For years, Hollywood folks have claimed that the tech industry is working against them, building all of these new technologies like music players, digital video recorders and file sharing networks that they believe are designed to destroy their business.
What they've failed to realize is that these aren't attempts to destroy Hollywood at all, but to rejuvenate it by making it easier for people to consume content in the way that they most enjoy.
It's why almost every entertainment technology invention has ended up helping, not hurting, the industry -- even as the industry tried to stop each and every one (examples: player pianos, radio and the VCR).
However, since the entertainment folks swear that techies are working against them, they've decided to take the tech into their own hands.
The six leading Hollywood studios are setting up "MovieLabs" a research consortium designed to create all this anti-copying technology that all of us techies have been hiding from the entertainment industry all this time.
Apparently, our devious plan to not tell the industry how to stop copying will be foiled now!
Not that they're going to figure this out for quite some time, but the simple fact is that some amount of copying is going to happen no matter what. Technology can not, and will not, stop it.
Any attempt to do so is a waste of money (in this case, $30 million for the first two years).
The industry would be much better off taking that $30 million and spending it on creative new ways to embrace what people are doing with their content. Of course, for the movie industry, $30 million is a tiny fraction of a bad movie -- so they'll just let it go to waste on this new project and not think too much about it.
Nice to see Hollywoods intelligent reaction- The Technologists are al Hxx0rz!!!, summon the copyright league
Photography Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
I understand why the RIAA is wasting their time combating music piracy, as it exposes the music industry for the crooks they are, but I'm not sure why the MPAA is bothering with it. They have only seen dramatic increases in sales since file sharing of movies began, do they figure that there are extra profits out there that they can make with this? Movie downloading will never be mainstream and even if it was, it will never replace DVD's and their successors.
