Movie Studios Making Different Mistakes Than The RIAA

Overhype

from the learned-the-wrong-lessons dept

There have been a number of articles recently talking about how the movie industry has watched and learned from the mistakes the recording industry has made in the last couple years when it came to combating file sharing. If that’s the case (as this article claims), it looks like they learned the wrong lessons and are quickly making their own set of mistakes. They’re certainly not embracing the technology – or realizing that watching a movie is a social entertainment experience that isn’t easily replicated by downloading a low-quality film online. Instead, they’re making life more annoying for their customers by practically strip searching those who go to see the movies and then playing whiny advertisements to try to get across the idea that file sharing is “bad”. Their latest move is to actually go into schools and put on a Warner Brothers scripted lesson on why downloading movies is immoral. Thankfully, at least some people are questioning if it’s appropriate for folks in the movie industry to enter the classroom and lecture kids on morality. As you read the article, though, the scary part is that everyone quoted simply assumes that file sharing is unquestionably bad for the industry. Not a single person brings up the idea that maybe it’s a good way to get attention for movies – and that there might be ways to build new business models around the movie-going experience. Instead, they simply take it as the official word that file sharing is bad… just like two decades ago when the VCR was supposed to be the death of the industry. Some people never learn.