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MPAA Plans To Launch Movie Links Site
eldavojohn writes "To combat piracy, the MPAA's latest idea involves a site that would allow users to search for a movie and then provide links to legit legal downloads or ticket purchases for it. Why are they doing this? Because their research showed 'many users have a hard time differentiating between legal and illegal content online.' And all this time I thought people pirated movies because it was cheaper to do! Turns out they were just confused."
Is it just me being paranoid or have I learned my lesson from the whole MediaSentry debacle?
The ability for MPAA to log your IP and your search query gives them a precise target to look for in whatever data they collect from various filesharing networks (with the help of either MediaSentry or someone else).
I know I am sounding paranoid, but at this point I would not be surprised.
A year ago I was working on a PDA based Media PC controller. I could, from work, on my wifi-enabled PDA, pull up the week's line up for all of my local cable channels, set up reminders, flag shows for recording, change the media PC's channel, start up DVD's, change the volume, etc... on the media PC sitting in my living room.
But what I really wanted was a reliable and LEGAL way to download content. Sure, I'll pay $3 to rent a movie with a 72-hour DRM on it. Heck, I used to pay $3-5 to rent movies off of Charter's on demand system. If a movie is worth watching twice, I'll go buy it, if not, I'll rent it for a night, enjoy the show, and not clutter up my house with yet another DVD that I'm not going to watch. I'm fine with that, so long as it plays with out difficulty, and allows ample time to see the movie. But, at the time, there was no functional way to achieve this.
If this new service offers that opportunity, even if it is just a standardized public listing, I'm all for it. Open up an API and let us integrate it into other systems.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Obviously it won't stop all infringement, but it's a much saner response than suing your customers.
Woah, wait a minute there tiger! They never said they were going to stop suing their customers, nope. All they said was that they were going to setup a site that will rank poorly on Google and will likely be poorly designed so that they can say that they are providing a service to their customers that those customers say they want.
A sane response would be to provide DRM and commercial free media to your customers that are filled with quality content (holy fucking God Almighty in heaven, I know, crazy right?!) While I haven't seen anything except the leaked first 6 minutes of the Dark Knight, those 6 minutes were decent enough for me to be interested in the film -- the first time I have had any interest in a MPAA released film in quite some time.
Because their research showed 'many users have a hard time differentiating between legal and illegal content online.
I have this problem everytime. It's hard for me to discriminate between a DVD rent at 4$ and a DRMed download at 9.99$ and still come out believing it's not a plain robbery. Good MPAA that's the way to go...
A couple weeks ago, a relative wanted me to download about 40 songs for free using one of the P2P services to be burned onto CDs. After explaining to them that obtaining songs this way would be a great way to get sued and showing them iTunes Music Store as an alternative, they got upset about the fact that it would cost them money to obtain same the music they could find for free elsewhere.
The mindset here, is that if it were illegal to obtain copyrighted materials for free from a P2P service, then why are these services allowed to host the files in the first place? They don't comprehend the dynamic nature of P2P networks that makes it nearly impossible to shut down such a service or impose any content enforcement on it. They just see P2P services as a single entity that exists at a fixed location in the real world.
What's more interesting, is that the older a given person is, the more likely they are to have similar hang-ups, simply because they aren't savvy enough to see it any other way.
8==8 Bones 8==8