Picture by Alfredo Daniel Rezinovsky.
Way back in 2003, then head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, got so worried about “piracy” of movies coming from insiders that he banned the use of “screener” DVDs for those voting for the Academy Awards.
Rather than sending DVD screeners that members could watch with their existing home theater setup, it hired a company to make special DRM’d DVDs that would only play on special DVD players. Then it sent these special DVD players with the screeners to the Academy members. Of course, this was both a huge expense and still a tremendous pain in the ass for voters, who had to hook up this special DVD player that could only be used for screeners. It also made it difficult if the Academy member wanted to take the DVD somewhere else (say on vacation) and watch it elsewhere without dragging along this “special” DVD player. Apparently it only took 3 years of complaints before the MPAA realized that perhaps this was a dumb idea (that also didn’t stop the movies from getting online anyway). This year, it’s apparently phasing out the special DVD players and will provide (gasp!) normal DVDs for voting members.
They were pretty effective tool, since nearly every first DVD rip is a DVD screener.
Sometimes it becomes readily apparent that stupidity is not the best way to go. And seldom is it cheaper.
So effective that everything still got ripped and put out in the wild anyway?
So, let’s see..it took three years to rectify a knee-jerk reaction ? or maybe it was just a jerk off reaction from a jerk ? My kid keeps telling me he can’t wait for all us old bastards to die and get out of the way of progress..seems somehow familiar to me..
Why not just force screeners to view movies on BetaMax tapes? They of course will get a free refurbished BetaMax player.