19 July 2000

But I digress…

Just as the process has become intensified by the Internet, the industry has intensified that coming out party beyond all previous recognition. It used to be that the new parents would take the baby around for everyone to see, visiting friends, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups. In the old days of distribution, the analogy was really true, as the big films would literally go from city to city, premiering afresh in each new town. Now, the coming out party is massive every time and the baby is expected to amass all the gifts it will need through its college years within a very short period of time. There's no time to wait so the baby can present itself though speech. No, the baby must be presented now and the baby must be so beautiful that everyone has to get into the tent to see it today.

But there's a little problem. When people got the invitation, there was this spectacular photo of the baby and no one told them that it took 20 hours of make-up and lighting and that the baby's eyes were really the eyes from another more beautiful baby and that they airbrushed out all of the baby fat. What the grandparents forgot was that the public might love the fat, little, flat-eyed baby that the parents so wanted to have if they didn't feel so abused when it turned out that the baby they came to see wasn't the baby in the crib. And sometimes, the public reminds the grandma and grandpa that their baby deserved a lot more love than they could ever have imagined.

It's all very Rosemary's Baby, isn't it?

I kind of started this column going in one direction and the analogy kind of took over. My first instinct is to apologize or to re-write. But on second thought, I feel okay about embracing that imperfection. That imperfection is what makes me and the column human. And every day, this is a work in progress. I can be wrong. I can be right. But the art is in the being, not the bottom line.

There are some ugly babies out there. And there is someone to love each and every one of them. But in our era of more, more, more, a little love isn't enough anymore. I guess that this column's box office analysis perpetuates that sickness in some ways. I have embraced what I hate, whether I want to admit it or not. Why? Because it fascinates me. And I know it fascinates many of you. Of course, this columnist also embraces the art and the artists of cinema. There is nothing more tiring than covering film festivals and yet, it is my favorite work in the year. I am human. This column is a fairly good reflection of me. Love me or hate me, if you read me for a while you will develop a relationship with me.

And that's all the movies ask of you. Take the time to develop the relationship. Studios, allow audiences the time to develop a relationship with the movies. Actors, you have to give of your time if you want the public to make the connection. We are all running so fast from meeting to meeting, from cell call to cell call, from e-mail to e-mail… movies are an opportunity to get some perspective on the world. Art is a refuge from the clumsiness of real life. Take some time to live.

READER OF THE DAY: B&D on Tuesday's E-Me questions: "No David, I don't want more Mickey D's at the movies, and neither does the rest of your audience. You're speaking to an audience of movie lovers, who not only listen to several reviewers, but know enough not to slavishly heed their warnings nor view their every rave.

You've estimated Roger's audience to be no more than a million (DAVID NOTE: More like 2 million), and you're speaking to a subset of that, so I'm afraid our wishes of higher quality films with more complete character development and working plots is mostly irrelevant to big Hollywood's bottom line. But you know this already.

Now on to DeCSS.

I'm not surprised at Eric's quotes regarding DeCSS. Most attorneys tell their clients to remain silent about pending cases, and with good reason. There are three points of consideration about the case, ranging in order from simple to complex.

Point the first. The DeCSS source code was made a matter of public record in an unsealed affidavit by the MPAA attorneys. They included the source code in their affidavit. The affidavit is unsealed. It's public record, available for anybody who asks. Whether the affidavit was reproduced in whole on the 2600 Web site, or the source code in part, without attribution to the affidavit, I can't say. I've seen neither the site itself, nor the evidence submitted by the MPAA, though I have read the affidavit in question on another website. More disturbing is the MPAA's suit against those sites who are linking to those sites which host the DeCSS code.

Point the second. The CCA (Copyright Control Authority), the organization charged with developing the CSS (Content Scrambling System), failed to use the industry standard practice of peer reviewed open development in the CSS algorithm. The result is a laughably weak encryption system. The decryption was helped along by the fact that Xing Technologies left their decryption key unencrypted on a DVD. Both Xing and the CCA should be facing due diligence lawsuits from the MPAA and the studios.

Point the third. Just as we no longer sue VCR and camcorder manufacturers because their products have non-infringing uses, so too does the DeCSS code have non-infringing uses. Would you feel any moral compunction about dumping a freshly arrived DVD to your laptop hard drive just before you left for Toronto so you could view it on the plane, if your laptop didn't have a DVD player? I certainly wouldn't. At present, sending even moderate quality a/v files over the Internet is an expensive proposition, nevermind the 6Gbs of a high quality DVD. But that's only a temporary stay. And what of the poor Linux users, who have no DVD players for their operating system? Okay, there is a DVD licensee with one in development, but no other licensees seem interested. You can call that the price of using an alternative OS, but for my money, developing software to view a movie on your own computer, whether or not you pay a license fee for the privilege, is fair use. Notice that this last item has little to do with the Corley suit, as he did not write the software in question.

Many of the items in that last point overlap with the RIAA members' current gripe with MP3, though not with their Napster gripe, which involves actual sharing.

Another point to consider is the studios' eventual move to digital distribution. Will it come slow enough for secure delivery over dedicated circuits, or will it be so soon that satellite delivery is required? If it's delivered over satellite, then every Ain't It Cool geek with an analog satellite dish will be able to capture the feed and dump it to their pc for decryption.

And yet another point is that digital piracy does occur, but it occurred long before DeCSS appeared on the scene. To date it's been by way of analog transfers to digital, and from there either over the lines, or to video cd. It certainly is nowhere near the numbers of camcorder to vhs piracy, which doesn't appear to be hurting ticket sales any.

Another DVD bugaboo is regionalization. As near as I can see, the only reason this exists is to keep me from viewing obscure anime titles from Japan, or obscure European titles that the studios don't want to market over here. I realize that the studios feel that global release dates are too expensive and unworkable, but I want my anime. On a side note, most porno DVDs are nonregionalized, and they also make use of the multiple camera angle feature of DVDs. And they haven't been submitted to the MPAA for ratings, either. I don't know what pornographers Jack Valenti is talking about.

Bear in mind, I am not a lawyer, not on any jury, and my company will disavow the contents of this email if they ever read it, and so the contents of this letter are worth exactly what you paid for it..."

E ME: Well! He took his time to make his points. I'm really looking forward to Civilian Voices. What do you think?