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in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright system in the world would protect any work for.

If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal to you, you\'re not alone. When representatives of nearly all the world\'s entertainment, technology, broadcast, satellite and cable companies gather in a room to collude to cripple their offerings, limit their innovation, and restrict the market, regulators take notice.

That\'s why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These systems aren\'t designed: they\'re governed, and the governors are shadowy group of offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their own members! I once called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) on behalf of a Time-Warner magazine, Popular Science, for a comment about their DRM. Not only wouldn\'t they allow me to speak to a spokesman, the person who denied my request also refused to be identified.

The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever are finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up, making them account for themselves to the public. And so long as you, the technology-buying public, pay attention to what\'s going on, the activists will continue to hold back the tide. 
 
$$$$ 
 
Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it\'s doomed us, and how we might survive anyway  
 
(Originally published as \"How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy,\" InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) 
 
Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America\'s impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Today, the the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement. 
 
Through most of America\'s history, the US government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America\'s political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!). 
 
How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the \"Information Economy.\" 
 
No one really knows what \"Information Economy\" means, but by the early 90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an \"information economy\" was and to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the \"new economy\" -- America sent in the futurists. 
 
We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don\'t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don\'t remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast. 
 
We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That\'s why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only moreso. 
 
So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the \"information-based\" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson\'s 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in which these would grow to dominate the world\'s economies. 
 
There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world\'s economies consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if
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