Apple announced the addition of a DVD burner to its Titanium PowerBook portable computer on Wednesday.
The burning question: Will consumers who burn billions of audio CDs a year use the new portables to bootleg Hollywood movies?
The answer: Probably not.
Even the Motion Picture Association of America doesn't seem too worried about it.
"The reason we're not particularly jumping up and down is we're spending a great deal of time in private forums with the people offering these products," said Scott Dinsdale, the MPAA's executive vice president of digital strategy.
Dinsdale acknowledged that MPAA officials had been in talks with Apple prior to its release of its SuperDrive, which burns DVDs as well as CDs. "We talk to everybody," he said.
New notebooks from Sony and Toshiba also sport DVD-R drives.
One result of those talks: The DVD drives in the new laptops are different than those used to stamp out mass-market movie discs, and will not burn bit-for-bit copies of them. Most releases today come on dual-layer discs, which are impossible to replicate exactly using the single-layer DVD-R drives sold to consumers.
"There are probably home users out there who buy DVD recorders thinking they're going to copy movies, only to find that they can't," said Mark Ely, who heads the desktop products group for Sonic Solutions in Novato, California, maker of MyDVD authoring software.
Both technical and business sources said when it comes to preventing piracy, the movie industry has learned from mistakes made by the music biz in terms of technology, availability and pricing.
"There was no concept of Napster or playing CDs on PCs when the format was defined," Ely said. "As a result, they've got a format that's inherently unprotected, but they don't want to stop selling discs. That kind of conundrum informed the MPAA when the DVD format was being developed."
Besides better -– or at least more challenging -- copy protection, Dinsdale said the movie industry would rely on competitive pricing and a variety of formats to discourage DVD piracy.
"If you offer the consumers enough sense of choice, they're less likely to feel they need to do something rash to snag it on their own," he said.
Programmers who claimed to have cracked and copied DVD said that while they felt no guilt about duplicating Hollywood's products, they rarely bothered to spend the two or more hours necessary to do so.
"Dude, it's $12 to buy it," one said. "The soundtrack album is $18. What does that tell you?"
