As if the Digital Rights Management restrictions on the MP3's that you buy from online retailers such as iTunes weren't enough, the Motion Picture Association of America wants to restrict the copying you do from your own television.
Miss your favorite television show and want to make sure it gets recorded? If the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has its way, in the interest of protecting itself from "piracy," the average consumer will have much more difficulty in recording their favorite shows.
On April 7, 2009, digital television will become the standard form of television broadcast, and traditional analogue broadcasts will be abandoned.
In the interest of protecting "free television," the MPAA wants to enable a "broadcast flag." In the future, digital television sets will have a built-in system in order to make sure digital quality copies of television shows aren't made available to people who record onto their computers.
We take for granted that our TiVo system can capture a clear duplication of TV images. New digital televisions will be equipped with the restrictive broadcast flag that automatically degrades the quality of recordings. We'll essentially be paying for something that comes broken.
The tragedy of technologies such as this is that they treat the consumer like a criminal. The system presupposes that a television viewer will attempt something illegal in the process of recording a show for later viewing.
The movement is counterintuitive to the justice system in America that claims we are "innocent until proven guilty." In the world of entertainment, this notion is reversed so that restrictions are placed in the goods you purchase before anyone attempts a crime, essentially disabling it from full functionality from the moment of purchase.
The entertainment companies are obviously scared because less television viewers equal less advertising profits.
With all the discussion of protecting the rights of hardworking professionals in the entertainment industry, one has to question whose profits are really being affected.
Is it actors and behind-the-scenes crews?
Or more likely, is it the multi-million-dollar corporate executives who are paid by advertisers to promote their products on television networks?
I suggest the MPAA stop treating its consumers like felons by setting standards that they feel will "protect" us from having to pay for television.
The movie and television industry has been using the scare tactic of the abolishment of free television as a means to scare people into submission. The loss of free broadcasted television is an empty threat, considering the amount of advertising the stations provide for each show. Network executives would be at a great loss of revenue if they were to no longer broadcast programming for free.
These new measures will certainly be annoying and they will not stop piracy. By inconveniencing millions of television viewers, they will never thwart the practices of those determined to steal television programming.
Pirates in the digital age are always two steps ahead of the corporate restrictions. Attempts at blocking CD and DVD piracy have failed in the past, as will this.
If the television producers don't soon realize that the future of television is paid content on the web, all of their profits will slowly go towards the visionaries who are able to effectively deliver entertainment to the increasingly online-oriented public.
The age of traditional media is changing rapidly. If the content providers are too late to realize this fact, pirates will soon be the least of their concerns.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
