Stitch and Split invites you to take a look at the future of digital television, not from the utopian everything-is-possible-the-world-is-your-oyster sales strategy, nor from the purely artistic angle. But, what if Hollywood decides what you watch, when you watch it and how many times? If it determines the size and form of your family? But what is a family? What if you, as a public, no longer have free choice to decide what you want to watch when, even if the bills have been paid? Sciencefiction, you say? This sciencefiction writer opens up your eyes and sets your telly on the screen of the future.

Lecture
Don’t let Hollywood hijack your rights
Cory Doctorow

American entertainment companies say they’re fighting piracy, but they’re going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital-television restircitons proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all DTV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It’s not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for DTV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks — and you shouldn’t take it lying down!

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer and a contributor to the famous weblog boing boing. Until very recently, he was the European representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international organization battling to protect the rights of web surfers everywhere. Doctorow’s novels are available under a creative commons licence. They examine wireless societies, life in Disney World, and how you can survive in a non-scarcity economy.

Screening
The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility
by Walter Benjamin as told to Keith Sanborn , 1996, 3’20’’.

Stitch and Split
MuHKA
Boingboing
Craphound