LibertyVoice

I had been hoping to read Bill Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, over the winter holidays, but, thanks to a combination of short-fuse writing projects (about which I’ll have more to say soon) and a fairly grueling committee schedule (about which the less said, the better), that probably will not happen until Spring Break, or more likely, the summer. From the little I have read, I’m struck, so far, by Patry’s argument that traditional market makers for mass-produced entertainment have actively fueled the online infringement culture by consistently offering consumers a crabbed, limited product that doesn’t include the features they are actually interested in purchasing. This is a point that has been made frequently before, but not, I think, with quite as much clarity or persuasive force as Patry brings to the issue.

So I was especially amused by the new illustration linked from Boing Boing, Infographic: buying DVDs versus pirating them. The chart contrasts the end-user experience with a purchased DVD (insert disc, sit through a number of unskippable previews, advertisements, and warnings, before finally getting to the menu that allows you to play the movie) versus an infringing copy of the same content available for peer-to-peer download (insert disc, watch movie). It powerfully makes Patry’s point about how the consumer unfriendliness of officially sanctioned digital media products drives consumers towards illicit (but better) alternatives. Here’s Cory Doctorow’s hypothesis:

I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that’s such an attractive nuisance, it’s bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product.