The Protection Racket
I received a letter recently from the
owner of a brand-new DVD recorder whose main purpose was to transfer a pile of VHS
cassettes of movies that were not available on disc. He was surprised that he got an error
message saying, "copy not permitted," and wondered if that meant he wasn’t
going to be able to dub any of his movie collection. Probably.
Maybe he's just a newcomer. Although it's died down
somewhat, several years ago there were bales of newsprint devoted to describing, and
criticizing, the efforts of the owners of copyrights to protect their property, and to
derive the maximum return from it. Generally, the huge entertainment conglomerates --
Hollywood and the Big Five record companies -- have usually been cast in the role of
villains, and it is true that those companies have never been shy about throwing their
weight around.
This stuff has been going on for a long time, and it's
usually been demonstrated that the industries involved ultimately benefit hugely from what
they first tried to rub out.
The record companies had a monopoly on the home music
market for half a century before radio came along, and they believed that the latter's
ability to deliver music instantaneously would kill the recording business. It didn't take
long for them to realize that radio didn't replace records; it was the most effective
means of selling them.
The paranoia demonstrated by Hollywood at the coming of
television was legendary, until the movie companies became the main television producers.
Neither of those episodes had much to do with protecting copyright, however; both were
simply turf wars.
The efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) to use the courts to get rid of Betamax in the 1970s on the grounds of potential
copyright infringement was another matter. That didn't work, fortunately, and video
distribution is now a vital part of Hollywood's business.
At one point, the companies involved seemed to clue in to
the fact that legal fights were not going to work; the solution had to be technical. If a
system could be devised that would make copying impossible, then the strong-arm tactics
wouldn't be necessary. As far as I know, the first such scheme was the copy protection
added to early prerecorded videocassettes in the 1970s. That basically suppressed the
video synchronization signal to such a degree that a copying VCR couldn't lock on to it.
Trouble was, many television sets couldn't read these signals either, so a whole cottage
industry of "image stabilizers" grew up which solved that problem and,
incidentally, made copying a snap. More sophisticated schemes have been met with similar
solutions.
And not only in the audio/video world. When I worked in a
small office a number of years ago, the word processor most of us used was copy-protected.
We could have a copy of something on disk, but to run it, we needed to load the master
disk. After that, we could continue to run the program as much as desired, unless we had
to re-boot, but it was a nuisance nonetheless. It didn't take long for someone to turn up
with a program that would make bit-perfect copies, turning everyone's version into a
master disk. The program's developer gave up on the protection scheme for later versions.
The music industry stalled the introduction of consumer
digital audiotape in the '80s pending an effective (and inaudible) protection scheme
(which never arrived), and the price of Hollywood's endorsement of the digital videodisc
was that an effective copy inhibitor be part of the standard.
In all this talk of copyright, however, scribblers like me
have to walk a fine line. As a freelance writer, my position is not that much different
from Disney's or Sony Music's except for scale (and how!). When I was a staff writer, it
didn't matter much because I didn't own what I wrote, but freelancers own their work and
have little else to offer but the words they create. I can't do much about it if someone
chooses to download this column and forward it to someone else, with no compensation to
me.
So I have no quarrel with the philosophy of the record and
movie companies trying to make the most of their property. But it's the consistent pattern
of bullying that diminishes my sympathy. At first, for instance, the movie companies
insisted that DVDs incorporate a copy-protection system that was so robust that it would
have seriously compromised the medium’s use for data storage. They had to back down a
bit on that one, but as my correspondent found, it's virtually impossible to dub a
prerecorded videocassette to DVD or vice-versa. As far as I know, nobody is taking much
trouble to inform the buyers of these shiny new toys that they incorporate such a
limitation.
Then there’s the question of regional coding of the
discs, which prevents a DVD made for one market from playing in machines in other regions.
Ostensibly, this is to curb pirating in cases where a movie is released at different times
in different areas, but what is already happening is a gray market in discs in those
countries where the DVD is released later than elsewhere. Simultaneous release around the
world would allow universal DVDs, which could play anywhere, as CDs do now.
The people who actually buy these items would be better
served if the movie companies eased up a bit on their precious marketing strategies.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
|
