Darknet’s on a blogging frenzy today, and there’s some excellent content to chew over. First up, an interview with the former CTO of ReplayTV talking about the studios’ attitudes towards digital recording:

[The Hollywood studios] essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed.

There’s also an excellent piece about the people who trade movies online (don’t bother with the interview transcript with the movie pirate, though, it’s a load of crap):

College students who run similar private file-sharing networks have been busted for less, but Forest does not fear the copyright cops. When he negotiated his contract, he insisted on an indemnification clause, a hold-harmless provision that shields him from being prosecuted for downloading pirated movies belonging to the major movie studios. He also consults for the music industry and has been indemnified by the Recording Industry Association of America. Forest may be a spy, but he is no snitch, and he takes pains to make clear that he will not fink on anyone in the scene.