Now Hollywood Is Going After DVD Recorders

from the oh-come-on dept

I imagine this will surprise no one, but the folks in Hollywood are now getting worried about DVD recorders and how people are going to use them to "steal" movies. Didn't they learn their lesson from the VCR - which helped save the movie industry? Apparently not. Actually, this isn't so much about Hollywood freaking out, but about Macrovision, makers of copy protection technology trying to freak out Hollywood with a misleading and biased survey. First of all, since Macrovision makes copy protection, you have to assume quite a bit of bias in any study they put out about the risks of movies being copied. However, even their own study doesn't support the argument they're trying to make. The study only reports people who attempted to copy movie DVDs - not those that were successful. For every person who attempted to make a copy, Macrovision counts it as "lost revenue" for the movie industry. They also don't indicate just how many movies each person attempted to copy - but just say 25% tried to. I'm actually surprised the number isn't higher. Of course people are going to try to copy a DVD if they have a DVD recorder. Why wouldn't they? There's also no proof that anyone who did end up copying the movie would have actually bought or rented the DVD had they not been able to copy the movie. Furthermore, even if they would have rented or bought that particular DVD, there's no way to tell if, by copying the DVD for free, they didn't end up spending the money they would have spent on the original DVD on a different DVD. Finally, in many of these cases, I'm sure the attempted "copying" of the DVD came off of a rented DVD - so the movie industry got some of their money anyway.