The digital media convergence and the rapid dissemination of media production capabilities is a challenge to many existing structures in the media industries. Lasica looks specifically at how established entertainment industries in music and movies react to the "threats" of filesharing, local production, mods, remixes and other personal digital media possibilities. The emerging picture, which Lasica paints in very lively colors using a journalistic presentation style, is focused on restrictions, violations of user rights, and political power plays in the interest of continued economic gain. The perspective of the book is clearly biased in favor of personal media, underground movements and a certain amount of Internet evangelism -- but the underlying conflicts are extremely interesting for any interaction designer involved in the digital media.

The future of entertainment is freedom, Lasica argues, and hidden sharers will route around copyright owners’ controls if they clamp down too hard. Mostly interesting to see how a book published in 2005 speaks about these issues, many of which are still boiling—the index of this book about the future of entertainment and knowledge has no entries for Google or YouTube. Makes you wonder what 2015 will look like, and actually reinforces Lasica’s argument that, with so much in flux, the last thing we need is some sort of clampdown. ( )

An engaging and informative discussion of technology, politics, entertainment and intellectual property. It suffers somewhat from being five years out of date in that many of the trends it sites as problematic have since resolved (iTunes going DRM free) while new issues have materialized (Amazon's restrictive DRM for eBooks). Still, Lasica's descriptions are interesting and accessible, I would love to read a similar discussion of recent wrinkles in the seemingly endless battle between copyright-owning corporations, and users of digital media.. ( )

I assumed Darknet would just be about the new breed of anonymous peer-to-peer filesharing services and the threat they pose to 'big media' producers. It is about that, covering film, TV, games, and (to a small extent), but the struggle between big media and the broad range of fans and enthusiasts is being fought on a much wider range of fronts - everything from using short clips in church sermons to modifications of games. The breadth of the book is surprising as well as interesting, though it does mean that the book lacks a bit of focus, and the conclusions it leaves you with are perhaps a little to abstract to be practically useful. ( )

Excellent introduction into the changes that digital media are bringing to hollywood. Although the writing is dry, the book keeps your interest by shifting back-and-forth between being a description of how electronic media distribution is changing hollywood and and investigation of the "darknet" of hackers creating illegal copies of films. ( )