From the Washington Post, a story looking back at the entire year in review.
In 2002, the important developments in the computing business had little to do with hardware or software; instead, they revolved around a comparably bug-ridden realm, that of politics — specifically, copyright politics.
How creators and distributors of art should be paid for their work — and how they might go after people who refuse to pay — dominated the important discussions this year.
On the one hand, movie studios, record labels, software developers and others pointed with justified alarm to a culture of theft on file-downloading services. Not all of the people sharing files were doing so for casual research, nor were the victimized parties all faceless, amorphous multinational conglomerates.
On the other hand, the biggest copyright holders forgot to offer a viable response to this problem. Some tried to attack it with technology, putting forth such doomed schemes as DataPlay music discs. Some turned to existing laws and so, among other accomplishments, helped strip Naval Academy midshipmen of their computers for downloading too many MP3s. Still others found the existing laws wanting and so asked for sweeping new legislation — such as the “Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act” that Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) and several sponsors proposed in March.
That law would have mandated that virtually every hardware manufacturer or software developer build a federally designated copy-prevention standard into their products, with disobedience by manufacturers or tampering by users punishable by jail time.
Too many companies kowtowed to this agenda — most shamefully, Microsoft, which showed itself far more willing to obey Hollywood than the Department of Justice when it added bizarrely restrictive copying rules to its Media Center PC software. (It later retreated after getting hammered in early reviews of this multimedia operating system.) Meanwhile, those who steal creativity for a living continued their trade largely unchecked.
Behind the Hollings bill and other Orwellian copyright-protection proposals lie two contentions that are toxic to the rights of citizens. One is that copyright holders’ rights (specified by the Constitution as limited in time and extent) might trump the rights of anybody else. Another is that digital content is more dangerous than analog content (a foolish assertion when one can easily digitize any analog content with widely available hardware).
I still hope to see some faceless, amorphous multinational conglomerate compete with piracy on the one ground where it can win — not technology, politics or law, but economics. People are cheap, but they’re also lazy, and I believe time-starved consumers will pay a fair price for an easy, usable download.
Elsewhere in personal technology, change appeared only in disguise. For example, Microsoft won its judicial battle with the Justice Department, but its biggest threat actually may lie in such open-source software as the Mozilla Web browser, the OpenOffice productivity suite and the Linux operating system.
I installed the first two programs this summer for curiosity’s sake but stuck with them out of satisfaction. OpenOffice opened every Word document, Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation in my e-mail since July without complaint — while insulating my PC from Office macro viruses. Similarly, Mozilla gave me a Web without pop-up ads, at the price of the rare site-specific glitch; better yet, it’s already spawned both a couple of useful upgrades and speedy offshoots, including Phoenix and Chimera.
Linux continues to frustrate and fascinate. It got easier to load but remained too persnickety with added software or hardware.
As for the name-brand computers, neither Mac nor Windows machines made breathtaking evolutions this year. The last exciting change in personal computers came six days into 2002, when Apple unveiled its latest iMac (which has been in stasis since January, save a bigger monitor). Since then, the only useful additions have been USB 2.0, which allowed for faster peripherals, and newly cheap LCD monitors.
Windows XP’s big upgrade, Service Pack 1, drew spotty third-party support for a new control panel that allowed consumers to designate preferred Internet software. Apple, meanwhile, garnered favorable reviews for its Mac OS X 10.2 release but then taxed its users with three massive maintenance updates that left Mac modems gasping for breath.
Regardless of operating system, spam and viruses gave our e-mail inboxes no rest in 2002. Many viruses were spread by hijacked PCs, so here’s one sermon: Windows users, update your software and keep an anti-virus utility current.
I also wish that the realm of consumer electronics had stayed immune from all these silly squabbles, but, once again, reality did not cooperate with my wishes. Digital-camera prices crumpled this year — hardware that cost $900 in February sold for $500 in December — but digicams did not escape a pointless storage-format war.
Equally useless strife in DVD-recordable formats saw no cease-fire at year’s end. And despite clarity in the digital TV business (a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission to require the inclusion of over-the-air tuners and an agreement by TV manufacturers and cable operators to include cable receivers), a nagging question remains: Will we be able to record shows as we can with VCRs?
Yet people still bought digital TV sets. And with every new TV set, computer and other gadget sold without copy-prevention hardware, it gets harder to advocate content-protection measures that would make that gear obsolete.
Also at News.com, they have reposted their top copyright related stories form the past year.
