Here it is– another great solution to the movie and music piracy problem!
It’s so mind-numbingly simple, why didn’t George W. Bush think of it?
The music industry and film industry should get together and create new recording medium. It wouldn’t be very hard at all– the technology is there. There are dozens of modifications they can make to existing technologies in order to create a new medium that belongs only to them. A special type of DVD with special coding at the start that prevents it from being played in any existing DVD player. You heard me right– but hang on. I’m not crazy. They can call it the “Super Media Content Diskie” or “SMCD”.
The music and film industries will own this standard and will not license it to anybody but themselves. They will contract out with factories to produce a new SMCD Player. The codes required for playing a SMCD will be hard- coded into a special chip, and thus almost impossible to copy or hack.
Then the music and film industries will start releasing all of their “content” only on these special disks. You won’t be able to buy a SMCD version of “Titanic” or “A Few Good Men” or a CD version of Bruce Springsteen or Britney Spears. You will only be able to buy it on SMCD, for which you will have to buy or lease the SMCD player.
And thus piracy will end. No digital copying will be possible. No digital quality copies of songs or movies on the internet, though, of course, some people might be able to make passable copies by recording, with microphones or video cameras, right off the SMCD player screen. (The music and film industries have made it plain that while they’ve always been concerned about copying in general, from any source, it is really the digital copying that gets their goats.)
Problem solved.
It will never happen.
It will never happen because the music and film industries know damn well that they don’t really want a world in which they have absolute ownership and control over their product because in a world like that they won’t make any money.
The reason is very simple and obvious. The consumer would never accept such a system. And some smart musicians and independent movie makers would immediately realize this and start to offer their products on popular media like DVDs and CD’s. And the music and film industries would lose their power and control over the entertainment market and quickly capitulate and that would be end of that.
No, wait— there’s a better solution! The music and film industries can try to seize control of the existing technologies– VCRs, computers, CD recorders– and try to shove their copy-protection schemes down our throats.
And that is what is happening. No one is required to issue movies or music on DVDs or CDs. They do it because they know damned well that the public adopted those media because they were widely accepted standards. They were widely accepted standards because they were broadly licensed to many manufacturers and PC makers. They were broadly licensed because they were sold to us as media, not content. The music and film industries benefit enormously from those widely accepted standards. And that is why, if they don’t like the consequences of a broad, open standard, they should get the hell off it and start producing their own proprietary media that nobody can copy. If they don’t like the SMCD idea, they can go back to vinyl. If they don’t like the internet, they go back to AM radio.
It would be the best thing that could ever happen to the entertainment industry. You would get loads of Third World bands and movie-makers who would be more than happy to give up some protections of their materials in exchange for wide distribution and exposure. They would issue their stuff on popular media formats and would soon blow Hollywood out of the mass market. You would see Demi Moore and Bruce Willis traveling to Bombay to make a new action flick, in English.
This is why Apple is tiny compared to Microsoft. This is why Betamax never caught on. This is why the Laser Disk never made it. This is why Advantix film by Kodak will never succeed. This is why rock’n’roll succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations (the AM battery-powered radio).
The truth is that music and film industries don’t really compete with each other anymore, and don’t want to have to compete with anyone else. They price their products in lock-step with each other, and hate having to actually produce and develop new talent while they can still pimp off their old established stars.
And when their control starts to diminish, because of computers and the internet, instead of becoming leaner or meaner or more competitive– which requires work and talent– they start stuffing your congressman’s pockets full of cash and get the DMCA passed. Now they want congress to require all electronic recording devices to give control over what and when something can be copied to these pimps at the RIAA and MPAA (Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Pictures Association of America).
This is an outrage. It’s one of the five or six biggest scandals of the last twenty years. The Music Industry has every right to negotiate contracts with radio stations and hardware makers about how and when they can put their content on their media. Why the hell should the government step in and make laws to govern– and penalize offenders– an arrangement that should absolutely be a contractual agreement between the record companies and radio stations?
Their control of the world-wide entertainment industry is threatened by any technology that gives more power and control and choice to the consumer. Most consumers wouldn’t give a damn about Britney Spears if it weren’t for the monopolistic control the music industry has over radio, print, and television, but most consumers don’t know that.
They would find out in a hurry if something prompted them to start looking elsewhere.
Yes, I know it’s a symbiotic relationship. New technologies are often created by content companies (or at least companies that have a content division, like Sony and Phillips) at least partly for the purpose of creating new markets for their products. Sort of what I described here as “SMCD”. But Phillips also licensed their technology to many companies to make recorders, players, and car decks. So it benefitted by the very open standard that most content providers now want to kill.
It doesn’t always work that way– few people buy a minidisc to listen to pre-recorded minidiscs– but Phillips certainly intended the cassette as a mass market music media. But the relationship is ambiguous. For example, the recording industry needs radio and television media exposure in order to sell their products. Yet they now want to charge Internet Radio broadcasters for playing their music! Here we have the RIAA acting like a bullying monopoly. Why, for heaven’s sake, won’t some competing independent producers come along and offer their goods for free play on the internet? They would, but the RIAA of America is doing everything it can to not let them. They want their policy wishes to be the law, instead of a contract between themselves and the radio stations, which is what it should be. Because if it was only a contractual arrangement, then competing music producers could offer a better deal!