Commentary: "What Do METALLICA And The US Government Have In Common"
December 8, 2010, 13 years ago
The following is an excerpt from a commentary by Ken Ammon from ZDNet:
What do METALLICA and the US government have in common?
They are both fighting to control information once it has been placed on the Internet. Like Napster, which rocked the music industry by enabling piracy and was eventually sued by the band Metallica, the current Wikileaks crisis concerning the unauthorized access and downloading of 250,000 sensitive and classified diplomatic cables and other files is simply another example of a controversial yet highly efficient and hard to stop Internet distribution engine for the global sharing of data.
Both Metallica and the US government have gone after these Internet distribution systems in an attempt to regain control of content they own. But it’s a losing battle. For Metallica, not much has been done to stop the millions of people who illegally access and share music files. Internet users know several Napster replacements exist that still amass files and enable the sharing of them. When something people want—music or data—becomes public, you can be sure that people will find a way to share it.
Clearly, once information is available online—whether government cables or music—the people who own the information have lost all control over it. They can discuss new laws to accommodate new technologies, ethics and so on, but an equally pertinent question is “what could we have done to prevent this in the first place?”
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