In a recent Boing Boing post about Hollywood trying to plug the analog hole, Cory Doctorow asks "So what problem does this solve?" - noting that it'd stop fair use without actually stopping copyright infringement.
My guess is that they fear independent movie producers - those who are so independent they're basically a camcorder and a net connection.
I would suspect that Hollywood's real goal in the "analog hole" effort is to restrict camcorders so that home movies can't end up as high-quality torrents. Perhaps home movies will be marked for limited distribution (say, within the family); anything beyond that will be deemed commercial film production, and require a union card from Hollywood.
Hollywood doesn't want to compete with video podcasts.
This is within the scope of "Analog Hole" legislation - after all (so they can claim), as long as people can point a camcorder at a screen, they can pirate stuff.
It would also make sense for Hollywood to be concerned about this: like all middlemen, they're threatened by the disintermediating effect of the 'Net.
Consumer-level equipment can make a decent movie now; you want a good computer to do editing, but not ridiculously so - many a gamer would spend as much; BitTorrent can distribute it with modest bandwidth costs. All it really takes is skill and inclination.
Now, where's the place for Hollywood in that story? Nowhere.
Inclination there certainly is; it's reported that in the US half of all teens could be considered Content Creators. This is for all media (text, images, sound, video), but it's still a lot of creativity.
There will, of course, always be a difference between a home movie and a multi-million-dollar production. However, a home movie is good enough to tell a story; and as long as the story is compelling, it may not matter that the props are cardboard.
I guess that's been true for a few years now; the new element is the net connection. If I make a home movie, I can now distribute it to the world for zero marginal cost with no loss of quality.
Then there's "long tail" economics - success no longer requires millions of viewers. On the Internet, you can be just as happy if you reach a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In the aggregate, this is success on Hollywood scale; but it's even harder for Hollywood to compete with - niche films are tailored to their audiences in a way that a multi-million dollar production just can't match.
Thanks to Paul and Greg for comments on an earlier version of this.
- previous post (but it's just a passing mention)
- Similar post elsewhere: Hollywood wants to control the sense of sight. (W Herndon)
- next post (giving a somewhat contrasting view, for balance)
- This is probably a much more immediate and realistic threat to music recording companies than to Hollywood. Recording music is much less challenging than making a movie, well within the scope of an amateur.
- Almost a year later, another post, about a recently-announced device (MS Zune) that actually does this sort of thing.
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