film fortressThe Main Mouse at the Fabled Mouse House is mighty mad at all those bad, bad, evil nasty Internet pirates. Bad, immoral pirates! Bad, bad! Stealing with a keyboard is like stealing with a handgun, Mighty Mouse says! Bad, bad! At this week's Big Picture confab in New York, Mr. Mouse House could be heard saying such things as, “These Internet pirates try to hide behind some contrived New Age arguments about the Internet, but all they are really doing is trying to make a case for age-old thievery. When they hack a DVD and then distribute it on the Web, it is no different than if someone puts a quarter in a newspaper machine and then takes out all the papers, which of course, would be illegal and morally wrong.” Bad newspaper thieves, bad, bad! So tell me, please, Mr. Mouse, what you are doing to address consumer demand for your products (soon-to-be-services) online1 . What digital distribution mechanisms are you nurturing and supporting? “History has shown that one of the best deterrents to pirated product is providing legitimate product at appropriate prices,” Mighty said. That's true, Mighty. Again, what are you doing about it, besides filing lawsuits? Are you analyzing why all these nefarious rogue pirates are pirating? Are you asking yourself what these pirates are getting for free, that you're not giving them (and it ain't free content that most of them want)? Are you making it easier for them to pay for content over the Internet than it is to pirate it? Do you know what your customers really, really want? Because all of this piracy isn't perpetrated by a bunch of good for nothing thieves (though there will always be a few of those around, if not online, then breaking into your new Lincoln Navigator) - it is perpetrated by your customers, who are currently finding it easier to pirate content than it is to purchase it legitimately, mostly because you are too busy railing against piracy and filing lawsuits to ask them what it is that they want. What do they want? They want digital access to content, Mr. Mouse. They want your crystalline films available online so they can demand them at their leisure. They want some recognition of their consumptive desire, not just another restricted media sedative. And lucky you (unlike the music industry), you still have a choice: you can give it to them with simple, efficient purchasing mechanism attached - or they can take it through various DVD hacks. But the longer you wait and pontificate, the more used they'll get to getting it unpaid. The window to monetize digital distribution is shrinking, and when it's gone, no amount of lawyering will get it back. The sad irony here, of course, is that if you were actually attuned to your customers' desires, this whole piracy thing wouldn't be an issue in the first place. (In the appalling hypocrisy department, we hear from an ex-Disney employee that when he was working there, he was on the circulation list to receive photocopied subscription-based industry newsletters, a la digital mogul. Apparently, the list was eliminated only after a newsletter editor threatened a lawsuit. So keep talking morality and legality, Mr. Mouse - we enjoy hearing those flexible-integrity winds whistle.) Our “content protection” band-aid solution friends at Macrovision are at it again, waving the fear flag about yet another Macrovision-sponsored study, this one declaring that increasing penetration of CD-Recordable drives is having a big ol' impact on consumer copying of CD-ROMs. And again, this study would mean more if it didn't have Macrovision as a sponsor2. Haven't they heard of unbiased research? The MPAA Strikes Back! Well, strikes again, anyway. This time, their problem with the hacker online community 2600.com is that, while the site complied with the law by removing its DeCSS DVD descrambler, it's still throwing to hundreds of mirror sites around the globe with the hack happily on it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), once a collection of titanic visionaries early in the modern Net's history, has joined in the fray as well, claiming the usual freedom of speech arguments against the intellectual property arguments. Having the EFF on side can't hurt, and it's going to take a lot to persuade courts that merely having a link to a site makes a party responsible for what that site carries, whether or not it's clearly for the purposes of ripping off Hollywood. The next step, of course, would be to gag 2600.com entirely from discussing where DeCSS can be found, and by that time some other site should be able to pick up the code, which removes CSS scrambling from DVDs. But that's never gonna happen. As always, so much money and time. If the MPAA would, for example, invest heavily in a site that could stream movies for little money, something as yet lacking on the Web, save in the porn world, they could begin capitalizing on surfers tomorrow instead of buying lawyers new golf carts. But, as any reader of digital mogul knows, that's just not the way it's going to go. These organizations are determined to win or take everything down with them. They'll drag this, and dozens of other cases like it, out, all while folks online find new, better and probably free ways of getting movies on their desktops, for lack of any widely-available pay infrastructure. It's a pattern that's been set by MP3s with music, and as computer memory and broadband space become irrelevant, so too will panicking follow in the video world. But there is still time. Just remember that. Just because VCRs made it easy to tape everything doesn't mean there's no home video market, the DVD invasion aside. You've been warned. And quit shaking that stick at everyone while you're at it. A final word on the MPAA case. They're playing a dangerous game here, actually trying to outlaw specific hyperlinks, if you can believe it. The next step, as I said above, can only be speech. It's a pretty ironic move for the motion picture industry to try to pull, given the amount of trouble so many of their members have had over censorship issues since creation, and it most likely won't fly. If the courts did rule in their favor, forcing 2600.com to pull its links to DeCSS, it would be a very dark day for the Web indeed. And that's not over-dramatic. It's a fact. Hyperlinks are such a fundamental part of the Web; any assault on them should be seen as uniformly dangerous. The MPAA is comparing these links to links to kiddie porn, which is nonsense. They're just being lazy fear-mongers and we should all pop a bottle of fine champagne when they lose. Because there's no way anyone should ever be able to tell me, or you, what we can tell other people to talk, see or think about, even if it's discussion about things that are considered taboo. To censor or simply deny the existence of ANYTHING that does exist, a tactic that all big industry is so fond of, from MP3s on, is foolhardy. And it's going to cost them. |
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1. For a discussion of the transition to a service-based economy, please see “Are You Being Serviced?” in digital mogul 2-7, September, 1999. 2. In mogulwars, week of 3.3.00, we chastised Macrovision for yet another sponsored study. |
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