Ed Felten describes the silly anti-piracy measures Microsoft is hammering into their next OS release, Vista, at the movie industy’s request:

movie studios will have explicit veto power over what is included in some parts of Vista. For example, pages 22-24 describe the “High Bandwidth Cipher” which will be used to encrypt video data is it passes across the PC’s internal PCIe bus. Hollywood will allow the use of the AES cipher, but many PCs won’t be able to run AES fast enough, leading to stutter in the video. People are free to design their own ciphers, but they must go through an approval process before being included in Windows Vista. The second criterion for acceptance is this:

Content industry acceptance
The evidence must be presented to Hollywood and other content owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security. Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is required.

Wow. And here I thought that making crap movies was Hollywood’s way of making me not want to copy their movies. I should have known that wasn’t it. After all, it’s simple, non-invasive, effective, and doesn’t exist primarily to preserve their defacto monopoly on movie production and distribution.

As Mark Cuban (someone with skin in the movie theater game) has previously noted, people increasingly don’t like the options available for going to the movies, especially when compared to the competition:

So on any given night, for whatever category you feel like putting yourself into for that night, you only have 3 or 4 major movies, and unless you live in NY or LA, only 6 or so limited release movies to choose from. Is that enough to always have something that the full range of movie going public wants to see?

That’s not many choices. Not many choices for kids 12 -20 who make up the most active film goers. Not many choices for the rest of the population that goes 1x or less per month.

Then you add the battle you go through of not wanting to fight the crowds and lines and long walk from your parking spot against not wanting to wait so long that you are one of 4 people in the theater when you see the movie, or have listened to everyone at work talk about the movie and spoil it for you.

When there are 40k DVD titles, all the TV shows and Movies we can capture on our PVRs and VOD and PPV, you have to really want to go to the movies.

Mark is unusual in viewing the problem this way. He has taken the radical viewpoint of asking, “What don’t people like about the total entertainment experience and what can I do about it?” This seems to be viewed as heresy by The Content Industry (as opposed to the broader category of Content Producers, which includes me by virtue of these very keystrokes) wants to make sure that they are the only people “allowed” to provide content. We’re all competing for viewers, but only the Content Industry is attempting to leverage their cartel status to prevent Independents (aka, “their competition”) from competing through technical means.

Not that this will come as a surprise to anyone, but the movie and music industries have an incredibly reactionary approach to risk management. They seem to think that they have some sort of “right” to control their audiences’ behavior as if they can add a third inevitability of, “go to movies” alongside death and taxes.

So what can we divine from this about the Movie Industry’s risk priorities? That’s a gimmee. The movie industry is is terrified of technological change and primarily concerned with preserving the status quo.

This comes as no surprise, but it still bears including. Their greatest fear is the “Napsterization” of movies–the idea that digital formats will lead to unrestricted unauthorized re-distribution via the Internet. Everything they now do is focused on preventing this from happening.

Unfortunately for them, thanks to DWDM and blue diode lasers making backbone bandwidth nearly free, the only things standing between them and their worst nightmare are time and the fact that the cable and phone companies are waiting build out their infrastructure to the Edge until they figure out how best to maximize their profit from doing so.

So what’s the Movie Industry doing in the meantime? Improving the moviegoing experience? Improving the quality of their product? Making the cost of going to the movies better match up to the value of going?

Nope. They’re too busy making the situation worse by crippling the output quality of a DVD on Personal Computers. They’re effectively lowering the bar that file traders must compete against. Truly dedicated file sharers–the collections–will still bypass all those DRM efforts and begin happily shuffling 10GB files around via BitTorrent. They’re collectors, so they don’t care how long it takes–they want it to have it, not to watch it tonight.

For those who are more impatient or less picky, though, the choice is now between crippled (low-resolution) content off a DVD or downloaded from the Internet. If the best you can hope for from “your” legally purchased DVD is something inferior, then the quality bar that the file sharers must beat has just been lowered significantly.

So there we have it. Their self-described countermeasure, decreased movie quality, has a huge second-order risk. It effectively reduces the “price” (filesize, which is to say time and bandwidth) required to obtain a comparable product from the DarkNet. And as we all know from, when price decreases, the number of people who are willing to pay it increases.

So the Movie Industry, like modern-day Oedipuses, bring about their own doom. Maybe that’s why movies so often make me want to gouge out my eyes.