Isn’t their finger getting cold?

I meant to post this the other day, but I was easily distra… Ooh shiny. Oh and in response to a friend of mine’s choice of esoteric titles, I challenge you to figure this one out. Ramble along with the rambling ramblebee.

The MPAA held a short talk to movie industry folks a few days ago talking about the steps they were taking stop piracy and eliminate the “Analog Hole.” Ars Technica, per usual, has a good article about it. The rapidly changing, difficult to use, and overly limiting technology changes being forced on consumers by the MPAA and others apparently has many of the content creators worried that these restrictions and difficulties are going to piss the consumers off and make them shy away from the new tech. I think they have good reason to worry. I would also expect them to have a lot of returns by people that buy new sets and equipment only to get it home and realize it won’t interface with any of the older stuff they have. It’s just not smart. Lets piss the people off that are buying the stuff. The funniest part is that the legal stuff won’t work very well, but the pirated content and non-crippled hardware will work great. Pirates must be loving this because it signals a lot more people will be looking for content that, to use an Apple phase, “Just Works.”

It reminds me of when George Lucas said he wasn’t going to release DVDs of Star Wars, because he was afraid of pirates. I personally think that it was a load of bunk cooked up by Lucas to drive up interest and therefore sales when the movies were finally released. I remember at the time that there was a petition that you could go to a web site, sign, and add a comment. I remember saying in the comment that the logic made no sense. The movies are already available for download, and at the time movies downloaded over the Internet looked much worse than DVD, because of the compression needed to shrink their size. The DVDs would therefore sell for quality reasons. I said that DVD had been out for a while and was growing quickly, and sales would far outweigh any piracy loses. Plus HDTV was coming, probably with a new video disc format as well. I said that if he sold SW now, he could sell an HD version to the same people in 5 years or so milking the cow twice. It turned out to be more like 8 years though. If he waited people would definitely seek out pirated copies to fill a need and then he might only be able to sell the movies one time. Logic said give it to them quick at a price that would flood the market with legitimate copies, and make pirating uneconomical.

The funniest part is that the legal content won’t work very well, but the pirated content and non-crippled hardware will work great. Pirates must love this because it signals a lot more people will be looking for content that, to use an Apple phrase, “Just Works.” The pirates will e able to do that, but the industry won’t.