Stuckists

I read an article in The Register titled The Stuckist Net – what is your post-Palladium future?, by Andrew Orlowski. He writes that Microsoft’s Palladium and other TCPA efforts “could risk ceding the nation’s technological lead, once and forever”, because countries like India and China “have far more to gain from fuelling a Stuckist Internet than they might by following the Disney/Palladium path”.

The “Stuckist Internet” is an alternative Internet, created by those who want their network to remain stupid and their PC’s free from “Fritz chips”. He doesn’t go into what China and India in particular have to gain from this, and I don’t understand what he refers to. But the moment I first read about Palladium (see here – here – here – and here), the thought struck me that it might lead to the fall for Microsoft.

Orlowski also writes, “The computer industry, in an alliance with the entertainment pigopolists is simply filling a vacuum that’s been left by people unwilling to engage on a political level.” (Pigopolist apparently is a Register-coined term meaning a very greedy oligopolist.) This is what Lawrence Lessig (see here) and Dan Gillmor (see here) says, too. There is increasing discussion about this war between the entertainment industry and people standing up for the “consumers”, whether it concerns the extensions of copyright terms or controlling “intellectual property” and digital “content” by technological means. It is a good sign.