The MPAA has had a slight change of focus and now wants to educate instead of irritate with a central website to help people find legal downloads, but is it doomed to fail?
This is an attempt to draw people away from the piracy realm. While this seems like a step in the right direction the issues of excessive DRM and over-pricing will likely make it an ineffective strategy. People will continue to be drawn to piracy when it offers a better service than the legal alternative.
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the organization charged with protecting the rights of movie studios in the US, and seeing as that’s where Hollywood is, that’s a pretty large chunk of the worldwide movie industry.
Fight Or Promote?
Since the emergence of the Internet as a viable source for obtaining copies of movies, a large part of the MPAA’s fight has been online, promoting legal sources of movie downloads, while trying to inhibit illegal sources.
Attack on illegal sources such as torrents and peer-to-peer clients has included legal shut-downs, filtering college campuses, and that whole sorry TorrentSpy mess.
Now, rather than going after what it deems the bad guys, the MPAA has decided to instead focus on promoting the legal destinations for movie downloads. To that end, it is in the process of setting up a one stop shop for legal sources such as Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes, and others.
Directory Website
According to Variety the as-yet unnamed website will work as a kind of directory, with links to external sources allowing consumers to purchase cinema tickets, buy or rent DVDs, and download copies of the movie to their PC. This is a bit like what LocateTV.com is already doing.
All of the major studios are thought to be behind the initiative, which is being done in an effort to those people who can’t quite determine legal and illegal sources for movies on the Web.
While you may be thinking that those people surely don’t exist, there are more people venturing online now than ever before, and not all of them will be au fait with the actual difference between BitTorrent and iTunes.
In fact there are a lot of paid torrent and movie download services which provide pirated versions of movies, and the less tech savvy among us would not be able to tell if the content is pirated or not, especially when these paid sites claim to be legal.
A Noble Cause… At Last
This is the kind of thing the MPAA should have been doing a long time ago, working with new technology to rise up to consumer demand, rather than trying to fight it.
While I think piracy will always exist, and there will always be an illegal trade in movies, and TV content, the more legitimate destinations there are on the Web, the less chance there is of it becoming an out of control problem.
A Wasted Effort?
Unfortunately with legal video downloads coming with more DRM and more restrictions than a VCR, as well as having higher costs than renting or buying a tangible DVD, the TV and movie industry is still way off meeting consumer demands.
So while this is a step in the right direction its a pointless step if these other issues are not addressed.
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