[Infowarrior] - Sony Won't Support Its Own Movie For An Oscar

[Richard Forno]

Sony Won't Support Its Own Movie For An Oscar Over Misplaced Piracy  
Fears
from the that-evil-internet-again dept
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091231/1109367563.shtml

One of Jack Valenti's final battles while still in charge of the MPAA  
was his silly, misguided war on DVD screeners. Screeners are copies of  
the movie (on DVD, obviously) that are sent out to people to view (to  
"screen") for awards shows and the like. Valenti freaked out that  
since these screeners went out before the official DVDs were out, they  
would lead to people uploading them online, creating a piracy problem.  
Of course, that assumed two incorrect things: that those movies  
weren't already online and that adding one more copy would create any  
sort of "problem." Valenti lost his initial battle to forbid studios  
from sending out DVD screeners, but what came next were a series of  
convoluted attempts to stop "piracy" via the screeners -- including  
sending DVDs that could only play in special players. Two years ago,  
studios finally realized how ridiculous and cumbersome this process  
was, so it dropped the special DVD player requirement, and instead  
went with a watermarking option. But that's crazy expensive. Each DVD  
screener now needs to be individually watermarked and tracked.

Given that, it seems that some studios are simply deciding not to  
support certain movies for the Academy Awards. johnjac points us to  
the news that folks involved with the movie Moon are pissed off that  
Sony won't send out DVD screeners for the movie, as they were hoping  
that actor Sam Rockwell might get an Oscar nod for his part in the  
movie. Sony claims that it's just too expensive to do the watermarking.

It's really no surprise that this comes from Sony Pictures, whose CEO,  
Michael Lynton, is on record as saying that nothing good has come from  
the internet, and then when questioned on that statement, stands by  
it. So I guess that Lynton doesn't use the internet, or he would know,  
as pointed out in the Slashfilm link above, that perfectly good copies  
of the movie -- sans watermark -- are already widely available for  
download. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever to waste money  
watermarking the DVDs. It won't make a difference. Yet, because of  
Lynton and his crew's misguided fears, Sony Pictures won't support  
this particular movie.