What do you do if your current policy is failing to pay dividends? Change your strategy and try something new or up the current efforts to even more extreme levels? If you’re the MPAA you do the latter. Oh, and the change the name of what you’re doing as well. Like it matters.
Piracy Peaks
The people who run the big media companies clearly have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is, or at least was maybe a decade ago.
While piracy has always existed in some form or another, the popularizing of the Internet and the trend for file-sharing saw the “problem” get a little out of control as far as those in charge are concerned.
If It Don’t Work, Don’t Fix It?
The problem is, rather than embrace the new technology or even trying to fight piracy by offering innovative and fair alternative means of obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. they try to maintain the status quo. Even though the horse bolted a long time ago.
The latest attempt at locking the stable door is to change the terminology used from “anti-piracy” to “content protection” and to push even harder against illegal file-sharing. Because that will clearly work.
New Faces, Old Ideas
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the trade body of Hollywood whose mission it is to look out for the interests of the film studios under its protective wing. In terms of Internet piracy, it has several people assigned to the task of stopping it happening. And they have clearly been doing a fantastic job.
According to CNET, the studios have realized the current strategy isn’t working, and so the MPAA has let three people go, including Greg Goeckner, the MPAA’s general counsel.
Unfortunately, this isn’t in order to usher in a new way of doing things. Rather than a roster of proactive measures such as offering new, improved, and reasonably priced ways of offering movies to people over the Web, the same old reactive measures will be enforced. Just more harshly.
Conclusions
This latest chapter in the life of the MPAA is both sad buy hilarious at the same time. Changing the name of its efforts is absolutely pointless. And it still hasn’t figured out the undeniable truth that piracy is here to stay.
Some will argue its efforts have been mildly successful – with the victory against The Pirate Bay the most obvious example – but do those people seriously think for one moment that the people who used to use TPB have stopped downloading movies from the Web?
How long is it going to take for both the MPAA and the movie studios it serves to stop fighting a losing battle and look at how to take advantage of the very system and practice it is currently desperate to stop?
