Slyck Interviews the MPAA

An anonymous reader writes "P2P community and news source, Slyck, interviewed vice president Dean Garfield of the MPAA. Topics covered range from the MPAA's thoughts on BitTorrent, Limewire and DRM. Garfield acknowledges that they do not have much of a grip on the file-sharing world as they would like to believe."

Grip on the filesharing world?

[TheUncleD]

It's hard to have a grip on anything p2p these days, since most p2p users have more than a single client depending on their interests/needs. Sometimes, bit-torrents come in handy, other times people resort to eMule/limewire and the various sorts of softwares available. Big deal. Kazaa really did it best when they got into the market and spread like wildfire before the competition. Their use of advertising helped give them a profit and in turn, feed back into making them a stronger company. And now with skype, what a landslide that was... The future of p2p is going to be up to the communities of people and their needs. It's not enforcable like it once was, shutting down warez servers one at time like the old-days. It's everyone and everywhere these days and gripping the market as a whole is next to impossible. Good luck

Re:A demonstration of the problem...

[91degrees]

Heavy Goods vehicles in Europe are required to have a speed limiter fitted that limits them to 56mph. A lot of truckers are strongly opposed to these since they consider them to fail to solve the problem they are designed to prevent (accidents through speeding), and prevent any benefits that legitimately driving over this speed will offer. These are pretty much the same problems we have with DRM.

Personally, I'd be quite happy with DRM that told me how many times I'd copied something, what generation copy it is, and any other information that may be relevent.

Re:the real issue is...

[click2005]

"We are also concerned with making sure we are (sic) understand and make use of the latest technological advances"

I think that is the most important thing said in the whole article.

MP3s & P2P has caused them to change tactics slightly but everything is still heading exactly where they want things to go, they just need to wait a few years.

What will things be like then?

1. DVDng players will be even more restrictive than they are now, possibly only allowing a limited number of plays on certain discs. They'll need internet connections for billing, license & firmware updates.
2. The Trusted Computing version of Windows will only run approved hardware&software and anything else loaded/detected will prevent media apps from working properly. Import restrictions will be placed on non-secure hardware.
3. Tivos & PVRs will only record what broadcasters want you to record and auto-delete shows after a short time 48hrs.
4. DVDs will be sold will variable licenses. Either a basic license which allows 1 or 2 plays or a more expensive license with more 'free' plays.
5. Distributable digital media will be centrally stored on a MediaCenter WinPC. Every time a song/movie is 'transferred' to another device its no longer available from the MC PC without paying extra. If 2 songs from the same album are listened to at the same time, you'll get billed extra.

The politicians there are prepared to pass whatever laws the media companies want. Hardware manufacturers will be required to TC harden all their devices or get locked out of future windows/apple releases.

The european politicians are just as bribe-able as in the states so they'll do the same.

India will replace the east as the main source of cheaper electronics goods until china/japan/taiwan agree to make TC hardware. This will make non-TC hardware and devices harder to obtain and much more expensive.

The MPAA/RIAA are just waiting. They never wanted to release digital media until the market was ready for them.
Its not ready yet but soon.

Bad movies, bad remakes, bad ideas

[digitaldc]

"We want to tell stories about fantasmigorical pirates not spend much of our resources on fighting piracy. It should come as no surprise to you that every studio is committed to making movies and television shows that people love and are willing to see. Some times we are successful, but when we are it is not from a lack of trying. No one gets up in the morning and says today 'I am going to make a really bad movie.'"

They say are committed to making movies and television shows that people love and are willing to see, but usually they have run out of ideas and just remake the television shows into movies that will make money.

For example, which one of these bombs would you say was a good idea?
The Dukes of Hazzard?
Starsky and Hutch?
Fat Albert?
Lost in Space?
The Mod Squad?
Scooby Doo?


I was not willing to see any of them, but I guess Hollywood is in a creativity crisis and the MPAA is not helping.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says I want to make a bad movie, but they DO get up and say I want to make a movie that will make a reasonable profit regardless of the insipid and tedious script.

Re:A demonstration of the problem...

[iamwahoo2]

Interesting thought:

As punishment for the Sony Rootkit, all Sony Media employees and employees responsible for creating the rootkit should have speed monitoring devices attached to all of their vehicles. If they speed, they get mailed a ticket. They can also have all thier phone and email conversations recorded and available on the internet to the public. If they are in such a hurry to live in an Orwellian society, I say, let them have a little taste of it.

Re:sigh

[m50d]

But the real difference is that speeding is often an issue of life and death, both for the driver and for everyone else on the road. Piracy isn't even remotely analogous. Even if the industry could prove that piracy is hurting them so much, the "hurt" here is loss of profit. I apologize for not sympathizing with your pain, my rich corporate friend.

I think his analogy is dead on. The kind of DRM the customer would be happy with is that which tells you whether your copy is "genuine", but no-one else. With luck that could stop commercial piracy as much as is possible, but not harm normal customers; at the very least it would let buyers be more informed.

Re:the real issue is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait till next year when they expect you to pay for it again, or their subscription lapses and they 'lose' all the music they downloaded. The RIAA will have helped push the piece up buy then to so you'll probably be paying $120. -- No one is getting me to rent music.

Sorry Mr. Garfield

[AnyThingButWindows]

but I own a computer repair store in a town of about 5,000. I am the only one. I do not support DRM or anything with 'Trusted Computing', and NEVER will, for that matter. When someone asks what they should use to get music, I point them to Limewire. I preload Limewire, FireFox, AVG, Nero OEM, and Ad-Aware, on all the PCs I sell. I put the burdon of DRM reactions on the MPAA, RIAA, and those who sell broken music that violates my customer's fair use rights. When a customer has a Sony rootkit problem, I fix the problem, then give them Sony's number for their corporate office, and the number of a good lawyer. If a customer has music with DRM attached to it, I have tools to strip the DRM from the songs, then re-encode them into mp3 format. I now have 3/4ths of the town's file sharers on limewire, and am going strong. I don't put ANYTHING on a customers computer that restricts what they can, and cannot do with THEIR OWN machine. Untill the entertainment industry gets their act together, and stops infecting people's private property with viruses, and spyware, lobbying our elected officials, and continued cyber-terrorist activity, I will continue to recommend Limewire, and fight them with what resources, and influence I have. And at the moment Mr. Garfield, my business is expanding, fast, and vastly increasing.

NEWS FLASH

[what_the_frell]

Hackers and the user community are always one step ahead of the RIAA and MPAA.

Clean their own house.

[schlick]

In the course of the interview the issue of watermarking was discussed. This allows an audit trail leading back to the source of every copy that is made of media. Interestingly, Dean said that he wasn't keen to adopt any system that would give them an incentive to track down people and seek to take legal action against them.

This tells me that they don't want to persue the people in the industry who are actually leaking the content. They don't want to litigate against thier own. They'll sue a little girl, but not some lacky that works in the industry. You'd think that they'd be interested in at least tracking the propagation path. Hell I'd be interested in that.

On a different note, I'm a movie junky. When a new movie that I really want to see I want to see it on a big screen with an awesome sound system, with my redvines, popcorn, and cherry coke. My roommate actually got a pre release of Ep.1 and I refused to watch it on his 21" computer monitor at VCD quality. It would ruin the experience.

What I don't like it the whole "event" marketers try to create (one of my bigest pet peeves about Apple as well). When it is ready to release, f*cking release it!!! The artificial scarcity only makes me annoyed, sometimes pissed off enough to hold out buying it, sometimes violate copywrite as a means of flipping them the bird. Don't treat your customers like imbeciles (even if they are).