Copyright is killing the future.

Flickr User - Thomas Hawk

Back in the 80’s and 90’s (yes, we’re now allowed to say back in the 90’s), TV shows and movies offered a very integrated vision of the future: your music, movies, calendar, notes and email all available from anywhere through the house without an optical disc in sight. And that’s not a very farfetched future, all our data is mostly available in digital format, we have insane storage capabilities, faster local networks, fast enough cell phone networks to stream most textual data… and yet, I can’t keep all my movies on a dedicated server, waiting to be played without inserting the DVD and I have no legitimate way of transfering that movie to my portable media player which is a natural fit for watching movies on the run. Why is that?

Copyright.

Or, rather, the security measures and usage restrictions put in place to protect said copyright. What it basically amounts to is that the various organizations holding the rights to the media you “own” just want to make sure you don’t use the data in ways they can’t profit from anymore. That includes the obvious “I’ll make you a copy of the CD I bought” and the now classic “I love this song, let me borrow the CD I’ll just rip it to mp3″. But it also includes – and this is where it becomes a problem – ripping songs and movies from the CD or DVD to your hard drive. Yes, even if you can natively import songs from within most media players it seems that the powers that be don’t agree it constitutes fair use. Some CDs even include countermeasures to prevent you from ever ripping them – but that’s another topic entirely. And movies, well, it’s even more complex.

This is the core of the problem, everything else pretty much flows from there. On the movies (on DVD) front, protection prevent the ripping AND the READING of discs on unauthorized software. So even if adding content to your media server wasn’t the point, you still can’t read it just the way you want, you need to use the software they want, and thus, limit innovation and integration of DVD in media playback suites. The only thing that’s not too affected is the legally ambiguous TV recording. Features in most software seem well fleshed out, allowing scheduled recordings, TV Guides, real-time rewinding… basically, it’s what it should be. Too bad the rest our media experience is nowhere as slick.

Of course, a lot of developers try to approach the market and ignore the legal issues – it’s not illegal to provide you a way to sort your media, stream it across the network, fetch info online about a movie (to provide box art and such) and reencode movies for transfer to portable devices. And that’s where money becomes an issue. All these greatly integrated media experience solutions are unable to grow as they should because there’s no money involved. So you end up with buggy, unstable software that you want to work.

So there you have it, a dying copyright system prevents advances that are already in place to be used to their full potential – and it’s not piracy that’s hurting, it’s fear of piracy. And at this point, using pirated material allows for a better implementation of most of theses advances, but it’s far from perfect…

Feel free to comment, I will probably follow up with a second article if it sparks any interest.

~ by flyinwhee on August 22, 2008.