
The people who run it [Hollywood] are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down.
It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise, the document says.
This righteous indignation is inspired by the recent attempts to pass two bills in the U.S.: SOPA and PIPA.
The two bills are allegedly intended to crack down on copyright infringement. But what they actually would have done was quash a lot of perfectly legal activities thanks to heavy-handed rules, kneecap the net, and make things slightly more inconvenient for the people who actually do large-scale copyright violating. For a week or two.
When sites from the huge (Wikipedia, Reddit) to the small (The Oatmeal) protested and went dark for a day, a number of senators and congressfolk jumped ship and abandoned the bills.
But theyll be back. Unless someone kills them off.
Heres the thing about copyright: it was never a perfect tool to protect writers, directors, actors, studios and all those other folks who make money out of creativity.
There have always been pirates, whether it was an American publisher making his own edition of David Copperfield in 1850, or Soviet samizdat smugglers pressing copies of jazz records in the 1960s, or VHS tapes of Bruce Willis action movies on sale in Hong Kong in the 1980s.
Digital technology just lowers the bar. Any form of book, movie, or song can be turned into information, and as Clay Shirkey has pointed out, computers are devices designed to copy digital information.
Neither anti-copying technology, nor restrictive laws will ever put that genie back in the bottle.
Wed have to go back to an early 1980s level of technology, complete with bulky cellphones and Pong consoles, to stop whats been started.
There are already a lot of people who make a pretty good living creatively without worrying about copyright much.
Theyre scattered across the web, writing and drawing webcomics, publishing serial novels for cellphones, making videos on YouTube.
They thrive on giving away their work.
If its good, then they can also sell ads on their site, or some merchandise, or collected editions or DVDs to their hardcore fans.
Y Combinator knows this is already going on. Theyre just trying to speed things up, to push a few more pebbles off the top of the hill.
If were lucky, theyll start the landslide that crushes the old system flat.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance.
