Somiatruites, Ciberderechos en la Red

The answer to video piracy, publicado en el McKinseyQuaterly (necesita registro) hace un repaso interesante del equilibrio de fuerzas entre la industria tecnológica, por un lado, y la industria de medios y de producción cinematográfica por el otro. Resumiendo: los estudios y las televisiones no están dispuestos a que sus contenidos sean distribuidos en tecnologías que no son "seguras". Por seguras se entiende tecnologías que posean una serie de sistemas como los Digital Right Management (DRM) que permiten a los propietarios de los contenidos especificar los usos permitidos. Es decir, una serie de tecnologías incrustadas en televisiones, videos, grabadores digitales, etc que regulan si un programa se puede grabar o no, si una vez grabado en un disco duro se puede pasar a un DVD, etc.

Se trata del enfrentamiento extenso entre toda la industria tecnológica y el sector de producción cultural y que apunta a un cambio radical que se ha producido en nuestro tejido cultural porque si hasta el último cuarto del siglo XX las empresas de tecnologías eran independientes de las empresas de contenidos es a partir de finales de los años ochenta cuando las empresas de contenidos imponen al sector tecnológico condiciones sobre cómo deben ser las tecnologías. Ha ocurrido ya con las DAT (Digital Audio Tape, hacia 1992), con los DVD (hacia 1997), con la música digital actualmente, y va a ocurrir con la televisión digital y toda una serie de dispositivos relacionados, etc.

Es un asunto problemático que quien es el propietario de los contenidos condicione también las propiedades de la tecnología que permiten acceder a ellos, porque al final quien va a salir perjudicada va a ser la sociedad en su conjunto.

Recojo amplios extractos del artículo:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a novel form of media distribution is promising to launch lucrative new content services, but the industries involved can’t agree on how to protect them from theft or how to split the revenues they generate. At the birth of the cable TV industry, in the 1970s, the story had a happy ending—the players collaborated to develop encryption standards and to set up a revenue-sharing model that now generates more than billion in revenues yearly for the cable and satellite TV industries and has created more than 0 billion in business value for the cable companies, the content companies, and the makers of TVs, satellite dishes, and switching equipment.

Fast-forward 30 years and, as a famous baseball player once said, "it’s déjà vu all over again." Companies in three industries—the content creators, the broadband providers, and the PC makers—find themselves stalled as they try to deliver digital video over broadband connections. This time, there is an added element of urgency: if they fail to act, illegal distribution will likely ramp up to meet market demand, and bootlegged movies could hurt box-office and downstream revenues, much as file sharing took a bite out of compact-disc sales. Video in 2004 stands where music did in 1998...


The studios, production companies, and TV networks that create the content want some protection against theft before they offer their programs and films in an open digital environment. In addition, some of these companies are wondering if they should set up their own video-on-demand distribution services to avoid having to split the revenues with the broadband providers, which have so far proved hesitant to thwart piracy. But the cable and telecom companies that provide broadband services to their subscribers worry about a backlash if they act as watchdogs for the studios and networks. The result is that few studios are providing content. So even though more than 13 percent of US households have broadband Internet access, the market for legal digital-content services remains underexploited, with total revenues of less than billion.

why aren’t PC makers pushing for video on demand? Because they, like the broadband service providers, worry that consumers will resist products with built-in security measures, such as embedded chips that prevent the copying of films or songs without the copyright holder’s permission...


for the hardware manufacturers, they can improve their position by agreeing to make their devices less friendly to theft. They might be under no legal obligation to embed copyright protection in PCs, MP3 players, and set-top boxes, but doing so would send a strong signal to the content providers, encouraging them to develop services that will in turn sell more hardware. Much as early makers of videocassette recorders learned to stop building machines with two slots for the easy copying of tapes, hardware manufacturers should ask themselves as they design a product whether it will facilitate theft.