Wolff on Sony hack: Taking down Goliath
For nearly a generation, it's been an either/or world split between traditional media and digital media, with digital as the obvious choice for progressive thinking people.
In part, this is because the media industry had, over many years, consolidated into what certainly seemed like a hegemonic cartel (hundreds if not thousands of independent companies combined into five major media conglomerates). Hence, new media became the compelling and in many ways inspirational alternative.
Using digital media tools to undermine, or in fact actually steal, the business of old media seemed like something of a liberation movement. Who regretted the destruction of the music industry and its limousine fat cats, except the fat cats themselves? Or newspapers with their old white men? New media was bringing down the establishment.
The most concerted effort by the hoary media establishment — although, by now, much less of an establishment — to defend itself was SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. This was a 2011 bill that would have given the U.S. government clearer wherewithal to fight copyright infringement and that would have curbed parts of the key 1998 legislation, the Digital Millennial Copyright Act, that protected the new digital media industry from onerous infringement penalties (or, put another way, that let it infringe without much risk). SOPA, though, became a digital rallying cry against the old regime: Here it was trying to save itself by breaking the open Internet.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/12/21/sony-documents-fighting-digital-hegemony/20610925/
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