Slashdot notes (Music Industry Compared to Movie Industry) a commentary in the Denver Post that unfavorably compares the response of the recording industry to modern technology with the response of the movie industry (Recording industry's missteps). The opinion piece approvingly notes how much more value one gets for a DVD as compared to a CD. Importantly, the author also points out how many more distribution outlets there are for a wide variety of cinema (1st run, 2nd run, art house, cable, rental, etc.) as compared to the nearly monopolistic control of radio and venue ownership. All good points. But the author blows it here:
Threatened over the past decade by various forms of piracy, the movie industry chose to go after profiteering international crime rings while letting the local cable companies take on illicit home descramblers with low-key enforcement action.
DeCSS anyone?
Even without DeCSS, however, this is a good test case for whether better business models reduce filesharing. I do think that the members of the MPAA do provide more value than the members of the RIAA have. However, even given the better value, I'm not sure how the members of the MPAA can compete with free. The only thing holding things back now is bandwidth (what happens when everyone has last mile fiber?) and, importantly, it isn't as easy to transfer a movie from harddrive to your television as it is to burn a CD (though DVD recorders will become ubiquitous enough in the near future). The argument of many filesharing advocates (though certainly not all) is that people would be happy to pay for music if it were a better value. To a certain extent that is true, but the value would have to be awful high to compete with free.
I'd also like to ask the author why the difference, since the companies that make up the RIAA are pretty much the same companies that make up the MPAA.
See also, C|Net's article on a recent move by one major movie studio to try to meet consumer demand for downloadable content (Disney, CinemaNow ink Net-movie deal).