During a six-year stretch that began in the late s, he produced more than 1, tracks and 24 platinum albums for Madonna, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, and other musicians, and the records combined sold more than 40 million copies. When he married his British-born wife, Mitzi, in London in , their first dance was to a recording made for them by Elton John, who played the piano while Boy George sang. Forest eventually burned out on his job, stopped producing records, and began working with entertainment companies to create a strategy for distributing digital media online.
In Forest joined his first movie release group, a cluster of individuals who worked secretly and illegally to distribute digital goods in the Darknet. A server is at great risk of criminal prosecution because he distributes illegal movie files on an open Internet address. A typical release group, bearing a name like Flair, Esoteric, or Opium, consists of anywhere from a handful to as many as 30 individuals, with an average membership of Today there are an estimated underground movie groups worldwide, up from 32 in Releasing a movie requires several steps that begin with getting a copy of it, preferably a good one, from a supplier.
The preferred suppliers are editors, special-effects experts, and other post-production workers who can make copies of a master print, the sharpest version of a movie. The most common suppliers are people who sneak a camcorder into a theater and aim it at the screen. Movie studios have lately tried to thwart screen cams by arming movie theater attendants with metal detectors and night-vision goggles and engaging them as anti-Scene mercenaries.
The supplier passes the unreleased film to a contact in a release group or puts it on a drop site, a hidden server on the Internet. The movie is then sent to a ripper by overnight mail if it is on DVD or, if it is on a drop site, by telling the ripper to grab the file through a secure computer line called a virtual private network connection or VPN. The ripper also compresses the video file into formats suitable for downloading and viewing on a computer or television screen.
Next, a distributor places a file on one of 30 or so topsites—secure digital locations that can be entered only with a password. From there, couriers transfer the file to high-speed distribution servers, computers configured to share files. Forest estimates that 1, IRC channels are devoted exclusively to movie piracy.
The entire process usually takes two to three days—with handoffs often crossing international borders. Much of this activity involves individuals working alone in bedrooms, college dorms, and offices. Few movie-group members have met each other in person. For tax purposes, Forest deducts all such donations from the income of his consulting business. Once released, a title filters into Usenet news groups and web-based file-sharing services. The movie-piracy network is like a pyramid, with a few thousand members of the elite release groups at the top; 50, to , users who operate servers that store the digital goods; another 3.
The members of the release groups at the top of the piracy pyramid are young men it is, says Forest, an overwhelmingly male enterprise who generally share a conviction that everything should be up on the Internet. Whether the movie groups realize it or not, he said, commercial pirates in Asia take the stolen films off the Internet, burn them onto discs, and sell bootleg copies throughout the world.
Feingold, pointed out that the studios have already moved up the date of home video releases partly in response to piracy. The studios also load DVDs with lots of extras—interviews, outtakes, discarded scenes, alternate endings—that are supposed to make Hollywood products more attractive than the pirated versions. Traditional antipiracy measures have had limited success. The FBI has busted release groups only to see them revive after brief periods of inactivity. The movie industry has filed lawsuits against file traders, created technology that makes DVDs difficult to copy, and persuaded the FCC to help curb piracy by, for example, requiring that televisions and similar devices recognize anti-copying signals embedded in digital programming.
Anonymity on the Internet is of concern to everyone. I predict that the Darknet will eventually become as popular as the world wide web. Clive Young rated it liked it Mar 10, Kyle rated it really liked it May 05, Zachary Lockwood rated it really liked it Aug 02, Keith rated it really liked it Apr 02, Ali rated it did not like it Dec 28, Josh Fatzick rated it it was amazing Feb 02, Jason rated it liked it Mar 23, Christopher rated it did not like it Oct 05, Roland rated it liked it Jan 04, Ken Camp rated it really liked it Apr 27, Paul rated it really liked it Nov 17, Ricardo Huamolle rated it liked it Sep 28, Sudipta Rudra rated it it was amazing Jul 21, Paul rated it really liked it Feb 22, Devin rated it it was amazing Nov 05, Andrea Lodi rated it it was amazing Aug 04, Roberto Giannotti rated it it was ok Mar 29, Kirill Martynov rated it liked it May 02, Toph rated it really liked it Apr 16, Alfredo rated it really liked it May 21, Tom rated it really liked it May 30, Sheryl Camp rated it really liked it Apr 27, Caco Ishak rated it liked it Jun 08, Phillip rated it it was amazing Nov 22, Brian rated it liked it Aug 15, William Blair rated it it was amazing Jan 01, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one ». About J. Books by J. Mahogany L. Browne's Picture Book Gift Guide. She's also the Read more Trivia About Darknet: Hollywoo No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now ». Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Darknet raises one central question above all: What kind of media world do we want to live in?
The outcome of this protracted struggle will determine how we innovate, educate our children, create and share information, communicate with friends, tell stories, and leave our own marks on the larger culture.
Ultimately, the questions raised in this book go to the heart of what kind of society we want to become. Growing up in a flyspeck town in southern Mississippi in the early s, ten-year-old Chris Strompolos stared out his bedroom window and dreamed.
He fanta-sized about what it would be like for a whiff of adventure to breeze through his humdrum little burg. On a sticky June afternoon in he found a vehicle for his wanderlust in the darkness of a local movie theater.
He watched, jaw agape, as Harrison Ford outran a rolling boulder, dodged a swarm of blow darts, and dangled over a pit of slithering snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Chris Strompolos was blown away. The movie captured his imagination like nothing he had ever encountered. He thought, I want to do that. Chris first mentioned his outlandish idea to an older kid, Eric Zala, a seventh-grader at their school in Gulfport.
Chris did not suggest a quick and easy backyard tribute to Raiders that they could pull off on a summer weekend. Oh, no. He proposed shooting a scene-by-scene re-creation of the entire movie. Chris and Eric agreed they would have to cut a few corners, given their somewhat more modest savings account, but, yes, of course they could do it! Eric, a budding cartoonist, began sketching out costumes for each of the characters. Soon a third movie-loving misfit, Jayson Lamb, came on board.
Jayson was already heavily into special effects, makeup, puppetry, and lighting. He took charge of the camerawork with a bulky Sony Betamax video camera. The outgoing, slightly chubby Chris assumed the lead role of Indiana Jones. The production took on a life of its own. Months passed, then years. On birthdays the boys asked for props and gear: Chris got a bullwhip, Eric a fedora.
Jayson bought a VHS camcorder after a summer of delivering pizzas and saving money. Weekends were spent not hitting a baseball or playing a new game called Atari but in memorizing lines, creating plaster face masks, and filming take after take until they knew they nailed a scene exactly right.
Nearly seven years later, they wrapped. Voices deepen. Chris sprouts chin whiskers and grows six inches. He gets his first-ever kiss by a girl, captured onscreen. The girl who plays Marion, the Karen Allen character, develops breasts. In one special effect, an actor is shot, and fake blood oozes out of a condom hidden in his shirt.
And everywhere, explosions and fire and flames. This was, after all, Mississippi. Or the time they re-created the bar scene in Nepal where the entire set was set ablaze. Eric played a Nepalese villager whose outfit catches fire, and nobody could put it out until Chris resourcefully grabbed a fire extinguisher.
Almost two hundred friends, family, and cast members turned out to watch the hundred-minute film. But soon their little master-work became all but forgotten as they parted ways and went on to college and careers. Then, one day in early , it resurfaced. At the New York University film school, which Eric Zala had attended, someone passed along a years-old videotape of the movie to the horror film director Eli Roth.
Roth did not know the boys, but he was bowled over by what he saw. He slipped a copy to an executive at DreamWorks, where it quickly found its way into the hands of the master himself. Spielberg watched it—and loved it. Days later, he wrote letters to all three amateur auteurs. I saw and appreciated the vast amounts of imagination and originality you put into your film. League set aside three days in late May for the world premiere showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation , though before the screening he was careful to sub out the John Williams musical score because of copyright fears.
The trailer of Strompolos dodging a giant boulder sparked such interest in the weeks leading up to the event that hundreds of people had to be turned away at the door. Flying in for the occasion were all three filmmakers: Strompolos, now an independent film producer in Los Angeles; Zala, who works in the video game industry in Florida; and Lamb, an audiovisual technician in Oakland.
To their amazement, the screening was packed to the rafters. The audience watched Chris Strompolos with his wiseacre smirk and rumpled fedora capture the spirit of Indy.
They watched, mesmerized, as the kids credibly pulled off one scene after another. When the credits rolled and the screen went dark, the audience gave them a four-minute standing ovation—almost twenty years to the day after they had shot their first scene. The love and passion and sacrifice is on every single frame of this thing. This is the dream of what films can do. Motivate kids to learn and make it. An audience jaded by one mega-budget blockbuster after another is all too ready for an action movie made with love instead of money.
It would be wonderful if audiences everywhere could share the love. Only a few hundred people have ever seen Raiders: The Adaptation. But the boys are older now and wise to the bare-knuckle realities of federal law. Happily, Spielberg and Lucasfilm have no intention of pressing charges, but the young men are taking no chances. Strompolos no longer passes out copies of the film to those who want to see it. In fact, he has asked those who do possess copies to return them to him, for fear that the remake will wind up in the Darknet.
The studio passed. As for showing their Raiders homage to others, Strompolos tells me, We have legal constraints. The boys will be teeing off on their th birthdays right about then. An entertainment consultant who worked as an adviser to Disney management for many years related a meeting he took with executives of another major Hollywood studio in early As he ruminated on the profound impact that people creating their own media will have on the entertainment giants, the faces around the table grew puzzled.
Well, the consultant explained, many years ago people told each other stories, played musical instruments, and sang to one another. They would rather experience the worlds they create rather than what Hollywood makes for them. All the studio people at the table shook their heads.
No one will turn their backs on Hollywood entertainment. Outside, on the streets, much more interesting things are happening. Kids are taking up digital tools and creating movies and video shorts. Some are remixing big media television shows and movies into fan-style DVD digital versatile disc commentaries.
Others are creating new musical forms on computers in their bedrooms. While millions sharpen their digital photo techniques, many also have begun using camera phones and mobile devices to post photos or homespun wisdom to a global audience. The world has changed since Chris Strompolos was ten. What once took seven years to pull off could likely be done in a single summer of youthful exuberance.
What once required expensive, bulky equipment and professional editing studios can be done with a palmcorder and desktop computer. As the tools become cheaper and easier to use, the kind of storytelling that infuses Raiders: The Adaptation —the grit, the passion, the wide-eyed wonder—is spreading throughout our culture. Such personal works remind us that it is in our nature to tell stories and be creative—instincts that have been too often repressed during the couch potato era of force-fed mass media.
Make no mistake: personal media will complement, not supplant, the old order of mass media and consumer culture. Most of us will continue to watch entertainment created by professionals working at media companies.
High-quality entertainment takes time, talent, effort, and money to pull off. In ways large and small, individuals have begun bypassing the mass media to create or sample digital music, video diaries, film shorts, weblogs, visually arresting multimedia Web sites—in short, personal media. Sometimes these personal works will be an entirely original creation, borrowing techniques and ideas, perhaps, but no music, video, or photos created by others. At other times these creations will be a collage or hybrid, borrowing bits and pieces of traditional mass media mixed with material supplied by the user or remixed in interesting new ways and transformed into something new.
People are no longer satisfied with read-only media encapsulated in whatever proprietary formats the entertainment industry sees fit to distribute, Greg Beato writes in his music weblog Soundbitten. Which means copying it at will, using it on different platforms, modifying its contents, combining it with other media, and basically doing anything else that can be done to turn centuries of copyright law on its ear.
Something new is happening. Call it personal media, open media, bottom-up media, or home-brew media—it all comes down to people plugging into the larger culture in creative ways. Today no more than 5 percent of the populace can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume, says Marc Canter, a multimedia pioneer who cofounded the software giant Macromedia. The new technologies promise to change that, enabling the rest of us to express our creativity.
Amateur filmmaking, digital photography, writing in online journals about a topic you know well—all are forms of creativity. All are on the rise. Technology is one reason. Personal computers have become so powerful and pervasive now in two out of three U. Communication is another reason. Smart search engines and community forums let peers collaborate and exchange ideas in ways that were once available only to insiders or those who took expensive training courses.
But there may be a deeper reason for the rise of personal media: a hunger for authenticity in the land, perhaps a Jungian shared memory of a time when stories held power and when creative expression was not reserved for a privileged class. The impulse to create stories or make up songs or paint pictures is what culture wants. There was a brief moment in human history where mass culture pushed the other stuff out of the way.
Somehow we became convinced that only a few special people have talents or visions worth pursuing. But that moment is ending, and now mass culture and participatory culture have to negotiate their relationship with each other. Old media, born in the industrial age, rely on the economics of conveyor-belt mass production and scarcity of atoms. Broadcast-style media send programming down one-way pipes to a mass audience of consumers, requiring a one-size-fits-all content model catering to mass tastes.
Members of the public rarely participate in the media process. Some write letters to the editor. Others might call a TV station when a favorite show gets bumped. But pity the renegade who wants to excerpt material from a song, movie, television show, magazine, or book for use in his or her own work. The game of copyright lawyers, chutes, and ladders makes sure that such a player will rarely reach the finish line.
Add to this equation the disruptive effects of personal media in the information age. While the analog world has long featured a stable landscape of mass media, fixed objects, and predictable atoms, today we swim in a turbulent digital sea of nearly limitless bits. Digital tools now allow people at the edges of the network to create high-quality material, to make as many copies as they like, and to share them worldwide.
In this new space, built with two-way pipes, we can choose from not a hundred or two hundred channels but from a million topical niches. Interactivity and personalization are the coins of the realm.
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