Hollywood is a major pain in the ass. I can’t emphasize the disdain I have for the corporate side of Hollywood. Sure, I love movies, nothing beats watching a great movie on a sunday night, or any other night for that matter. But what pisses me off about Hollywood is the lengths they goto to remind you that you don’t own the piece of media you are about to watch on DVD or Blu-Ray.
It’s incredible. You just spent between $10 and $50 on your favourite movie, and one of the first things it tells you when you pop it into your machine, get comfy on the couch is that you can get fined $250,000 and spend up to 5 years in prison for showing this in public, a friend’s house or making a copy of something you bought and paid for with your hard-earned money.
As more and more of our movie watching experience is moving online, they are taking the same steps as the music industry, and we know how badly those guys screwed up. Luckily, at the time we had Steve Jobs to drag them into the future kicking and screaming. This time, I’m afraid we don’t have anyone strong enough to arm wrestle them into submission. I don’t think Tim Cook will do it, but if anyone was going to do it, I think it would be him or someone else at Apple just from the huge amount of pull they have now in the media business and when their Apple TV comes out next year, but I doubt it.
Online movies, in my opinion, will stay DRM’ed, be watchable in only a specialized program (i.e. iTunes) and won’t be transferable to other formats and you won’t even own the movie, just a license to watch it. That to me, is the most infuriating part about all of this, if I give you money for something, I own whatever it is that I receive in return, no questions about it, but that’s not the way it works these days. These big media behemoths go out of their way to lobby governments for copyright protections above and beyond what was already codified into law, despite the fact the existing framework worked perfectly fine, and that pirates wouldn’t be buyers if they did not have the option to download it illegally.
Now they are trying to release SOPA (The Stop Online Privacy Act) which pretty much leaves it up to the media holders, and the US government what constitutes privacy or not. In other words, if this bill passes then internet censorship will be legalized, and be placed in full control of the US government and these Hollywood types. Buh bye democracy. Luckily, SOPA just got rebuffed on the first go around but the next scheduled hearing is on the 21st Dec, so hopefully it will be defeated once and for all.
I just read this over at business insider, and I couldn’t agree more. This is disgusting and pathetic, but we bought it on ourselves.
This is the way Hollywood should handle themselves. C. K. Lewis recently did his own show, released it online DRM-free, and charged only $5 for it (as opposed to the usual $20 that a corporation would), and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. When there is very little difference in effort between buying the legitimate copy that will benefit the artist, and downloading it free, then consumers generally tend to pay the money. What Hollywood does is treat everyone as an illegal downloader, DRM the crap out of it all, remind you they will try to put you in jail if you violate the terms of service, and charge you a ridiclous price to boot, with the majority of the profit going to the studio itself instead of to the artists. And they call illegal downloaders thiefs!
Whatever happens to the future of the industry, they bought it on themselves, and I will happily say, suck it!
This news article is just the icing on the cake. Hollywood IP addresses used to download via bittorrent movies and tv shows illegally. So Hollywood, please come meet us in the future, or you might get teased for being that stupid kid still playing his Atari while the rest of us talk to Siri, watch blu-rays on our Playstation 3s. They are a bunch of dinosaurs, and not the cool kind.
Filed under: Economics, Governance, Politics, Tech
