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Welcome Hollywood, to the 21st century.  As most of us know, copyrights and digital permissions have been first and foremost on a lot of technologist’s minds.  I have heard more about illegal mixing and mashing and downloading than I care to repeat.  The bottom line is that our media has changed.  We live in a digital age, where information and data is easily accessible, and this of course extends to DVD’s as well.

The Digital Journal released an article yesterday that said that Hollywood will finally calm down on issues surrounding how films are copied to DVD. 

Up until now, anyone who has downloaded a movie from the Web has been
forced to watch it on a PC (clearly not as much fun as the ol’ boob
tube). But with new technology and rule changes about to be announced
by the DVD Copy Control Association (the consortium that makes the
technology that prevents DVDs from being copied), PC users will be able
to copy a downloaded digital movie to a specially made DVD.

To computer users, I am not sure how much of a difference that this will make.  It will be interesting to see how much these ’specially made dvd’s’ sell for.  If it is over $10, I guarantee the consumers will not follow.  However, if they are reasonably low, a better case can definitely be made. 

One thing though, if retailers adopt this technology into a kiosk or a counter of some sort, how much money would they save in retail space?  How many more titles could they carry? 

Much along those lines…  I read a great book called ‘The Long Tail.’  To sum it up briefly, in outlets that offer thousands of like products such as Netflix or Itunes, 98% of their products are sold at least a couple times a month, making the business money.  And the 98% is proven time and time again.  It is no longer 20% of you goods make up 80% of your revenue.  It doesn’t take retail floor space to sell those products, so it is in the companies best interest to keep all 55,000 titles.  You see?

This development is a huge step in the right direction concerning digital rights management.  It will benefit a lot of people and organizations.  I just hope that it is done with consumer interests in mind at least partially.

Please, view the source article at digitaljournal.com.

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