Feed Studios Continue To Ignore Just How Badly They Hamstring Legal Download Sites (techdirt.com)
It's been clear since the outset that the movie download sites supported by Hollywood studios have been far too clunky and user-unfriendly to attract many users, and they've made only marginal improvements over the years. They provide the perfect insight into how the movie industry puts its stupid fears about piracy above everything else -- including creating a product that consumers will actually want to pay for. While it's been blindingly obvious to many of us, Jeff writes in to point out that BusinessWeek is highlighting, for Hollywood's benefit, the fact that these sites will never be successful when copy protection is the top priority. It's often easy to marginalize complaints that an overemphasis on DRM and copy protection are hurting big content's business as the whining of a tiny group of geeky consumers, but articles like this one in mainstream publications make it clear that isn't the case, and that only when services like these are usable and useful do they stand a chance of succeeding. Still, the movie studios must not read BusinessWeek, since it was almost a year ago that another article in the magazine pointed out that the movie studios couldn't find a buyer for Movielink, the download site they own, because all the potential buyers realized that it will never succeed as long as the studios insist on locking down their content so rigidly.
