The Almighty and His Servant

Copyright infringement should have been seriously stifled by Blu-Ray, but it wasn't.

I have always held the view that the way to fight content infringement was to make the original content more accessible and restrict the channels through which the content could be dispersed. The first part of this comes down to whether content authors are willing to price their original content at a price point where bona fide buyers are willing to pick up a copy instead of ripping it off the net; and while exploitative pricing is a serious culprit on the infringement scene, my discussion today will focus on the second part of the analysis, namely, how best to limit the channels of distribution.

I have always held the golden key here to be quality with a capital Q. Take movie piracy for instance. It wasn’t until the advent of high-compression technologies such as DivX and Xvid that the distribution of copyrighted movies saw its boom. The reasoning is simple: provide the masses with an easy means of distributing content at at or near the same quality as the original and with an internet line that keeps getting faster and faster, ultimately you will lose the war.

That’s why when Blu-Ray technology was first announced I saw with it the promise of not only an unparalleled viewing experience, but so to a slap in the face to movie rippers everywhere. Here was a movie format which, if you wanted to preserve its exact quality in a file for your PC, could run north of 50GB depending on the movie length. That’s large enough to consume a sizable fraction of most consumer hard drives, and would prove a formidable foe against even the most blazing internet download speeds.

So why has film piracy continued to run rampant? The answer, oddly enough, is for the same reason it boomed in the first place. If the quality of a DVD needed to be compressed into a DivX format to be quickly transferrable, so too now has Blu-Ray found its nemesis in the ubiquitous MKV file format. MKV files serve as open containers that can hold any type of media content, and are the likely home for the high-def heavyweight format to travel in the information underground. With compressed audio and uncompressed video, a typical MKV file will run about 10-15GB, which while not a terribly accessible size, is still small enough to pack into an evening’s worth of downloading. As one friend put it to me, “You have to plan ahead, but you can definitely get Blu-Ray quality on your High-Def TV without the need for a Blu-Ray player or even the Blu-Ray Movie you want to watch.”

The problem is one that should have content producers fast tracking ahead to the next file format. With ever-increasing storage capacity and faster internet download speeds, the time has come to bring more to the table than a better quality picture and more immersive sound. So long as the film industry relies on this tried and failed formula, we will have many more years of copyrighted content splashed all over the internet.

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