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Movie Madness by MPAA
by Andrew McCaskey
Lets’ Force our Customers to Piracy
Did you have a movie on your Netflix queue or AppleTV/iTunes bookmark that you meant to see like Michael Clayton or Charlie Wilson’s War ? Look again, it has disappeared. It’s a part of a 49 year old agreement that’s one more example of dinosaur media.
TV Has a License to Kill Movies on the Net. That’s the CNET report, dating back to 1959. Over the years, it has morphed into a well organized hierarchy. First, box office release, then cable pay per view and airlines. Then DVD to retail, followed by DVD to physical rental like Blockbuster or the Mom and Pop video. Then broadcast television. The deal is that the television industry negotiated exclusive rights during the “broad cast window” .That was the deal in 1959 when CBS locked up “The Wizard of Oz” broadcast rights for close to forever.
When the broadcast window opens, the studios don’t send out minions to pull DVD’s off retailer shelves. The Mom and Pop Rentals are safe. The difference is Netflix and iTunes are not treated as retailers, but rather as broadcast competitors. That means that when the date rolls over, the switch gets thrown, and those files get pulled from online distribution. After all, broadcasters have paid the movie industry billions of dollars over the past fifty years and online downloads don’t even add up to rounding errors, right now.
That would be LEGAL online distribution – like iTunes/AppleTV, Amazon/Tivo and the Roku/Netflix box. What’s a consumer to do ? Those movies are still available without the long trek to the video store, parking, hassle, returns. As close as your home broadband connection. And now to make it even easier, Foxtorrent or BitFox puts it right at your fingertips as a Firefox extension.
It’s still wrong. It’s still piracy – but when an industry works to stymie legitimate customers who want to do the right thing, it doesn’t sound like good business. Those rounding errors are going to add up when you train an entire new generation to steal your product.
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