Samedi, alors que je finissais de regarder les huit épisodes de The Scene, je me suis demandé quel était mon propre point de vue sur les questions sous-jacentes. Je me mis alors d’en écrire quelque chose, et je laissai mariner la question tout le week-end.

Ma lecture du matin m’en a dispensé. C’est au détour d’un article sur Slashdot que je découvris le commentaire suivant :

All this DRM technology will fail its intended purpose because the MPAA companies are trying to protect a 20th century marketplace that is fading ever more each day.

20th century film marketing was based on the pay-per-view model where a central facility (the movie theater) charged each person a fixed fee (the box office admission) for each showing of the film. It didn’t matter which film was showing; customers paid the same entry fee. Unpopular product would not collect as many fees as a more-popular title.

In this model there is no price flexibility for the consumer. It’s strictly take-it-or-leave-it. This model works when there is a limited number of viewing openings available (the seats in the theater) and limited product (one print of the film per theater and only a dozen copies of the film in the metro area).

This model fails when there is nearly unlimited product (all film titles from the past 50 years) on DVD or unlimited view openings. What happens in this type of market is that the consumers get to bid on what they will pay and the terms that they will pay for the product. The new technology has changed the marketplace by removing most of the previous restrictions. The new technology is not going away.

DRM is an attempt to force the previous market conditions onto the new business environment. The MPAA companies (the film studios) want to have the highly profitable previous marketplace conditions with the greatly expanded marketplace made available by DVD. Beaucoup bucks if you can make it happen.

But it won’t work. What will happen if the MPAA companies actually get DRM to work is that the market for film product will shrink to a small percentage of what it is today.

Successfully integrating DRM into film industry product is not going to bring back the old way of presenting film entertainment product. It’s just going to drive the current film consuming public into some other form of entertainment.

One of the reasons that parents are encouraged to read fairy tales to their children is that it is an effective way to get the collective wisdom of the ages passed on to the adults of the modern age who are too vain to listen to good advice coming from any other source. The fairy tale that the MPAA should pay attention to the story of the goose that laid golden eggs. This goose would lay one egg a day of pure gold. The villagers got greedy and decided to kill the goose, cut it open and get all the golden eggs that must be inside. This they did. And they found no gold inside. And they never got any more golden eggs.

Like the villagers, the film studios don’t understand the new film market. Adding DRM to the product that is providing their golder eggs will be like killing the goose.

Merci à Simonetta pour ce commentaire éclairé.