A Half-Century Search Ends for $1.99 and 2 Gigabytes

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Lauren Weinstein [lauren () vortex com]
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 8:53 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: A Half-Century Search Ends for $1.99 and 2 Gigabytes

               A Half-Century Search Ends for $1.99 and 2 Gigabytes

                   http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000409.html


Greetings.  Once upon a time many years ago -- something on the
order of 45 years or so I estimate, I was taken as a young child to
a number of film screenings as part of a series at UCLA's famed
Royce Hall.  The Internet -- and affordable bandwidth -- have in the
last few hours closed a circle for me that has been gaping open all
these many years since those screenings.

One of the films I saw back then at UCLA -- "The 5000 Fingers of
Dr. T" -- so disturbed me at the time that we had to leave the screening
in the middle.  Years later I rediscovered this amazing work, and
have shown it a number of times at conferences and film festivals.
Amusingly, the scene that so upset me as a child is so remarkable in
context that it routinely gets unsolicited applause from audiences!

But "Dr. T" is comparatively well known now to cult film fans at
least.  Another of the films in that UCLA series -- the 1953 French
animation "The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird" -- remains much
more obscure.  I only saw it theatrically at that one Royce Hall
screening, and then once more a couple of years later when it was
serialized on commercial television.  Then -- poof! -- it
essentially vanished.

For a number of reasons, perhaps partly the imaginative and
fantastic technology portrayed, "Wonderbird" -- particularly a few
specific scenes -- has remained bouncing around in my head for all
these years.  I would occasionally try to locate a print, even at
one point decades later reaching the person at UCLA who remembered
it from the original film series, but I never could lay my hands on
a watchable copy.

This almost half-century quest ended earlier today.  After a new
round of Google searches, I found a relatively beautiful and
apparently legitimate print available for immediate DVD burning
and/or local viewing -- the cost all of $1.99 for a 2 GB download
(in fact, simply streaming the film is free).  For the curious,
here's the link:

    http://tinyurl.com/6lptct

As I watched the lights blinking an a nearby router while the film
downloaded in about half an hour, I found myself wondering if I'd
have been so immediately willing to make the purchase if I knew that
the 2 GB involved was going to eat up a significant proportion of an
Internet usage bandwidth cap.  After a search this long I probably
would have gone ahead anyway, but certainly a cap would be a major
impediment to all manner of other potential downloads of similarly
legal and wondrous content.

Whether we're talking about 5 GB or 250 GB a month, it's clear that
bandwidth caps will inevitably have the psychological effect of
suppressing Internet media downloads.  As the entire video
entertainment complex moves to high definition, such negative
impacts will be ever more heavily felt.  Internet subscribers will
feel increasingly pressured to purchase "non-metered" content from
their own ISPs rather than purchase from outside sources where the
ISP bandwidth meter is running in addition to the cost of the
content itself.

I relate this saga since we tend to think about these sorts of
issues in theoretical rather than concrete terms most of the time.
But sitting here spinning on the hard drive a couple of feet from me
is a real world example of memories validated and a quest begun in
childhood -- however trivial it may seem to some observers --
finally ended in success, thanks to a forward-thinking content
supplier and the typical high quality of Google Search.

It would be unfortunate indeed if unreasonable, anti-competitive
bandwidth limitations serve to smother the potential for the
Internet to provide the vast range of nearly infinite content that
doesn't fit the profiles of the telephone and cable company ISPs.

Here's hoping that we'll all be permitted to find -- and can afford
to download -- our own Internet "Wonderbirds" and memories, and that
our bytes and neurons won't be held hostage by those parties who
view a truly open and neutral Internet as a threat, instead of as a
treasure.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
   - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com



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