Monday Panel #2:

The panel title - The Future of Darknets: Can Hollywood See the Light?

Darknet is a book written by JD Lasica about "Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation is a new book that offers first-person accounts of how the personal media revolution will impact movies, music, computing, television and games."

Here is the podcast of the panel.

Random Blogger's POV

My Thoughts: This was probably the liveliest panels. JD Lasica the moderator started the session with a great 4 min video that explains what draknets are and how they are used. Then each panelist stated their position on darknets. There was a lady from the MPAA was saying some gibberish about how Hollywood was embracing new technology and online distribution (but if you recall from the previous panel discussion about doc distribution they don't want have anything to do with the internet). People asked questions about creative commons and fair use. Creative Commons is an organization created by Lawrence Lessig a Law professor at Stanford to create a system of licensess that easily provides a flexiblee range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Fair use is a doctrine that exists in current copywrite law that is probably the most misunderstood part of copywrite law (an audience member professor from AmericannUniversity informed everyone about this.

The industry insiders (MPAA PR Lady and Mark Ishikawa, who is the CEO of a company that tries to track down copywrite violators) were basically writing off how powerful this technology is and stating that any use or copy of what is essentially information/data is illegal. They were totally disregarding fair use.

Ultimately, because Hollywood is tied to the arcane system of theater/DVD/TV release schedules they are totally discounting and misunderstanding how they can be making money online.