Back in the day when I was working in the film & TV industry, I learned that engineers working in this industry was viewed as a “necessary evil”. That’s good, because I felt that film studios and their management were a “necessary evil” as well, since they paid my employers who in turn, paid me.
The ultimate irony was that we had to have multi-region DVD players (I’m assuming they had to either be chipped or had to use manufacturer’s remote control codes to enable multi-region – at the very worst we’ve had to import the players from abroad) to play content from people we were being paid by to do work for. When artists working on big budget Hollywood financed productions required to watch reference material on DVD (usually either other films, but sometimes expensive stock footage on DVD), we couldn’t allow them to play commercial DVDs on their Linux workstations because no official and legal CSS playback library was available. They had to play them on a small portable DVD player (usually the artist’s own), or go into a producer’s office and watch it there on the chipped/multi-region DVD player. There was, of course, a representative from the film studio whenever a screening was put on, to ensure that nobody ever went into the screening theatre with possible recording equipment. Contradiction city! They make it hard for us to do our work, and then eye us suspiciously when we want to see what we’ve done for them!
But then again, the film industry IS one big contradiction, and it’s high time it sorts itself out once and for all. And this is why I love this article from Peter Serafinowicz – actor writer, producer, director – who explains why he sources his films and books the way he does. The fact he has to download a torrent of a movie he is in to be able to include footage in his own showreel, and that his work for a promo video is region restricted, prove that the entertainment industry keeps both it’s fingers in the ears and is shouting, “la la la la la la – I can’t hear you!”. If it’s THIS difficult for people at his level getting them to co-operate with them, the consumer has no chance whatsoever for a reasonable fair use policy.
