Dee ARRR! Emm.
Over at the Beeb, some of “the leading figures from the global film industry” decided to take a few questions. The Beeb went through the process of choosing the eight best questions from the hundreds submitted and then asked for the answers.
Some very good questions got asked. Almost none got good answers. For the most part the answers conflicted (check out Lavinia Carey’s and John Fithian’s answers to question one), hemmed and hawed their way around the question (Dan Glickman’s in-no-way-to-the-point answer to question five), or regurgitated standard industry rhetoric (both Carey’s and Glickman’s responses to question four). Very little new ground was covered. But two answers in particular caught my attention.
First, in the category of “Completely Missed the Point” we can see question six and its answer from Dan Glickman of everybody’s second favorite consumer-crushing organization, the MPAA. (Sorry about the “second,” guys – the RIAA still tops the list. You’ll have to try harder next year.)
Why am I made to sit through fluff at the start of DVDs I bought with no option to skip it? The most insulting is the “Buy movies don’t download them” one. I did buy the movie, and now I’m being made to sit through a video aimed at people who don’t buy their movies! Stephen Moore, Lisburn, UK
Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America:
On some DVDs, there are trailers to educate and encourage people not to steal copyrights. While not everyone who buys or rents a DVD is going to commit acts of piracy, we are trying to spread a message.
Protecting movie copyrights is vital to this industry and we hope that we can reach some people and that others will fast forward through these announcements and realise we are not focusing on them.
I’m fairly certain that the Anvil & Sprocket has covered this on our podcast, but let’s point out the significant, glaring oversight in Glickman’s answer that proves he wasn’t really paying attention to the question. Hint: It’s in the second paragraph.
”...we hope that we can reach some people and that others will fast forward through these announcements and realise we are not focusing on them.”
Okay. First of all, when my High School biology teacher stood up at the front of the classroom and announced that pinning the dissected frogs to her desk chair was not funny, that was not focused on me. I was sleeping comfortably at my desk when that went down, yo (which kind of explains my biology grade, now that I think about it). Even so, I sat through the announcement with no way of skipping it.
Kind of like what Stephen Moore describes. Hey! We have a tangent that actually turned out to be connected. Now if I can just slip my “setting the furniture on fire” story into a discussion on the Pentagon, we’ll be set.
See, Glickman misses the point that the messages cannot be skipped. In one episode of our podcast, you can hear John waxing eloquent about DVD’s that decide for you what you should be required to watch before you can see the movie. You’ve probably noticed by now that some of the movies you pop into your player not only require you to sit through to the FBI warning (sometimes in more than one language), but also require you to sit through previews and the occasional commercial. Hitting the “Menu” button only causes your screen to pop up either an icon of a disc with a circle and slash through it in the corner (not cool) or a variation of the text “That operation is not permitted by this disc” to be superimposed over the playing image (even less cool).
If Glickman hopes that some people will just fast-forward through these announcements and realize they’re not focused on honest users, then maybe the film industry should stop deciding what we can and can’t scan through on our own DVD’s. How’s that for an idea?
Second, there’s the patently offensive answer to question seven. All three answers are bad, and all three are standard industry rhetoric – but Lavinia Carey’s response is particularly heinous.
Seeing as only one clever hacker is needed for films to appear on P2P networks, is it fair to say that digital rights management (DRM) does not prevent or even reduce piracy? If that’s not fair to say, can you tell us of a single instance in which DRM has prevented a copyrighted film from appearing on these networks? Dave Morris, Oxford, UK
Lavinia Carey, British Video Association:
Digital rights management comes in all shapes and sizes. DRMs are becoming increasingly sophisticated and effective as a means of enabling consumers to access and use audiovisual content in a wider variety of ways that suit their tastes and habits. Watch out for the next generation of high definition discs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and content protection codes will be updated on a regular basis.
Blink. Blink.
Carey, did you just suggest that constantly-shifting DRM is the best selling point of both HD-DVD and Blu-ray? I mean, did you honestly just say that consumers should be happy to adopt a format that will continually limit what they can do with their legitimate purchases? Have you considered the possibility that you may, actually, be high?
Okay – first, tap-dance around the issue. Carey can’t provide a single instance in which DRM has been truly effective. At least Curt Marvis takes the opportunity to plug his own service, pointing out that to his knowledge MovieNow files never wind up on P2P. But Carey just chooses to ignore that segment of the question.
Instead, Carey asks us to swallow the notion that DRM is an “enabling” tool. This despite the fact that the more sophisticated among us are well aware that mixing twenty gallons of strawberry ice cream with five gallons of crap only results in twenty-five gallons of crap. To accept for even a moment that DRM is in any way a “means of enabling consumers to access and use audiovisual content in a wider variety of ways that suit their tastes and habits,” one has to completely discard any concept of how consumers view the material they buy – as well as any known definition of “a wider variety.”
Cory Doctorow put it nicely in his introduction to Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. (free to download at craphound.com)
No customer wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, “Damn, I wish there was a way to do less with my books, movies and music.�
Or, to borrow an image from the DRM speech he gave to Microsoft, we don’t want a Sony record player that can only play Sony records and then only for one specific user. We want a record player that will play any damn record that anybody puts on.
I don’t want to be told that the CD I just purchased has to be played on a specific kind of CD player – that it won’t work in my car stereo or in my CD-ROM drive. I certainly don’t want to be told that it can’t play on my iPod. For that matter, I don’t want to be told that the DVD I just purchased legitimately cannot be copied to my hard drive so that I can watch it while wearing earphones – a feature my television lacks – or that I can’t rip it to the next generation of iPods. I bought the movie. I want to be able to play the damn movie.
I can’t say that I’m surprised, but I think I’m perfectly within my rights to be disappointed. The BBC presented this handful of executives with a shot to speak clearly to the consumers – to present their own visions of some of the important issues regarding how the entertainment industry sees its consumers. They had an opportunity to treat their questioners with respect and talk directly to their concerns. Instead, what they revealed is that they see their consumers as thieves, morons, and petulant children.
And that, dear consumer, is who we’re giving our money to.