Podcasting Part III of “The Internet Heist”

In which the cartel gives itself a veto over your family life.

This week on my podcast, I read the final part of “The Internet Heist,” my Medium series on the copyright wars’ early days, when the entertainment and tech giants tried to leverage the digital TV transition into a veto over every part of our lives.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc

In Part I, I described the bizarre Broadcast Flag project, where Hollywood studios and Intel colluded with a corrupt congressman (later Phrma’s top lobbyist) to ban any digital product unless it had DRM and blocked free/open source software:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-i-3395769891b0

In Part II, I recount the failure of the Broadcast Flag (killed by a unanimous Second Circuit decision), and how the studios pivoted to “plugging the Analog Hole”: mandatory kill-switches for recorders to block recording of copyrighted works:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-ii-cb2add31a4fb

This week’s installment describes the global efforts by the studios to seize the future by creating a bizarre DRM system for the DVB digital TV standard (called CPCM), which is used in most of the…