Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xuzz | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting thing here, to me, is not that this happened — with the MPAA as it is — but this is the first time we've really seen something like this.

For example, the MPAA does not require Apple to block movie purchases or playback on jailbroken iPhones or Apple TVs. Maybe that something overlooked in the Apple contacts that they've gotten a chance to correct in their deals with Google?

View on HN

The difference is of course: with Apple, rooting a device is not an officially sanctioned thing to do. With Google, it is.

There is probably a huge amount of truth to this. Apple puts enough effort into stopping jail breaking that they can easily claim their movie blocking is done through those efforts.

I would suggest that the lack of a Netflix app on WebOS would corroborate this. You only have to enter a short key combination to unlock the phone (put it into dev mode).

MPAA is not the entity that either distributes or licenses the movies for distribution, so they have nothing to do with it.

The players that make those kinds of decisions are:

a) distributors/sellers like Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu

b) owners of the content that license this content to distributors (i.e. movie studios, tv networks etc.)

A decision like that might have been made by a distributor, out of their own volition, or forced on the distributor by a content owner via contract.

>MPAA is not the entity that either distributes or licenses the movies for distribution, so they have nothing to do with it.

Who do you think "b" is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_A...

Yes the MPAA doesn't distribute the licenses, but no that doesn't mean they have nothing to do with it.

They influence under what conditions content can be played on a device. Consider the case of CableCARD, where a device manufacturer has to have their hardware and OS certified before they will be allowed to make a device and distribute drivers for it.

A consortium of cable providers enforces that requirement, but ultimately, content producers are the ones demanding these restrictions (like the various copy restriction flags).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com