Please keep in mind, that this settlement pertains ONLY TO BONUS MATERIALS on DVD's. Amazing...All that work, and the legal language applies only to the bonus material! As the writer of the blog I supplied the link to above says,

"But in fact, the settlement represents another round of chicanery on the part of lavishly rich entertainment conglomerates to ensure that 100% captioning shall never be reached."

The MPAA, as a lobby, generaly has a track record of trying to defend their business interests very strongly. Nothing wrong with this, it's their living on the line. But often, they get far too heavy handed, as evidenced by their renewed efforts to control a feature of YOUR PERSONAL TELEVISION VIEWING AT HOME called Selectable Output Control (SOC). What is this and why do they want control over it? Good question, I asked the same thing, and here is the abbreviated answer:

"SOC allows a cable or satellite programming distributor to shut off analog or digital output on selected broadcasts, an option that MPAA wants to have if it begins to distribute early-run movies on cable. The studios want to be able to close down the analog route and offer only digital content, which they see as the most secure."

The MPAA views SOC (the part of your TV where you plug in your DVR/DVD player/recorder, etc. into the red, yellow, and white ports) as the least secure way to transmit a movie when compared to all digital transmission of movies. And they want to ensure that they block a movie from being shown on your TV if you don't have digital only TV. That's right....if you have a cable package, and have a SOC based TV instead of an all digital capable TV, even though you pay for the cable package, you would NOT be able to watch a movie they provide if they (MPAA) have control over the SOC. They have petitioned the FCC for this ban to be lifted so they can protect their works from piracy, allegedly.

I say "allegedly" because, according to Gary Shapiro in his article on Huffington Post, the MPAA even admits that they can't prove this form of piracy, and that most piracy happens differently than what they are trying to prevent with this petition to the FCC. The article from Shapiro is very informative, and can be found here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-shapiro/dear-fcc-please-dont-let_b_355191.html

So, dear readers, which is it? Is the MPAA simply over-reaching and trying to turn into an Orwellian "big brother" type organization unneccessarily, or is this a legitimate avenue they need to take to protect their movie interests? Based on what I've read so far, it seems they are over-reaching, in a BIG way, with this petition to the FCC.

From their headlong rush into the digital conversion in theaters without ensuring that a standard captioning format is in place ahead of time, to the renewed petition to the FCC for SOC control, this multi-billion dollar industry seems to be trying to do their very best to prove what a consumer-unfriendly business model they really have. Please understand, as a professional in the security field, I completely empathize with their efforts to protect their works. If companies didn't take SOME measures to protect their assets, they would go broke. But this one seems over the top, because any good company will justify actions like this with good hard DATA, not projections that can't be quantified. And when you factor in that they do not yet have a standard in place for the transmission of captions via digital, one has to wonder if, even if you DO have an acceptable (digital output) capable TV, would you be able to watch the movies with captioning? At this point in time, it appears the answer to that is "No".