You could call it a small shift in the movie industry's way of handling online piracy, but a group of media and tech giants – including Microsoft, Walt Disney, IBM, Intel, Warner Brothers, and Matsushita – are said to have agreed "in principle" on letting consumers make their own legal backups of next-generation DVD discs and share their content on portable players.
Calling the technology they're pledging to develop "Advanced Access Content System," the companies said late July 13 that they're hoping to have a product available to license later in 2004.
According to numerous reports, the next-generation DVD disc is expected to deliver superior audio and high-definition video in spite of studios and manufacturers not yet having consensus on which among several competing formats will prevail as an industry standard.
For now, DVD discs are protected by the Content Scrambling System which blocks copying, but the computer and consumer electronics industries have been pushing the media world to make room for less-encumbered media sharing between television sets, computers, and portable devices like MP3 players.
No further details of the in-principle agreement were available at this writing. But the announcement came just days after a joint survey by the Motion Picture Association of America and OTX called Internet movie piracy an epidemic, with one in four Internet users surveyed saying they downloaded a movie online.
