Despite my copyright politics, I actually have a great sympathy for the efforts by authors and musicians to control how their work is first released. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think there’s a difference between unpublished and published, and I like that part of the artistry can be about crafting that first moment. Still, I wanted to point out a comment from Salon blog-umnist Farhad Manjoo at Machinist (a terrific blog that’s become my second click when I go online, after Salon) about how the multiple leaks of the new Harry Potter book demonstrate that the information environment has forever changed, and that security measures (like DRM) simply cannot cope. Despite millions of dollars of extraordinary security measures to protect the higly-anticipated final installment, including satellite tracking of delivery trucks, leaks of the final book’s major plot points, and even digital photos of each page, have surfaced online. Again, fans are largely fuming about the leaks, and I can appreciate it, though Manjoo makes some very compelling points about how this is unlikely to hurt Rowling or Scholastic financially.

But then he delivers the sad truth:

Rowling intended her story to be released a certain way. She wanted it to come out on July 21, she wanted it to come out on paper (and audiobook), she wanted people to delight, together and simultaneously, to the climax of a tale they’ve been waiting a decade to read. The artist, in other words, expected a certain fate for her art…

So let me try to say this kindly, hopefully without causing any offense: What the author wants is not, anymore, all that will happen. Today, artists — even those as powerful as J.K. Rowling — can’t reasonably expect such dominion over their art. A well-laid plan is dashed by some guy with a camera and a lot of time on his hands, and that’s that. And mostly this loss of control is a good thing, for fans as well as for artists. Rowling and her wizard have, after all, benefited tremendously from the Internet; through fan fiction and unending online discussion, creative Pottermaniacs have immeasurably deepened and intensified her work, keeping it thriving between releases.

Much of the discussion about the internet and copyright and peer-to-peer and control mechanisms have been about the economics (are sales going down? do people try new works and then buy them?) and the law (should re-distribution be illegal? Is copyright working in this altered environment?). But I think some of the most interesting questions are going to be about the cultural questions. How will the experience of entertiainment change? Will we have these blockbuster moments, where many of us gather at the same time for a carefully crafted mega-experience? If not, is that good or bad? How will the relationship between the original and the secondary material (parodies, sequels, reviews, criticisms) change, perhaps in ways that fundamentally change what “the” and “original” mean? And how will artists and writers innovate in this new environment, conjuring up new ways to thrill people never before possible in the bottlenecked, mass-produced, blockbuster version of culture we’ve had for the last century or so?

Is Harry Potter the last blockbuster? Probably not. We’ve been wondering about the death of the mass culture experience for a long time now, long before the Internet, as film attendance declined in the 60s and 70s, the three television networks become hundreds, the VCR allowed time-shifting, and the terrain of popular music fractured into dozens of sub-genres. But I do wonder if the pop culture phenomena of the near future will have very different contours, in part because of the power to circulate and recreate that is so taking advantage of digital technology and the Internet.