From Dominic Jackson
I read your article about recordable DVDs with a mixture of delight and dismay (3 April, p 24). Delight because technological advances mean ever-higher data storage capacities that are useful for backing up the ever-larger-capacity hard drives in modern computers – but dismay on reading “Hollywood’s burning issue” as, yet again, Hollywood interferes with technological advance.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) states that it does not oppose new technology. Is this the same MPAA that fought to the highest courts in the US to ban the Betamax VCR? It failed, and the video rental industry was born, which now makes more money than box office receipts.
Digital copying technology makes business models such as pay-per-copy (DVD sales figures not withstanding) obsolete. Either the entertainment companies join the new wave of technology and find ways to profit from it, or we should let them die, as new companies will replace them. Protectionism ultimately does no one any good.
Incidentally, Hollywood was founded in California to escape the enforcement of east coast-based Thomas Edison’s all-encompassing patents on early film and camera technology – another fine example of the old guard’s hypocrisy.
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Reading, Berkshire, UK
