President Bush taps Carlos Gutierrez’s deputy chief of staff Chris Israel for the high-level post.
CNN/Money mentions the humorous anecdote where Commerce Secretary Gutierrez was offered a $1 pirated copy of Star Wars Episode 3 during his visit to China in early July.
The Secretary contends intellectual property piracy costs businesses $250 billion USD in lost sales, according to his comments to Reuters. Whether that’s a single year or multi year figure isn’t known.
So, Mr. Israel goes to Washington, gets a nice fat salary and the sort of pension benefits that HP employees who didn’t hit the Lucky 62 can only dream about, and guess what? Piracy continues unabated.
China has pledged to follow through on a series of anti-piracy pledges: stronger enforcement of existing laws, enacting of new legislation, etc. Mr. Israel and his staff will be monitoring the situation closely. If you listen very hard, you can hear someone burning yet another copy of Batman Begins to DVD in the background.
Mr. Israel has experience with Time Warner in his background, working in the public policy arena. Does he, or anyone in Washington, have the remotest clue as to what the public really wants?
Here’s a helpful hint, provided free of charge. Call it a congratulations-on-the-new-job present. People have become used to choice. The Internet has done for the world what no other technology or philosophy has done before. It has empowered people to the point where they feel they have the right to choose their information.
And that feeling of empowerment has led to piracy. Movie studios release their films in pricey theaters and keep the option of seeing them at home under wraps for months. Some countries have to wait longer than others for a new release.
Hollywood content providers create a product, create a demand, and then do nothing to address that demand. It doesn’t even seem as though they recognize that demand exists.
That demand isn’t just for the product, though. This is the digital age, yet only a handful of theaters in the country offer digital projectors, and even fewer studios release their films that way. For anyone who’s seen digital footage of Star Wars Episode 3 and then seen the film on a typical movie screen, there’s a vast difference in visual quality.
At home, many people have TVs capable of handling digital DVDs, and that number will grow when the FCC deadline to end analog signals arrives in a few years. Movie theaters do not offer a better experience than a modest digital home system today.
Maybe Mr. Israel can convince Hollywood that piracy can be fought, at least here, by catering to an increasingly sophisticated audience instead of doling out DVDs months after a debut.
Get the studios and the theater chains to drop ticket prices; they cannot compete on visual quality now. Two or three tickets in most metro markets cost as much as a single DVD, and people are increasingly choosing the latter.
Push DVDs into the global distribution chain faster, as in weeks or even days instead of months, and learn to embrace the Internet. Sure DVDs are big money makers for the studios, but Pixar and DreamWorks have been burned for overestimating DVD demand. Why be the studio that gets burned tomorrow?
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
