Old Genies in New Bottles

While there are still a few hours left before David Pogue's most recent column descends into the pits of the New York Times' pay-for-play archive, I want to praise him for articulating the strange disparities between the various media-bearing silver-discs we have grown accustomed to purchasing:

Now, Hollywood DVD's are copy-protected to the hilt. If you want to use one, you must play it from the original disc. If you want a second copy, you buy a second copy.

Yet nobody screams about the greed and paranoia of the movie studios the way they do about the music companies. Why not?

I'm guessing it's because DVD's were born copy protected. We, the consumers, just accepted copy protection as part of the DVD's definition-like books. (You can buy special software that can duplicate a DVD, but most people don't bother. Somehow it doesn't seem worth the trouble, just as it's too much trouble to photocopy a book.)

Music CD's, on the other hand, were never copy protected to begin with. What we're witnessing now is the ugly spectacle of an industry trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to take away something that its customers had already come to take for granted.

It has always nagged me that the silver disc with a soundtrack from a popular film often retails for more than the silver disc with the whole film. For example, Amazon.com currently lists the soundtrack for "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" at $13.98, but the DVD of the film can be had for $12.99. Pogue's column reminded me that consumers of DVDs arguably get less for their entertainment dollar than purchasers of CDs. They are purchasing a heavily-protected disc of limited utility, while CD buyers can (for the time being) copy, repurpose, and remediate their discs. Even so, the disparity between the DVD (end product of a process costing tens of millions, typically) and the CD (end product of a process costing tens of thousands, typically) still seems suspiciously out of balance.