Slyck Interviews the MPAA

An anonymous reader writes "P2P community and news source, Slyck, interviewed vice president Dean Garfield of the MPAA. Topics covered range from the MPAA's thoughts on BitTorrent, Limewire and DRM. Garfield acknowledges that they do not have much of a grip on the file-sharing world as they would like to believe."

Comments

Grip on the filesharing world?

[TheUncleD]

It's hard to have a grip on anything p2p these days, since most p2p users have more than a single client depending on their interests/needs. Sometimes, bit-torrents come in handy, other times people resort to eMule/limewire and the various sorts of softwares available. Big deal. Kazaa really did it best when they got into the market and spread like wildfire before the competition. Their use of advertising helped give them a profit and in turn, feed back into making them a stronger company. And now with skype, what a landslide that was... The future of p2p is going to be up to the communities of people and their needs. It's not enforcable like it once was, shutting down warez servers one at time like the old-days. It's everyone and everywhere these days and gripping the market as a whole is next to impossible. Good luck

Re:A demonstration of the problem...

[91degrees]

Heavy Goods vehicles in Europe are required to have a speed limiter fitted that limits them to 56mph. A lot of truckers are strongly opposed to these since they consider them to fail to solve the problem they are designed to prevent (accidents through speeding), and prevent any benefits that legitimately driving over this speed will offer. These are pretty much the same problems we have with DRM.

Personally, I'd be quite happy with DRM that told me how many times I'd copied something, what generation copy it is, and any other information that may be relevent.

Sorry Mr. Garfield

[AnyThingButWindows]

but I own a computer repair store in a town of about 5,000. I am the only one. I do not support DRM or anything with 'Trusted Computing', and NEVER will, for that matter. When someone asks what they should use to get music, I point them to Limewire. I preload Limewire, FireFox, AVG, Nero OEM, and Ad-Aware, on all the PCs I sell. I put the burdon of DRM reactions on the MPAA, RIAA, and those who sell broken music that violates my customer's fair use rights. When a customer has a Sony rootkit problem, I fix the problem, then give them Sony's number for their corporate office, and the number of a good lawyer. If a customer has music with DRM attached to it, I have tools to strip the DRM from the songs, then re-encode them into mp3 format. I now have 3/4ths of the town's file sharers on limewire, and am going strong. I don't put ANYTHING on a customers computer that restricts what they can, and cannot do with THEIR OWN machine. Untill the entertainment industry gets their act together, and stops infecting people's private property with viruses, and spyware, lobbying our elected officials, and continued cyber-terrorist activity, I will continue to recommend Limewire, and fight them with what resources, and influence I have. And at the moment Mr. Garfield, my business is expanding, fast, and vastly increasing.

Clean their own house.

[schlick]

In the course of the interview the issue of watermarking was discussed. This allows an audit trail leading back to the source of every copy that is made of media. Interestingly, Dean said that he wasn't keen to adopt any system that would give them an incentive to track down people and seek to take legal action against them.

This tells me that they don't want to persue the people in the industry who are actually leaking the content. They don't want to litigate against thier own. They'll sue a little girl, but not some lacky that works in the industry. You'd think that they'd be interested in at least tracking the propagation path. Hell I'd be interested in that.

On a different note, I'm a movie junky. When a new movie that I really want to see I want to see it on a big screen with an awesome sound system, with my redvines, popcorn, and cherry coke. My roommate actually got a pre release of Ep.1 and I refused to watch it on his 21" computer monitor at VCD quality. It would ruin the experience.

What I don't like it the whole "event" marketers try to create (one of my bigest pet peeves about Apple as well). When it is ready to release, f*cking release it!!! The artificial scarcity only makes me annoyed, sometimes pissed off enough to hold out buying it, sometimes violate copywrite as a means of flipping them the bird. Don't treat your customers like imbeciles (even if they are).