DVDs are just the latest in a long
line of recordable media which have been at the centre
of battles between those who want the right to copy
and those who don’t.
Huw
Collingbourne feels a distinct sense of déjà vu.
Having bought a movie on a DVD you may
consider that you have a perfect right to make a backup
copy for safe keeping. Unfortunately for the honest
user there are also plenty of people with more nefarious
plans. In short, there is a pretty brisk trade
in pirated DVDs. Pirated copying is blatant. It is often
quite easy to find obviously pirated DVD movies for sale
on Internet trading sites such as EBay. No wonder then
that the movie distributors go to some lengths to protect
their copyright by encrypting the video files so that
they can’t
be copied.
Years ago, software manufacturers used to do much the
same thing. Popular programs such as Lotus
1-2-3 and
dBase used various types of protection
to prevent users making copies. But no sooner had some
new type of copy protection been developed by one company
than some other company would release a tool to crack
it. In the ‘80s, a company called Central Point
Software made a good living from a suite of copy-protection-cracking
tools called Copy-II-PC. So what happened
to Central Point Software? Were they run out of town
like the unprincipled blagards they were? Nope, far
from it. They were bought up by that eminently respectable
company Symantec. Mind you, by that time, Lotus 1-2-3-
and the rest had given up the copy protection battle.
They were forced to accept that software buyers didn’t
like copy protection and so, giving way to market pressure,
they removed it. The movie industry has yet to find some
similar accommodation with DVD buyers.
In more recent times, we’ve seen battles to prevent
online sharing of audio by ‘rogue’ services
such as Napster. Initially the record
industry wanted to shut down these services and prevent
people from sharing audio. It quickly became apparent
that this was not a realistic possibility. So, on the
basis that “if
you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’,” the
rogues were legitimised. They were, you might say, brought
out of the cold and into the comfortable warmth of the
corporate dining room. The relaunched Napster
2.0 now
sells songs to bring in income for large and small record
labels. Originally Napster was condemned by the record
companies for supplying tracks which people could burn
onto a CD instead of buying CDs from a record shop. By
a delicious irony, the new Napster is owned by Roxio
- a company that specialises in CD (and DVD) burning
software.
Perhaps the way forward for the movie industry is to
stop selling their DVD products at such ludicrously high
prices. The prices in Europe, for example, are usually
much higher than in the USA and ‘region coding’ on
the DVDs prevents American disks from being played on
DVD players sold in other countries. Well, in theory
at any rate. These days, ‘region free’ DVD
players are readily available and cheap to buy, making
region coding pretty damn' pointless.
Instead of fighting a losing battle against the will
of the consumers (who, not surprisingly like their DVDs
to be cheap rather than expensive), DVD distributors
are going to have to stop being so greedy. High prices
are music to the DVD pirates' ears. New copy protection
methods are not the answer to the problem.
Some major players in the industry are now starting
to realise that it makes no sense to fight against consumer
demand. Instead, they should aim to satisfy that demand.
Sony has recently announced its plans to supply films
for digital download in an attempt to do for movies what
Apple’s iTunes has done for music.
The recent trend in low cost DVD rentals is another step
towards a solution. The plain fact of the matter is that,
if movies are readily available for rental or download
at a reasonable price, the demand for pirated DVDs will
dwindle. After all, why should anyone pay
for an illegal copy of a movie when they can get a legal
one for a similar price?
When view-on-demand over the Internet becomes a reality
for large numbers of people, that again may be another
nail in the coffin of the pirate DVD industry. By that
time, maybe buying and burning videos over the Internet
will become a legitimate business rather than a criminal
activity.
