During those light headed, giddy days, only the twinkling of an eye in the past, Hawaiian shirted super-boosters ridiculed those who didn't 'get it'. Among their favorite targets were the music and film industry which, the story went, were only a kiss away from being buried beneath the weight of their 'antiquated' business models by a dynamic web linked culture of globally wired youth.
And at first, the entertainment giants were indeed caught off guard and left scrambling - the best they could muster for a while were appearances by Jack Valenti
before Congress, lawsuits against 12 year-olds and crude, easily defeated copy protection methods on media (such as "copy-proof" CDs that were made copy-able via the clever use of marker pens).
But although they were slow out of the gate, media execs eventually realized they held two very powerful tools in their hands, tools that techno utopians, soaring high on dreams of a brave new world, barely understood. The first tool: computers are a command and control technology and can be used to restrict as robustly as they can be used to open. Joseph Weizenbaum, author of "Computer Power and Human Reason" predicted this very early on. But it's difficult to hear alarms when you're partying. And the second tool: a class based relationship with hardware and software manufacturers who, at the end of the day, have greater affinity with fellow capitalists at the multi-billion dollar level than information technology visionaries.
Which brings us to the restriction technologies - otherwise known as Digital Rights Management - that will be used to control how consumers use next generation storage and display media such as Sony's Blu-Ray and the reportedly less popular (but backed by Microsoft so certain to see the light of day) HD-DVD format.
Instead of the crude and fragile copy-protection schemes used in the past this new technology platform (consisting, in its fully deployed form of new players, new high def display devices and a host of other "compliant" devices) will all actively enforce the Advanced Access Content System - a technology designed to make 'intelligent' devices actively perform an access permission or revocation role.
With AACS, licensing and intellectual property enforcement becomes a fundamental component of electronic life - performed not via lawyers alone but also by the entertainment machines a person brings into her home.
Is this technology crackable? Of course, but that's really besides the point (and as it happens, it won't be permanently crackable in the way past systems were because of a dynamic revocation mechanism which, theoretically at least, can get as granular as the level of an individual, hacked machine).
AACS will provide a test run for new, and ever tighter methods for deploying the command and control element of computer technology. No, this won't mean the ushering in of some bad sci fi novel style dystopia (I think) but it does mark the beginning of the end, at least until the next upheaval, of the destabilization period of computer culture.
Info -
Industry propaganda on AACS - <http://www.aacsla.com/>
A rather good Wikipedia article -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System>
And, for the truly geektacular, a technical overview of AACS architecture -
<http://www.aacsla.com/media/aacs_technical_overview_040721.pdf>
.d.