Dear MPAA

Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson pens a “letter” to the next head of the Motion Picture Association pleading them to embrace technology, not thwart it. Anderson argues that cumbersome DRM technologies will only drive legitimate users away and there’s already newer avenues for movie watches to share films:

Online file-trading is going to get worse, too. Finally, on the wide-open Internet, the Napster for movies has been born. It’s called BitTorrent, and because it can pull a single film from dozens of computers simultaneously (reassembling the pieces on a user’s PC), it’s incredibly fast. More important, it turns the economics of file-trading on its head. The most popular files download the fastest and make the lowest demands on the host servers (because there are more computers to download from, and the load is balanced among them). The usual barrier to sharing, say, a prerelease of Return of the King – the fear that greedy downloaders will swamp your PC – is greatly diminished. Huge hard drives are getting so cheap that digital video libraries will soon be commonplace.

Anderson’s argument is similar to what I said the other day when it comes to music downloads – make it easy and compelling for users to obtain goods legally (i.e. pay for them) and the majority will.

[Link to Anderson’s piece via Good Morning Silicon Valley.]