210 DEAR HACKER

210 DEAR HACKER

even laid the blame (quite properly) for the 1973 coup in Chile on a phone company called ITT. The phone companies were still getting away with all kinds of things, but now at least there was a centralized place where people could talk about it.

The new kids on the block were anything but exempt from this. We came down hard on COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone) and AOS (Alternate Operator Service) companies because of the widespread price gouging they were engaged in. There were exceptions, and we’d even hear directly from them on occasion. But the sad fact was that they were simply an exception to the very unpleasant rule.

As time marched on, we became well acquainted with other corporate dramas. One of the more interesting ones centered on an online provider named Prodigy that drew a lot of unwanted attention when it was suspected of intentionally copying users’ private data off of their personal computers. The accusations and defenses played out right there on the letters pages, culminating in a letter from Prodigy explaining it all from its side. It was good to know corporate America was paying attention.

But that also became a problem for us. Because corporate America was paying so much attention to us, they felt compelled to come after us in force in 2000. It’s not that we were doing things to them specifically; it’s that we represented a world they really didn’t care for. That’s why the Motion Picture Association of America, with the backing of every major Hollywood studio, the big American broadcasting networks, and even some professional sports leagues, took us to court for challenging their lock on new technology, specifically the emerging DVD market. We lost the case but we won the argument. Through this action, the world became aware of how the industry intended to keep control of technology out of the hands of the consumer. It was a black eye they have yet to recover from. It also segued very nicely into the battle the music industry was engaging in with the public. The Recording Industry Association of America also had no idea how to deal with new technology. Their only answer, like the MPAA, was to use the courtroom to desperately cling to the world that they were used to. That battle continues to this day.

The letters column was the place where “corporate logic” got to be laughed at and where the individual had the final say. We had an almost infinite supply of material showing the abuses and cluelessness, whether it involved privacy violations through consumer credit reports, technology being crippled in the interests of profit, mega- mergers, an unhealthy obsession with licensing everything under the sun, or even examples of the corporate mentality making its way into schools and homes. Probably the best part of all of this was getting letters from people inside the corporate world who saw what we were doing and absolutely loved it. Anonymously, of course.

T H E M A G I C O F T H E C O R P O R AT E W O R L D