I've been waiting more movies than usual lately. Not the kind of movies I go see in the theater or even rent; the kind I get for free off BitTorrent. So far I've seen Dark City and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and AI. My next attempt will be Equilibrium. I'll talk a little about the films later, but first a note about bittorrent, the MPAA (the motion picture equivalent to the RIAA) and the future of entertainment.

The MPAA is even dumber, it seems, than the RIAA. As it stands, Bittorrent and the p2p networks pose no threat (none) to their bottom line. They will at some point, but right now there is zero threat (none) of lost revenue due to these technologies. I don't know if they're looking to monazite these "on-demand" cable services, or if they're just upset over loosing control over their release schedule, but their newfound taste for lawsuits against torrent trackers displays a sadly predictable lack of entrepreneurialism.

Getting movies off bittorrent is a hassle, and the product isn't really all that great. It takes days of steady broadband to download a whole film, and even then you're getting something that's usually somewhere below VHS quality, with occasional and annoying digital defects. Analog interference detracts from the viewing experience, but if it's mild enough your brain will sort of accommodate it. Anyone who's ever given up with the antenna and settled for ghosty tv knows what I'm talking about. It's bearable. The digital hiccoughs you often get from the kind of compression it takes to squeeze a DVD down to 700mb can much more disruptive to the enjoyment of the film. If you really want to watch a movie, you're going to spend a couple bucks to rent the shit.

So why, then, is the MPAA trying to squash this stuff rather than looking for ways to take advantage of it? I have three ideas. One is that they're too myopic to try and turn this into a profit center. Two is that they're lazy enough to be satisfied with whatever vig they've negotiated from "on demand." Third is that they're not really motivated so much by profit, but rather terrified of having less control over their industry.

While I'm sure there's some latent fear of obsolescence and profit loss, if you look at the articles out there, one of the things that always gets a prominent mention is that some film made it out online weeks before its scheduled theatrical release. This suggests to me that the primary motive for the MPAA to crack down on bittorrent is not a direct fear of lost dollars in ticket sales and rentals, but a future fear of loosing control over their industry.

Here's a scenario: As more and more moviegoers turn to the internet for information about cinema, if advance reviews are available online, and they're negative, it could hurt the opening. It's no secret at the moment that there are "reviewers" out there who will hype anything in the hopes of getting advance screenings, gift-baskets, or even (they say) payola. A democratic advance-review process could break this system, and cause potential opening-weekend viewers to shy away.

I don't know that this has ever yet happened, but it might, and if it did it would be a threat to the current movie studio business model. On the other hand, what we're talking about here is undercutting the ability of movie studios to produce un-entertaining products and then recoup their losses by marketing the flick in a slick enough fashion. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. And who said business models are sacred anyway?

The point is, there are a lot of smarter ways to go about this. But if the studios (or even the theater chains) were to make a move, it would probably be public by now. Their strategy seems to be to try and sue their problems away. While they're clearly on a sound legal footing issuing Cease and Desist orders to tracker servers, the reliance on this strategy reflect a crippling lack of foresight. Maybe something to do with how many lawyers there are (as opposed to techies) in your average boardroom.