Friday Open Thread > Hollywood Will Let You Copy Movies, Sort Of

Have you ever wondered why you can't download movies and write them to DVDs, the way you can buy songs from iTunes and make CDs from them? The reason why you can't legally burn commercial DVDs is that movie studios, electronics makers and computer makers agreed not to allow it. That has changed this afternoon.

For years, the trade group that administers that agreement, the DVD Copy Control Association, has been talking about amending their deal to allow DVD burning at home. These negotiations they have proved as complex as amending the Constitution, as various groups jockey for advantage. The group announced this change more than a year ago, and it's taken more than a year to get to final approval. A spokesman for the group said the amendment was approved last night.

It will take a while for consumers to see the effect of this change. The first step will likely be services that burn DVDs on demand from store kiosks or from central facilities, such as at Amazon.com. This will enable people to buy lesser known titles from movie and television studios that aren't worth traditional distribution.

As for burning at home, services like Movielink, which was recently bought by Blockbuster, are expected to start selling movies that can be downloaded to DVDs.

As with every intersection between technology and Hollywood, there are more than a few catches. First of all, movies will have to be burned onto special DVDs, which will likely cost more than regular writable DVDs. That is because the disks will be preprinted with codes meant to prevent copying. And there is a royalty payment on the disks that will go to a group, led by Sonic, that helped develop the technology.

Moreover, you can't use it to back up your existing DVDs. Nor can you watch the downloaded version on your computer or on your portable video player. So, like other forms of legal online movie distribution, it's a safe bet that downloading to DVDs will take off slowly. Still every last bit of legal craziness that can be removed will make it easier for people to design the sort of services that people might eventually want to use.