Universal Pictures: “DRMs do not stop piracy”
Point, counter point. After our Blu-ray post, here’s Senior VP of Universal Pictures Jerry Pierce chatting with TG Daily about all things HD-DVD. Discover why Universal selected HD-DVD, his opinions on DRM, and why he thinks HD-DVD is gonna kick Blu-ray’s ass…
TG Daily: Copy protection or digital rights management (DRM) is another major issue in high definition video. What is your view on necessary DRM?
Jerry Pierce: Different studios have different philosophies in this area. It is our view that we have to provide customers a rich experience so they can do what they want to do within their home. We don’t expect them to make copies of HD DVDs for their friends. And we don’t think customers want to do that either. So, DRM needs to give them some restrictions beyond what both the customer and we believe are the proper usage rules. That’s what we need to achieve. DRMs enable business models, they don’t stop piracy. And we want to make sure that we have a rich one without making it so easy so that you can violate what we agreed on when you purchased a movie.
TG Daily: Let’s go into the other direction: What would be an acceptable DRM approach?
Jerry Pierce: I don’t think DRM is about a certain technology, DRM is about usage rules. If consumers purchase an HD version of one of our movies and if they make a same quality copy and they can hand that to their friends - and if that was easy to do - they cross the line. But streaming around the house is fine with us. We absolutely support that.
TG Daily: What about private copies of movies?
Jerry Pierce: A properly controlled private copy, with a version that runs on the consumer’s hard drive and their media server, yes, I believe that there should be ways to enable that.
Source: TG Daily