This week we’re introducing a new regular feature: the Engadget Interview. Every week J.D. Lasica will speak with someone who is helping shape this crazy world of gadgets and technology that we’re all so obsessed with. We’re inaugurating it with Jack Valenti, outgoing president of the Motion Picture Association of America, who spoke to Lasica about movies, technology and whether the new breed of digital gizmos threatens Hollywood. His last day at the MPAA’s helm is Tuesday. Here are excerpts from that conversation:

You have personally come to personify the MPAA-

Well, I’ve been here 38 years, so if you last that long, you become an institution.

Some people have portrayed you as anti-technology. Not guilty?

Over time, I believe that technological innovation is the best way to go. All of our companies are working very closely with the best brains in the information technology industry right now to try to see if there’s some way that we can deal with the piracy problem.

I have said, technology is what causes the problem, and technology will be the salvation of the problem. I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it. In time, we’ll be able to do this, because I have great faith in the technological genius that’s out there.

You’ve made your biggest mark fighting Internet movie piracy. Why?

We know that with DVDs and VHS, we lost $3.5 billion a year worldwide due to analog or hard-goods piracy. Now, we don’t have a number on digital piracy yet but know that digital piracy will be far worse than analog piracy if left unchecked. I’ve seen camcorded movies that are uploaded to the Net and they are very, very watchable. A lot of camcording is taking advantage of the fact you can go into a theater and plug in to one of those sound systems you have in the armchair for hard-of-hearing people. And the sound comes over crystal clear-beautiful sound. These camcorders are small, they’re digital, and they do a remarkable job of duplicating the film.

How big a threat is this, and what technological measures is the movie industry taking to stop it?

If everything stayed just as it is right now, we could probably survive it, because even with broadband it takes at least an hour to bring down a movie. But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they’re running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.

We’re trying to put in place technological magic that can combat the technological magic that allows thievery. I hope that within a year the finest brains in the IT community will come up with this stuff. A lot of people are working on it—IBM, Microsoft and maybe 10 other companies, plus the universities of Caltech and MIT, to try to find the kind of security clothing that we need to put around our movies.

It may be possible to so infect a movie with some kind of circuitry that allows people to copy to their heart’s content, but the copied result would come out with decayed fidelity with respect to sound and color. Another would be to have some kind of design in a movie that would say, ‘copy never,’ ‘copy once.’ Some new business model may want to put a movie out on the Internet just after it leaves theatrical exhibition. We can’t afford to let that be copied at that juncture because it’s the [home entertainment] aftermarket where you make your profits.

You’ve traveled around the country during your tenure and spoken with a lot of young people. Do they agree with your take on this?

I’ve talked to about 3,500 students at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Stanford and Duke—eight universities in all. When I ask, how many of you believe that what you’re doing is wrong, morally and legally, most of their hands go up. But they rationalize it by saying, yes, it is a kind of stealing, but everybody else is doing it, and it costs too much to go to a movie. There’s a rationalization that goes on, but I am convinced if we keep putting this moral imperative before them and if the professors follow through on this, it will have an effect.

Do consumers have a fair use right to remix a few seconds of a Hollywood movie into a home movie project?

There is no fair use to take something that doesn’t belong to you.
That’s not fair use. If you’re a professor in a classroom, you show ‘Singing in the Rain’ to your class. You can fast forward it, and there’s no performance fee for that. That’s fair use. Now, fair use is not in the law. People are taking fair use and changing it to unfair use and claiming that it’s fair use.

Do you own any cool gadgets?

I have a TiVo set. I truly enjoy it. The movies I get on TiVo come from television, HBO or pay per view. We do not yet have video on demand—there’s semi-video on demand, things like CinemaNow and Movielink. But the technology is moving with such speed that video on demand will be here shortly.

Does Hollywood worry about gadgets like EyeTV or Snapstream, which let you record TV and movies on your computer and transfer it around the house?

No, because you’re not seeing new releases, unless you bring it down from the Internet in an outlaw form.

So there are no restrictions that Hollywood wants to place on what people can do with media on their computers?

Well, I can’t tell you that. We have to see what the technology can provide.

What would you say to a mom who wants to make a backup of her kids’ DVD movies?

When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn’t give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever.

When is the next generation of DVD players coming out with new forms of copy protection?

The MPAA’s technology people have been meeting with the IT and CE [consumer electronics] people and the chip manufacturers. We have meetings every month, trying to find some way to come to some concord about how we’re going to deal with the future. It’s moving, but at a lesser velocity than I would like. It’s very hard. You’re dealing with technology, with fragile concepts. I’m not putting the blame on anybody, I’m just a fellow who likes to move. I’m an action-now fellow, and sometimes I get frustrated.

Some have suggested that tech companies need to reengineer the PC to make it a ‘trusted appliance’ for watching copyrighted entertainment. Do you share that view?

Right now, I don’t know exactly. But in time, the technology innovation is moving with such celerity that Gordon Moore’s old deal, that every 18 months a chip doubles in capacity and power, is being brought down to about 12 or 8 months. When I look at what Caltech and Internet2 are doing, it’s incredible.

Does it bother you that you’re portrayed as a villain in some quarters of cyberspace?

I don’t relish it but I know what I’m doing is right. I want to look ahead. I want to have what Mr. Churchill says is the seeing eye, to know what’s on the other side of the brick wall. I believe in change. Change irrigates every enterprise, and particularly the movie business. So, I welcome it, but I want to make sure that thievery is not going to lacerate our future.

What keeps you up at night?

Not a thing. I sleep like a baby.

How do you see the motion picture landscape in five years?

The one thing that won’t change 50 years from now is the story; the thing wherein it will catch the conscience of the king, as Mr. Shakespeare put it.

When Frank Capra was making movies, when D.W. Griffith was making movies, it was all about the story. Today, we have technological changes, and you can do all sorts of digital wizardry, but digital morphing is not a story, and a computer cannot replace the story. It merely helps you enhance your story. I think the computer is the smartest mechanism the world has ever seen, but there’s one thing a computer cannot do. It cannot predict human behavior. So that’s what is not gonna change.

Will it be hard for your successor to step into your shoes?

I was in Dallas in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, and I saw that day a brave young president murdered, and a new president take over. The president is dead, long live the president, the nation goes on. No one is indispensable, I learned that day in Dallas. My successor will come into this job and he won’t be me, but he might do a hell of a lot better job than I’m doing.

What do you hope your legacy will be?

I hope people will say I never had a hidden agenda, and I never played it cute around the turns, and that my integrity stayed intact.

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August 16 , 2004 | When I attended journalism school at Rutgers in the ’70s during those heady post-Watergate days, the underlying premise of every class, every lesson, was that we were the expert professionals whose job it is to gather and filter the news for readers.

It’s time to toss those textbooks onto the bonfire of the vanities, for little did we see the rise of citizens media, a grassroots-powered phenomenon in which users are becoming both competitors and collaborators with established news organizations. It is this media revolution-in-the-making that Dan Gillmor skillfully chronicles in his new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media).

This is certainly the most important journalism book of this year, for it aptly details a gathering storm that is about to sweep away everything we thought we knew about the news.

Gillmor, a nationally syndicated business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News who was the first big-time journalist with a weblog, lays out his basic premise with his familiar mantra: My readers know more than I do-and that’s an opportunity.

It’s a truth that journalism professionals are only just beginning to grasp. Gillmor writes: “[R]eaders (or viewers or listeners) collectively know more than media professionals do. This is true by definition: they are many, and we are often just one. We need to recognize and, in the best sense of the word, use their knowledge. If we don’t, our former audience will bolt when they realize they don’t have to settle for half-baked coverage; they can come into the kitchen themselves.”

In a real sense, we’re all journalists now. At the very least, many of us practice journalism on occasion, chiefly through personal weblogs or community sites such as Slashdot, Metafilter and Kuro5hin. While blogs play a central role in this new grassroots mediasphere, SMS, wikis, camera phones and RSS also make cameo appearances. Wikipedia, the democratic encyclopedia written by volunteers, is demystified here, explained in the same spare, simple language Gillmor uses throughout the book.

He passes along approvingly the citizens media credo of Oh Yeon Ho, the reformist founder of South Korea’s largest online paper, OhmyNews: “Every citizen’s a reporter. Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others.”

Gillmor lays out the opportunities presented by this new turn of affairs this way:

The rise of the citizen journalist will help us listen. The ability of anyone to make the news will give new voice to people who’ve felt voiceless-and whose words we need to hear. They are showing all of us-citizen, journalist, newsmaker-new ways of talking, of learning.

In the end, they may help spark a renaissance of the notion, now threatened, of a truly informed citizenry.

The author recounts the time a Slashdot reader uncovered the misrepresentation in Microsoft’s “Mac to PC” advertising campaign (the photo of the supposed Mac user who switched over to Windows actually came from a Getty Images archive). He capably relates a number of such episodes, such as the scoop scored last spring by the operator of the Memory Hole, who used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the military’s photos of the flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers-something no news organization thought to do.

As news organizations grapple with their place in an interactive universe, pushback is inevitable. Big media are not eager to loosen their monopoly on the news (even as the earth is shifting beneath them), and the transition to a more enlightened media landscape will not come easily, if it comes at all. Blogs have been slow to take off in the mainstream media in part, Gillmor writes, because of “mistrust among traditional editors of a genre that threatens to undermine what they consider core values-namely editorial control” and “objectivity and fairness.”

Gillmor chides the journalism business for being one of the least transparent industries around. “We have been a black box, and have become only slightly more transparent in recent years.”

Education will play a role in helping to get us to a new place over the long term. He cites NYU’s Jay Rosen and Medill’s Rich Gordon as members of a new breed of educators who practice forms of new media that espouse true dialogue and break down the barriers between news provider and audience.

But Gillmor also tempers his embrace of this new world by tamping down any suggestion that blogs will put old media out of business or editors out of a job. “Bloggers who disdain editors entirely, or who say they’re largely irrelevant to the process, are mistaken.” At the same time, “my readers make me a better journalist because they find my mistakes, tell me what I’m missing, and help me understand nuances.”

My favorite anecdote in the book comes when the author Howard Rheingold was asked to assess the effect on speaker presentations that bloggers might have when they offer instant feedback and commentary even while the speaker was still on stage. Might the bloggers’ actions create a chilling effect on public discourse? On the contrary, Rheingold said to laughter and applause, “I would think it would have a chilling effect on bullshit.”

Lessons for other fields

Corporate executives, politicians, public relations professionals and others with access to the hallways of power can draw parallels in We the Media to what’s happening in their own fields as the Internet disrupts business models and empowers users to bypass traditional lines of authority. Gillmor shows newsmakers how to deal with the new realities and shift from a control mindset to one of conversation.

Even billionaires are getting into the act. In an email interview with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Gillmor asks what prompted him to launch a blog this past March. “I was tired of reading incomplete information or misinformation about what I as doing in the sports media,” Cuban responded. “This was one way to get the facts out.” Look for countless other business executives and entrepreneurs to follow suit.

Despite the news industry’s slow plodding response to all this, Gillmor has come to reform big media, not to bury it. He writes with the passion of someone who desperately wants journalism to find its way in the digital age-and laments what will happen if it does not. “I’m absolutely certain that the journalism industry’s modern structure has fostered a dangerous conservatism-from a business sense more than a political sense, though both are apparent-that threatens our future.”

The author traverses beyond journalism into related topics, addressing issues of technology, politics and law. There is talk of spectrum and the FCC’s communications policies and the copyright cartel-the name Gillmor uses for Hollywood’s efforts to clamp down on how people can use digital technologies. But Gillmor’s text is most animated when discussing citizen journalism. Which is, after all, the main point of We the Media.

Someday, a person who is interested in news about the local school system, which rarely rates more than a brief item in the newspaper except to cover some extraordinary event, will be able to get a far more detailed view of that vital public body. Any topic you can name will be more easily tracked this way. Just in the political sphere, the range will go beyond school governance to city councils to state and federal government to international affairs. Now multiply the potential throughout other fields of interest, professional and otherwise. And when audio and video become an integral part of these conversations-it’s already starting to happen as developers connect disparate media applications-the conversations will only deepen.

Gillmor saves his best admonition for last:

You can make your own news. We all can. Let’s get started.

We the Media was released under a Creative Commons license that allows users to download the chapters for free and share them with others (as long as it’s not for commercial use and the author is credited). But save yourself the inkjet paper and ink cartridges and buy the hardcover. This one’s a keeper.

bio:
J.D. Lasica is a veteran journalist, blogger, and consultant who has just completed a book about the personal media revolution (“Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music & Television,” Wiley & Sons, spring 2005).

Disclosure: J.D. has sat on several panels with Dan Gillmor and reviewed two chapters of his book in advance of publication.

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