Glickman
The big studios are culling their resources for their most aggressive -- and controversial -- effort yet to combat piracy.
Fox, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony and Disney came together Monday to form Movielabs, a joint venture that will evaluate and develop antipiracy technologies.
Based in L.A., nonprofit org will have a $30 million budget for its first two years.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America is overseeing the search for a chief exec. Aim is likely to find someone with a strong film business background, with tech-minded experts working underneath him or her to oversee research and product evaluation.
The first batch of projects planned for Movielabs is sure to raise concern among those who feel Hollywood is already going too far in trying to regulate how consumers use content.
These projects go beyond previous efforts in "digital rights management" -- software that limits how people can use digital content -- to monitor and limit consumer activity in order to prevent piracy. They include software that could detect illegal file-sharing online, constrict access to home networks by outsiders and identify users' locations in order to regulate distribution of content in different territories.
Movielabs will also focus on technologies that could prevent camcordering in theaters, which has become the most common way films are stolen before being pirated online or on bootleg DVDs.
In the beginning...
In November 2002 News Corp. prexy Peter Chernin became the first major media exec to speak at the Comdex computer industry tradeshow, where he called for media and technology companies to work together to combat piracy.
"I've come to call for a partnership of content and technology providers in order to create explosive long-term businesses in place of unrewarding theft," he said in a speech much buzzed about at the time. "The value of such a partnership is frankly beyond question; the only question is why it hasn't happened before now."
It took three years, but Chernin's speech finally produced results.
According to insiders, the idea for Movielabs first spun out of Chernin's speech in 2002, as well as heated words between Chernin, Michael Eisner and a top Intel exec at Senate hearings that year on the issue of content protection.
With Fox as the primary driver, studios started talking about the Movielab idea in 2003 but weren't able to come to an agreement.
But with piracy at the top of his agenda, new topper Dan Glickman got the idea going again this past year. By June the MPAA board approved the plan and made it a top priority after the U.S. Supreme Court condemned online piracy in the Grokster case this summer.
Unlike in 2002, every big studio now devotes significant resources to fighting piracy, with one or more senior execs focused entirely on the problem.
How the tech community will greet Movielabs, however, depends on whether it ultimately becomes a friend or a way for Hollywood to avoid working with Silicon Valley.
Org will devote some resources to evaluating antipiracy technologies and making recommendations to its studio owners.
In this way, it could help tech companies gain access to Hollywood.
It could also discourage individual studios from making deals with tech companies with whom they already have a tight relationship but may not be offering the best products.
When Movielabs identifies needs it feels aren't being served by tech companies, however, it will commission its own original product development. Thus a studio-funded venture could end up owning the intellectual property at the heart of future antipiracy products. Movielabs would then license its patents to manufacturers.
"Our members looked at the market and realized that in addition to being able to evaluate what's out there, they also want to get involved in self-directed research and development," said Vans Stevenson, senior VP for state legislative affairs at the MPAA. "There are unique challenges specifically related to movies, and this was another way to accelerate this process."
Studios have worked together previously in the technology arena, including in Movielink, the still-small Internet video-on-demand company, and Digital Cinema Initiatives, which recently completed its work creating a unified technical specification for D cinema.
But Movielabs appears to be the most ambitious joint venture to date, leading some in the technology community to question why the studios have chosen to focus exclusively on piracy prevention.
"It would be great to see them spending some of this money to create new business models that take advantage of technological capabilities rather than trying to stifle them," said Fred Von Lohman, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.
(Austin Modine contributed to this report.)
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