MPAA Creates Anti-Piracy Tech Lab
OK, we take back our “worst-idea-ever” comment on Tivo and now apply it to the following:
The six major Hollywood studios, hoping to gain more control over their technological destiny, have agreed to jointly finance a multimillion-dollar research laboratory to speed the development of new ways to foil movie pirates.
The new nonprofit consortium is to be called Motion Picture Laboratories Inc. - MovieLabs for short - and will begin operation later this year. According to Hollywood executives involved in its establishment, MovieLabs will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years. The idea arose out of Hollywood’s contention that the consumer electronics and information technology industries are not investing heavily or quickly enough in piracy-fighting technology.
Historically there is a reason why non-technology companies do not usually do research and development in high-tech. Its expensive and complicated (duh) and a bitch to get everyone else to adopt it. I have no doubt in my mind that this new lab can come up with all sorts of wacky ways to protect content but if it adds $40 to every DVD player out there then you are going to find a lot of resistance.
The Hollywood studios have teamed up on research and development before, most recently in the Digital Cinema Initiative, through which the major studios combined with the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California here to write uniform specifications for and test digital movie distribution technology.
Oh yes, that Digital Cinema Initiative was awesome. They’ve been around for how many years now? Oh and look how awesome all those digital cinemas are going…
Oh wait, there are none…
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