The BBC News website has been running a series of “Ask the Industry” articles, where regular people send in their questions about the future of the entertainment industry and they “theoretically” get answered by industry executives. I say “theoretically” because the answers the execs give are piss-weak. First we had digital music, and now we have digital film. Read and marvel as these PR robots try desperately to not give a single honest answer to these simple questions. For example, “What’s the point of DRM?” Most of the answers amount to: “Without DRM, the legitimate ways you have of paying for music would not be possible,” which doesn’t actually answer the question. (And then of course you get the Napster idiot at the end claiming that somehow their DRM isn’t as bad as Apple’s, because it works with more MP3 players or something.) It’s all wank. Also note the perfectly valid question about “Why do movie companies still insist on DVD region encoding?”, to which the only real response the idiots offer is “Because they can.” (Okay, so the classification excuse isn’t a bad one, but that doesn’t stop kids from getting region-free discs from elsewhere…) It’s like watching a Presidential debate, where each person only answers the question they want to hear without respect to the words that were actually uttered.
