Re: The end of an era? DVD Decryptor shut down....

rec.video.desktop and alt.video.divx are a little weird cross posting
into sci.crypt but ok.

sundialsvc4 wrote:

[snip]

> I think that both the music AND the motion-picture industries frankly
> were caught off-base with regard to a fundamentally new shift in the
> demand for their product. People WANT their music to be on iPods.
> They still WANT to pay for that music... but a song at a time, not a
> $17 disc full of nine songs they don't want. The industries didn't
> want to respond to that. (Note that this is the same industry that in
> various earlier times ALSO moved against... radios in cars; playing
> songs on the radio; cassette tapes; digital tapes; paying royalties to
> movie artists when their movies were sold on tape instead of in a
> theatre; and so on. A generally clueless and greedy bunch...) Instead
> of responding to the change in customer demand, the industry moguls
> tried to outlaw it and to claim that, if such demand did actually
> exist, it consisted entirely of piracy.

We are not dealing with cluelesness but craftiness and laziness.

In the music business there are two recording industries the recording
studios and the record companies. The recording studios actually record
the music, they are paid by the singers and musicians.

The record industry makes and sells round plastic disks with a side line
in lending money to musicians. Logically neither of these activities
requires the firm to own any copyright rights. Since they are a
distribution channel they only need a licence from the artists to make
copies. Theatres do not own the copyright of the plays they show, they
only rent it.

The craftiness is that the plastic disk manufactures are using badly
written copyright laws to sabotage *rival* distribution channels such as
radio. They are trying the same trick on the internet companies.

The laziness comes from plastic manufactures not running their own
internet sites. The board members of these companies can skive off
whilst leaving day-to-day operations in the hands of managers. Starting
new operations like download sites require the board members to do their
job.

Movies are more complex than records because they require actors as well
as musicians and the studios pay for the filming.

Movie downloading needs a royalty payments organisation to forward the
money to actors, musicians, directors and writers.

Andrew Swallow
Received on Thu Sep 29 21:41:52 2005