Derek Powazek reports from a panel at SXSW where a representative from the MPAA faced down an audience of geeks who called her to account for the MPAA's war on its customers and on technology; the session is also available as an MP3. It's typical that the MPAA only sends speakers to events where they're not likely to face an audience who knows how to call bullshit on their talking-points, so this is a rare and delicious debate, in which the MPAA rep is utterly defeated:
Think about this: I can go to the store and buy a five inch reflective disc that holds digital media. If that disc is a music CD, I can pop it in my computer, encode it, put it on my iPod, and listen to it whenever I like. But if that disc is a movie DVD, I cannot, even though the same iPod is perfectly capable of playing the same digital content that I own just the same. (Oh, and by the way, Apple created a billion dollar industry in legal song downloading because of this. Where's the Apple Movie Store? Ask the MPAA.)…
The audience was filled with other examples of an industry gone crazy. One guy moved to the UK and all his DVDs stopped working because they were region-encoded (as most are). Her answer? That was in the contract you agreed to when you bought the DVD. Another guy asked why he can't just download the Sopranos. After all, he's a HBO subscriber, so he paid for it, he just happened to miss the last episode. Her answer, again, was that the time is part of the contract. My answer: Give it a couple years and HBO will be doing this, or they'll be out of business.
(Thanks to everyone who suggested this link!)
