John Naughton wrote a great column about the announced cooperation between Warner and BitTorrent earlier this week. It’s a good thing that Hollywood is embracing BitTorrent, but not like this.
The great thing about BitTorrent is that it has really important legitimate uses – ones that do not infringe copyright. If you want to distribute copies of a very large file – a new release of an operating system, say – BitTorrent is a terrific way to do it. But to date it has probably been employed mainly to distribute movies – illicitly. My guess, for example, is that it accounts for the high availability of episodes of Lost which have yet to be broadcast in the UK.
Which is why if you told a movie industry executive you used BitTorrent, she or he would make the sign of the cross and flee, pausing only to collect cloves of garlic and phone a lawyer.
In vain would you explain that the system was a much better way of distributing movies than the clumsy expedient of stamping them onto bits of plastic, putting the disks in plastic boxes and transporting them to warehouses which then load them on to other trucks which ferry them to retailers, who … well you get the idea.
So you can see why the news that Warner Brothers has apparently seen the light makes your columnist sit up. Could this herald the Beginning of Wisdom in the movie industry? Having inspected their plans, I’m not so sure.
Certainly, they have understood the efficacy of BitTorrent as a way of moving bitstreams across the net. But wrapped round that welcome insight are layers of old-style, big-media cluelessness.
For example, the Torrented movies are priced the same as a shrink-wrapped DVD, yet encumbered with robust copy protection that allows them to be viewed only on the computer to which they are downloaded. So you can’t burn them onto blank DVDs for viewing on a standard player or home movie system. And the customer is expected to pay the same price despite the fact that Torrenting eliminates virtually all of the distribution costs (which for CDs and DVDs accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the retail price).
Trust Hollywood, as one Silicon Valley wag put it, ‘to “embrace” peer-to-peer distribution and all the economies and efficiencies that go along with it and then ruin it by using it to peddle an inferior and overpriced product’. Nothing changes.
