Sony Won't Support Its Own Movie For An Oscar Over Misplaced Piracy Fears

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php

from the that-evil-internet-again dept

One of Jack Valenti's final battles while still in charge of the MPAA was his silly, misguided war on DVD screeners. Screeners are copies of the movie (on DVD, obviously) that are sent out to people to view (to "screen") for awards shows and the like. Valenti freaked out that since these screeners went out before the official DVDs were out, they would lead to people uploading them online, creating a piracy problem. Of course, that assumed two incorrect things: that those movies weren't already online and that adding one more copy would create any sort of "problem." Valenti lost his initial battle to forbid studios from sending out DVD screeners, but what came next were a series of convoluted attempts to stop "piracy" via the screeners -- including sending DVDs that could only play in special players. Two years ago, studios finally realized how ridiculous and cumbersome this process was, so it dropped the special DVD player requirement, and instead went with a watermarking option. But that's crazy expensive. Each DVD screener now needs to be individually watermarked and tracked.

Given that, it seems that some studios are simply deciding not to support certain movies for the Academy Awards. johnjac points us to the news that folks involved with the movie Moon are pissed off that Sony won't send out DVD screeners for the movie, as they were hoping that actor Sam Rockwell might get an Oscar nod for his part in the movie. Sony claims that it's just too expensive to do the watermarking.

It's really no surprise that this comes from Sony Pictures, whose CEO, Michael Lynton, is on record as saying that nothing good has come from the internet, and then when questioned on that statement, stands by it. So I guess that Lynton doesn't use the internet, or he would know that perfectly good copies of the movie -- sans watermark -- are already widely available for download. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever to waste money watermarking the DVDs. It won't make a difference. Yet, because of Lynton and his crew's misguided fears, Sony Pictures won't support this particular movie.

Sony being Sony! 

[¤ Çhã®mèð ¤]

 
Interesting, I have not liked Sony ever since they took over Columbia pictures. As for Mr. Lynton saying nothing good has come from the internet, I'm sure when he is tucked in bed at night with his web cam and wireless key board it's a different story!
 lmao    

[FM Refugee]

...man...I've been losing a certain amount of respect for Sony in recent years.  Having been in the electronics repair business for a good part of the last 40 years, I developed a lot of that respect because they built 'hardware' that was of pretty consistently good quality.  Of course, most of their manufacturing is outsourced now (even the once-mighty Japanese have resorted to that sorry practice!), but they still build pretty good stuff.  But they have also gotten into the media business big time, and boy, have they gotten anal!  They once had an advertising slogan they used in the US: 'Sony, No Baloney'...certainly does not apply these days...