Today's digital technologies make repurposing all kinds of media much easier, and for all sorts of purposes, too -- promotional, artistic, even duplicitous ones. Consider the political snafu over the doctored photo that got zapped around the Internet in February, purporting to show Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a presidential hopeful, sitting beside Jane Fonda at a 1971 rally against the Vietnam War. It took a few days for the media to realize the hoax -- that Hanoi Jane had been dropped into the vintage photo courtesy of an image editor.
The Kerry photo and "The Grey Album" dust-ups hint at bigger battles to come from a generation getting its hands on emerging technology that makes it a snap to sample and blend published photos with recorded music, digital books, live TV broadcasts and even -- can this be stopped? -- Hollywood's prized blockbuster films.
It is easy for me to envision all kinds of nefarious video hoaxes roiling politics and Hollywood, especially since lately I've also been testing a Gateway computer running Microsoft Corp.'s Media Center Edition operating system. For those unfamiliar with this son-of-Tivo technology, Microsoft's Media Center software runs on PCs equipped with TV tuners, allowing you to record TV shows to the computer's hard drive with the click of a remote control. You can also burn your recorded shows to DVDs in case you want to play them later on a TV or portable DVD player.
I happened to have recorded the Super Bowl halftime show while I was testing the Media Center PC, and it's easy for me to imagine creative ways to repurpose those few seconds of video.
My experiments have convinced me it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They'll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally -- much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.
Record companies and Hollywood studios may not willingly cede control over how future fans watch stars perform, but it's hard to imagine how they could lock down digital video so tightly that clever youngsters won't eventually find ways around them. Already, the Internet abounds with freely available software that lets consumers circumvent copy-protection systems used on commercial DVD movies and concerts.
But as with music, it's also possible that the rip-and-mix generation will actually wind up buying more recorded video than before, all the better to fuel their digital creativity.
