Toolkit

Story: Hollywood heads to court over movie-swapping

Posted by: Mark (Friday 5 November 2004, 4:07 PM)

Personally I'm getting tired of seeing valid, useful technologies like BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer content distribution technologies tied up in court battles to protect aging, failing "product" distribution models.

It's about time the MPAA and RIAA woke up to the fact that CD's and DVD's are nothing more than media for transporting content, the same way that the internet provides a dynamic transport or a hard drive provides buffering and deferred delivery.

They need to take a much closer look at solutions like Apple's, where license keys are used to manage content distribution. If those keys are associated with a particular user/buyer, they're hardly going to be risking their credit information by handing out their data keys.

Technology has provided some form of every aspect of secure content delivery in standards, in OSS, and in proprietary forms. The media company's refusal to embrace and use those technologies to deliver new business models is their mistake, not that of the technology industry.

Why should companies like Mandrake abandon efficient content distribution solutions and high speed backbones just because the media companies can't or won't "get it?"