Hollywood Wizardry

So, a tradition was broken this weekend. The kids did not get to this Harry Potter movie on the first Friday it came out. We are out of town at a chess tournament and every evening show was sold out. They saw it on Saturday.  And when the DVD comes out we will faithfully buy it. Probably on the day it comes out. Young, eager consumers of Hollywood's IP.

So when I hear about Sony in a soup over installing copy protection code on CDs which potentially a) exposes users to hacking and b) may be in violation of open source licensing, I have  to wonder about the music and film industries obsession with "rights management". Or its profession that it is doing so "to protect the rights of the artists".

There are passionate consumers who pay full price for its products - others more casual probably need lowered, time elapsed pricing. They likely just wait for the product to show on network TV or rent at Blockbuster when it is on a special or borrow it from their public library. So even if some of them are file-sharing or burning copies illegally, I am not convinced Hollywood is losing as much revenue as it thinks from piracy. The revenue shortfall may be far less than the industry believes.  But then again - may be not since the industry seems to risk all the PR issues it has had around copy protection the last few years. Take a pretty strong potion from Hogwarts to fix this problem.