I keep seeing stories about how Apple is getting ready to offer movie downloads through iTunes. The story’s been the same for months: Steve Jobs wants you to be able to buy movies, wants them all the cost the same price. The studios want you to only be able to rent them, and want to be able to charge more for certain movies. Maybe Apple’s making headway?
I’ve been thinking about the terms of buying stuff from iTunes. For music, there are a few restrictions involving how many copies you can make and how many computers can play the songs, but there’s a big, intentional loophole that lets you burn the songs to a CD. It’s quite possible that I’m going to want to listen to music I’m buying now in many, many years. (What better way to embarass my kids?) The iTunes Music Store may be around in thirty years to authenticate my songs, but if not, I can back them up now and convert them to other digital formats down the road.
What about movies? As with music, I’m probably going to want to watch movies I buy in twenty or thirty years. Presently I own lots of movies on DVD. It’s improbable that DVD will still be the prevailing movie format in 2020, so I’ll either be stuck having to hold onto my old DVD player or I’ll have to buy new copies of the movies in the new format, right? Well, actually it’s conceivable that someone will come up with a good storage format for movies and I’ll be able to rip them to my computer just like I do for music now. Five years ago I had a computer with a hard disk that couldn’t fit my whole music collection, and now I have an iPod with twice as much space as I have songs. Storage isn’t going to be an issue, though someone will have to work out how to make a DVD ripping program that is 1. fast and, 2. doesn’t get them sued by the MPAA before they can come up with a name for it. (Note: I’m quite aware that DVD ripping programs already do exist, but they’re still fairly fringe.) Also, I need to be able to rip my DVDs at full quality but be able to quickly downsample them for iPod play (or we need iPods with screen resolutions to match our DVDs).
If I had to guess, I’d say that in five or ten more years we won’t be buying any media on discs. We’ll be downloading it all. With that is going to come an enormous need for good backups, or an online storage solution that hasn’t been smoothly implemented yet. The problem is, are the studios going to let us make good backups of our movies? I’m certain we’ll be able to copy the files around, but they’re going to depend on Apple (or whoever’s) servers to decrypt, right? A record that my mom bought forty years ago still plays. If she gives it to me and I record it to my computer, I’ll be able to play it my entire life, and pass it on to my grandchildren when I’m gone. Are the movies I buy from Apple’s store going to give me that kind of lifetime? Maybe that sounds crazy, but it’s my property, right?
I’m not going to advocate a boycott of the iTMS for Movies if Apple doesn’t give me rights to copy and preserve my movies, but I think of the hundred or so movies that I currently own on DVD. Someone who’s 15 now might start building a similar collection using entirely downloaded movies, and that thousand dollar movie library is going to depend on there being a server somewhere that’s going to verify that person’s identity. It’ll be an interesting long haul.