Re: Why Sony Will Die

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:32:18 -0800, "Charles Tomaras"
<tomaras@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So how do you propose to keep mass thievery from occuring while still
protecting your "private copying?"

That is, I will freely admit, a difficult thing to sort out. However,
I do something else for a living, so it's not really up to me to
figure out a model that works. I do expect, however, that my rights as
a consumer aren't compromised in any solution, otherwise it's not
really a solution -- just a different problem. And that is where I see
the situation at the moment: DRM is great for content producers, and
absolute crap for consumers. Which is not right.

But to at least partially answer your question, here's a few thoughts:

- I think the "mass thievery" is not nearly as bad as it is being
reported by bodies like the RIAA and MPAA. Their "statistics" are
almost certainly heavily, heavily biased in their favour. Any drop in
their business is blamed on filesharing, etc., and not on crappier
product, or the fact the same amount of personal disposable income is
now being split amongst CDs, DVDs, PC games and console games. Nor are
the per-copy damages claimed accurate (as I outlined in a previous
post). Overall, those industries seem to be doing pretty OK; there are
just more of them, all fighting for a share of the same-sized
disposable income pie.

- People have clearly embraced iTunes, which finally did what RIAA
members were screaming should never happen: it made songs available
online for a fairly-low flat fee. Now that it's pretty much an
unqualified success, RIAA members are suggesting maybe the price
should be higher for some songs. Let me get this straight: they've got
a huge hit on their hands -- one that keeps people buying music, using
a business model where they don't have to actually *produce* anything
incremental -- and they want to mess with it by raising the price??
Who runs these companies? Whoever they are, they're clearly idiots.
And greedy, greedy bastards.

- How about releasing a DVD of a movie two weeks after it hits
theatres? Those who want to see it *right now* will still go to the
theatre. Most of the box office for most movies occurs during the
first couple of weekends, anyway, and I'd imagine casual pirates won't
waste their time and bandwidth on downloading something they know will
be available in two weeks (I wouldn't). So the DVD comes out, and it's
*just* the movie: single layer (i.e. relatively low bitrate), no menu,
no extras, no nothing. Sort of the 21st century equivalent of a 7"
single. Put it out there for $5. Maybe even let me spend my time and
bandwidth downloading it in a variety of qualities and codecs. Put a
60-second trailer up front to make sure everyone knows the release
date of the "special edition" DVD, and give them a coupon for $2.50
off the SE DVD (or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray) to encourage up-selling. Make the
packaging and pricing of the SE version so compelling (liner notes,
embossing, metallic inks, memorabilia, extras, etc., all for $12-15 or
so) that it's a no-brainer to buy when it comes out.

As a bit of an aside: Did you know that thousands of consumers
actually went to the trouble of signing up online, printing out a
form, writing a cheque (or check) for about $5, snail mailing it to
California, and waiting 2-8 weeks for delivery, just to get *a
cardboard box* that would hold their Simpsons Season Six DVD set?
Mine's sitting on my shelf as I type this, and I figure it was one of
the better things I've bought for $5 -- especially considering the
weird and crappy clamshell thing the set originally came in.

- For TV shows, let me go to one site (not one site per network), very
quickly find any show that was on TV already this season (preferably
in any of several different countries), and download it in the quality
and codec I want. Let me pay around a buck an hour, or $15 for a whole
season. Let me print a coupon for $5 off the DVD box set that comes
out at the end of the season. Let me subscribe to an RSS feed that
tells me what shows I'm interested are on next, and let me subscribe
to a torrent-like feed that pushes shows to my computer once they've
aired.

- For music, let me go to iTunes and download the newest songs for 99
cents. If I wait a month or so, drop the price to 75 cents. Make the
oldest (or the least-popular?) songs 25 cents each. And/or give me the
option to download a range of qualities and codecs, with higher
quality costing a little bit more -- or better still, lower quality
costing a bit less. Give me a break on buying a whole album at a time,
so that I pay about $5-6 for the whole disc (since I'm getting lower
quality, with no physical disc or liner or case). Let me print track
lists and lyrics and disc art and covers, but don't gouge the sh!t out
of me for doing all the work that the label/distributor would have
done in the past. Let me burn CDs for my car. Let me stuff MP3s on
whatever digital player I like. Let me Rip. Mix. Burn. (Disclaimer: I
don't own an iPod, and have never used iTunes, so I don't really know
how much of this is already available -- but because it's sensible, I
suspect it's very little.)

Bottom line: like the original poster said, content owners gotta
eventually realize that their precious IP really isn't worth as much
on a per-copy basis as it once was. HOWEVER, the market for
lower-priced, easy-to-obtain versions of that IP is HUGE. These
companies should be concentrating on making the experience of buying
multimedia (especially when buying online) easier and better than
fighting with BitTorrent or Usenet or whatever, so that I can get
better quality stuff than the mis-labelled, poorly-ripped,
hard-to-find pirated versions. I will pay to avoid all the hassle! I
will pay to get things more quickly! I will pay to get things earlier!
And, perhaps most importantly, I will pay to check out stuff that I
wouldn't have bothered to pay to read/hear/see/play in the past!

But I don't plan on paying for anything that features choice-killing
DRM. I hope somebody in the content-providing industry "gets it"
sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I am watching
www.DeAACS.com with interest...
.