Stopping P2P needs anti-terrorist-like effort

The producer of Star Wars has declared that stopping the swapping of movies on P2P networks needs an effort "as concentrated an international event as the war on terrorism." And what's more, he says that if something isn't done, "big budget film-making faces a total collapse in three years," and that "the increasing ease with which high-quality films could be downloaded with P2P software was the biggest threat to the industry."

Cutting through the hyperbole: Box office revenues are up. They've gone up every year since 1984, when the VCR was legalized despite Hollywood's claim that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

Moreover, this claim of "the increasing ease with which high-quality films could be downloaded with P2P software" is just so much bullshit. You can download a movie from Gnutella or Kazaa, sure, given several hours' download time and much searching. Having downloaded it, what you end up with is a quarter-sized, scratchy-audio version that only a liar would describe as "high quality."

By contrast, you can head down to Broadway or the high street in most other major cities and buy commercially pirated versions of current releases on DVD, CD and VHS. This has been the case for years and years now -- bootleg VHS cassettes were available almost as soon as VHS decks were legal -- and still, the box office revenue increases, as does the proportion of total studio revenue derived from legit pre-recorded media sales and rentals.

So, where's the problem? Sure, copyright holders would like it if they had 100 percent control over their works -- just like grocery stores would like to eliminate 100 percent of spoilage, shoplifting, and package-damage -- but it's not a realistic goal. Meanwhile, the film industry is healthier than ever. It is not collapsing.

But the film industry clearly sees an opportunity to take another kick at the Betamax can here. By chicken-littling about the impending death of Hollywood, studio execs are able to appeal to lawmakers to regulate technology in unprecendented way -- to create what Fox Studios' Andy Setos calls a "well-mannered marketplace" where only those technologies that Hollywood approves are allowed into the market.

Remember, entertainment interests have sued to keep the player piano, the radio, the VCR and the MP3 off the market. Remember, these companies withheld their movies from television studios because they feared that TV would Napsterize the movie-business. Remember, these companies went to Congress during the National Information Infrastructure Hearings and asked for the Internet to be redesigned to that all packets could be monitored for infringement.

There is no new problem -- and Hollywood is not proposing a new solution. The "threat" and their reflexive answer to it are not "unprecedented" and the only real danger is that this time, they'll get their way. Link Discuss (via MeFi)