MPAA at SXSW

I hadn't seen this before, but J.D. Lasica moderated a panel discussion ostensibly on "The Future of Darknets" at SXSW.  Apparently the panel was a bit derailed by audience members peppering MPAA rep Kori Richards with questions.  Derek Powazek of Just of Thought some, uh, thoughts about the panel.  One question Derek mentions was the complaint of some guy who moved to the UK (from the US, I guess) where all his (preumably Region-1 coded) DVDs no longer worked.  Kori Richards' Mark Ishikawa's (from BayTSP) response was that this was a restriction the guy agreed to when he bought the DVD.  If that really was her his response (and I have yet to hear the whole panel), I wonder just what contract she's talking about.  The only thing most people sign when they buy a DVD is a credit card slip -- no contract involved.  And while most DVD helpfully include a note on the outside of the box indicating what region they're coded for, there's no explanation of what that means.  There's no shrinkwrap license, no clickwrap license.  Oh, and if you open a DVD, most places won't let you return it.  That's some "contract."  I don't think contracts work that way, but just in case, how about this?  Note to MPAA [and/or BayTSP]: In exchange for my purchasing a DVD from any of your members[/clients], you agree to give me a zillion kajillion dollars.  And a pony.  Do you disagree?  No?  Great.  I'll have my people call your people to arrange pick-up.

[Update: Having listened to the whole panel, it sounds like the one suggesting that consumers agreed by contract to any restrictions imposed by DRM was not Kori Richards, but rather, Mark Ishikawa, of BayTSP -- a company that investigates net piracy for the content industries.  Richards may have made the same point in there somewhere, but there was a lot of cross-talk, and I didn't hear it.  The basic point still stands though -- only now I think Mark owes me a pony.

What I did hear Richards say was that DRM restrictions are intended to stop pirates, not ordinary consumers.  And I'm not sure that's true.  As Ian Clarke pointed out in the panel, certainly DRM doesn't actually stop hard-core piracy, since it's easy for a techie to break the DRM on DVDs, encrypted music files, etc.  DRM does tend to make it harder for the ordinary consumer to use or copy content.  And MPAA seems to intend DRM to target this kind of casual use or copying.  They understand they can't stop piracy through DRM, but they think that DRM can reduce the amount of casual "piracy" by ordinary users.  So, for example, they may speculate that without DRM on DVDs, 20% of people might rip DVDs and post copyrighted video files online instead of half that many now.  (I'm making those numbers up.  According to a Pew survey last year, about a quarter of net users say they "sometimes share" movie, music, image, or game files online, and that includes sharing of non-infringing content, and sharing on non-P2P networks.)  The problem from a consumer perspective is that the DRM prevents all sorts of uses by ordinary users that are not piracy -- things like putting video on your iPod or on a laptop for a business trip, or using a DVD you bought in one country on a player from another one.  So far, though, these annoyances for consumers are not problems for MPAA -- to the contrary, they are the icing on the cake for MPAA's members, as they force people to buy multiple copies of the same content or limit the ability of DVD buyers to avoid content the studios want consumers to see (like FBI warnings).  So Richard's statement about what DRM is intended to prevent is, at best, only part of the story.]

Comments

[Kevin Smokler]

Hilarious! I was there. I asked a question. And I actually felt sorry for this woman.