Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

Balance Toppled

Who Owns the Bits?

Stealing Music

As an inmate serving a life sentence in a Florida prison, William Demler doesn’t have many creature comforts, and when the prison system took away his digital music collection, he sued.¹ Demler had purchased the only digital music player permitted in the prison and, over more than five years, filled it with more than $550 worth of music, at a cost of $1.70 a song. (Like much else in prisons, music costs more, and it can only be stored on proprietary players and in a prison-proprietary cloud.)

Prison authorities say they were just switching music-system vendors—and the new system, incompatible with the old, wouldn’t let users transfer previously purchased music. Instead, those who owned ...