The Dartmouth Review: October 16, 2000

The Dartmouth Review

Speaking in Code: DeCSS and Free Speech
by Ryan Roper
Armies of geeks are posting a frenzy of angry messages to online message boards. CNN is rushing to remove links from its website that its parent company's litigation has rendered illegal. Lawyers everywhere are lining up for a piece of the inevitable flood of lawsuits. Copyrighted software programs are often protected from unauthorized use by a password, unlock code, or serial number. While the use of pirated software has always been illegal, public sharing of software unlock codes has been allowed. That changed in October 1998, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. DMCA prohibits measures that circumvent copyright protection, dramatically extending the definition of existing copyright protection. The act has since commanded severe criticism, with critics questioning both its scope and constitutionality.

U.S. v. Consumers
by M. Ryan Clark
As the nineteenth century closed, the head of the U.S. patent office declared that "nearly everything that will be invented has been invented." When we look back on that statement today, it appears to be one of the worst predictions in history. We look back at the last decade of the nineteenth century and it appears as if hardly anything now relevant had been invented. One thing that was invented, however, was antitrust law, created with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. While antitrust has long impacted the Old Economy, the government's prosecution of Microsoft was the first case to target the New Economy, and it didn't help American consumers. Antitrust laws are entirely political phenomena. They were born out of politics and they should die through politics.

DivX: The MP3 of Movies
by Darren Thomas
Until 1999, DivX was nothing more than a defunct DVD format. Now the word sends shivers down the spines of the most hardened movie executives; DivX, they fear, may well do for movies what MP3 files did for music. Most importantly, DivX makes it possible to download a DVD-quality movie over the Internet. This has caused the movie industry great trepidation and Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti's endless anti-Napster tirades. Hollywood executives, watching closely their record label counterparts on the other side of Los Angeles, are as doomed as the recording industry ever was--and they know it. They can see the future of online movie delivery, and that future is no longer so rosy as it was before peer-to-peer file sharing, complex compression algorithms, and ever-increasing bandwidth. For Hollywood executives, the near future may be catastrophic.

Drowned by Bandwidth, Burned by the Light
by Tyler Thornhill
Mae West said "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." The fact that George Gilder begins his new book Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World with this quotation from the pre-feminism feminist says a lot. The good thing that Gilder's Telecosm promises in overflowing abundance is bandwidth, communications power through both fiber and wireless optics. Gilder sees a new world based on this overriding technological bounty. This new world, Gilder writes, is one that promises so much bandwidth, so much individual choice, so much more freedom, so much creative destruction, at such a increasing pace, that the question "is it too much?" is itself transcended. Conservatism applied to bandwidth is finally too hesitating, too timid. His view makes excellent sense.

CAMPUS FOLLIES:
Multicultural Misrepresentation by Stella Baer
"They Took the Bar!" by John Carty
U.S. News and Skewed Report by Benjamin Flickinger
Hero of History: Columbus' Greatness by Jeffrey Hart

NEW HAMPSHIRE AND THE NATIONAL SCENE:
Election Heats Up, Hanover Stays Cold by Alexander Talcott
Why Bush Won by Andrew Grossman
Don't Get Caught by Thomas White
The Modern Film Failure: Hamlet by Karen Parkman

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt