How will life change?

The nature of change over the past few years has been interesting. Consistently, changes have been such as to have great impact, but the changes in and of themselves have not been large. Instead, they seem to build upon each other, one small step at a time. None of them astonish us, really. Even potentially ground-shattering stories, such as the strong evidence for Martian life sometime in the past (and maybe even in the present) barely makes the evening news.

I got to wondering, as I was falling asleep yesterday, about how recent legal decisions may affect our lives. Specifically, I was thinking of the DeCSS case and the Napster case, which in my opinion were argued on one level, but which really have much broader implications. And the "small" changes that result in the legal system I think will have widespread effects on our lives in the future.

On the surface, the arguments made by the plaintiffs were classical intellectual property arguments. Sort of.

In the first case, it was argued that the distribution of a piece of software that could read and play DVDs should be prevented to prevent, in turn, massive piracy of movies distributed on DVD. Not that software to do so doesn't exist. It does, but only in a form that is carefully approved by and controlled by the entertainment industry.

The basis of the suit, apparently, was that a kid somewhere in Scandinavia reverse-engineered the routines that decrypt the data on the DVD disks and incorporated them into a program that ran under Linux. This was, apparently, an unforgivable sin, because such activity was unauthorized (an approved Linux DVD player has since appeared), it chipped away at the authority of the industry to control what you could do with data it transferred to you when you bought a DVD.

In the Napster case, the plaintiffs maintained that the service promoted piracy of music. Having visited Napster several times, I can see how easy their argument may be to accept - log in, get free music, end of story - except that in my particular case, I bought more CDs as a result of having visited Napster than I had over the preceding 5 years.

Again, in my view, what was really at stake here was not that bread was being taken from the mouths of starving artists, but the answer to the question: who will control how digital content is to be used?

Both cases expand the concept of intellectual property dramatically, in my opinion.

What ramifications does this have?

I'm not entirely sure, except that I would not be surprised to see some small, incremental changes that will transform the way we look at the world.

I would not be surprised, for example, to find the entertainment industry start to market time-limited or number-of-plays-limited goods.

Imagine a DVD of, say, Gone With The Wind that would sell for $1.99, but only play once, and then be ready to throw away. Or a Britney Spears CD that will play for an unlimited number of times, but only until December 31, 2006. Or the same CD that will play forever, but only in a CD player that belongs to you.

I've already read reports of electronic medical school textbooks that are not sold but licensed to students, with a fee payable annually to keep the book current. And I also have saved a news report concerning a patent (if memory serves) held by Microsoft and issued for a multimedia file format - you heard me, a file format - that basically would make it illegal to read or write files in that format without having obtained a license for the requisite software. What a sweet deal!

In these relatively early days of the digital revolution, you can be sure that many forward-thinking, sharp people are in the employ of the The Powers That Be to make sure that the law is directed along um, "appropriate" paths for the future. In the meantime, the pressure to institute ever-greater surveillance on ordinary citizens increases.

I did not sleep easily last night, and now you know why.

Cheers...