Valenti's film industry bankruptcy failed to materialize. Companies like Blockbuster, which generate billions in revenue for the film industry, sprung up instead. To them, the DVD battle is one of the first major skirmishes since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a hotly contested law that dramatically increased the power given to copyright holders. It strikes to the core of how I see the role of the hacker in society. Every day, in our increasingly networked world, our freedoms and privacy are being stolen from us.
Hackers understand that politics follows code.
We're busy writing the systems you'll be using tomorrow, and the forward-thinking among us are trying to program in the politics and culture we'd like tomorrow's computing to have. Our concerns over protecting privacy, over fending off corporate dominance, are being reflected in the programs we're writing. After all, it's awfully hard to hide objectionable behavior when the whole program is readable. We want to change the world. We're not at all sympathetic to defenders of the status quo like the Recording Industry Association of America and MPAA, two institutions vainly struggling to hold the globe in place, terrified of the changes that the digital revolution is bringing to their industries.