Apparently a new copyright “protection” scheme DECE, entirely dependant on hardware, is in development. Unfortunately the people who decided on this don’t know that what can be done in hardware can be done in software. And Kopimi is unstoppable, mostly because of the analog hole. What’s interesting is how the article reflects on optical media versus digital sales:
DVD and Blu-ray revenues contribute significantly to Hollywood’s bottom line, but spending on those discs is dropping sharply. It declined 3.2 percent to $4 billion in the third quarter of last year. Digital sales were up nearly 20 percent in the quarter, but amounted to a relatively paltry $420 million.
Physical sales are down, digital sales are up. Profits are increasingly rising and every part of the music, movie and other types of media industry except the optical media part. Considering how bad optical media is for technology, the environment and for the purpose of generating a profit for creators, I see this as a good development.
It declined 3.2 percent to $4 billion in the third quarter of last year. Digital sales were up nearly 20 percent in the quarter, but amounted to a relatively paltry $420 million.
A bird once told me that distributing and storing digital material i by far less than 1/10 of doing the same with physical matter such as pieces of plastic and aluminum. The costs merely related to gasoline in optical media distribution probably outweighs the cost of digitally distributing the music to twice the amount of people at better quality. And that’s not counting production, storage and employees at supermarkets.
What strikes me the most in the article is how consumers are portrayed (betrayed) by the person in focus in the article: Mitch Singer, the president of the DECE and chief technology officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
“Consumers shouldn’t have to know what’s inside,” he said. “They should just know it will play.”
Jeez. Consumers may be sheep in general, but can’t we at least try to enlighten people? Knowledge is power. Use this power to the greatest benefit. Stop buying DRM:ed crap. Or in this case, products that are part of the “Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem”. There’s something much better out there, and it’s called the internet.
