MPAA won't be RIAA II

It's far from clear that the music industry has learned anything from its war against illicit file trading, but the movie industry has certainly learned a lot by watching the RIAA's missteps and the resulting fallout. The New York Times does a good job of summarizing the lessons it's picked up.

Among them: Don't sue your customers and don't bury your head in the sand, hoping that the disruptive technology will go away.

Still, several tech execs tell the Times that Hollywood isn't learning nearly fast enough and isn't moving aggressively enough to secure its future:

... the biggest challenge for the video industry lies not with pirates, but with bytes, cash and lawyers.

What the industry needs, technology executives say, is to look harder for tools and contracts that allow people to get the movies they want at a competitive price, rather than concentrate on actions that restrict access.

"The film industry has a tremendous opportunity in front of it, and the bar is very low," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a company that tracks file-trading activity for the entertainment industries.

Movie companies can prevent the free swapping of their wares from mushrooming into a mass phenomenon, Mr. Garland said, by offering easy-to-use services with broad selection that will shape the consumer experience, instead of trying to change bad behavior after the fact.

The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: "Why do they want to steal from us?" The answer, he said, is simple: "Because you won't sell them what they want." The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.

I have to agree: merely avoiding the mistakes made by someone else don't guarantee that you'll get it right. The movie industry's moves to adapt to a digital marketplace remind me of what wireless companies were saying three years ago, during the peak of the "wireless Web" hype. Carriers, manufacturers and vendors all seemed determined to avoid repeating the mistakes made when the wired Web was built during the 1990s. That meant agreeing on standards early, tackling regulatory and privacy concerns proactively, lining up premium content and charging users for it from the start and, above all, refusing to let Microsoft get in on the action.

Overall, I think they largely succeeded in those goals. But do you use your cell phone to access the Internet?