When management moves beyond innovation and trying to add value, and on to rent seeking, you get what Hollywood is trying to do to RealNetworks:

Hollywood's six major movie studios on Tuesday sued RealNetworks Inc. to prevent it from distributing DVD copying software that they said would allow consumers to "rent, rip and return" movies or even copy friends' DVD collections outright.

What I love is this, the next paragraph:

The studios stand to lose key revenue from the sale of DVDs, estimated by Adams Media Research at $15 billion in the U.S. this year, if consumers stop buying DVDs and instead copy rental discs from outlets like Netflix and Blockbuster.

Right... their business model is going up in flames, and they can't find a way to deal with places like Netflix (and iTunes, etc) - so instead, they try to ban technology. Never mind that the pirate operations that create cheap duplicates use industrial scale reproduction - it's so much simpler to punish the end customer, who might want to copy a legally owned DVD to his hard drive in order to watch it on a plane.

This is stupidity and lameness on an epic scale, and it demonstrates just how far down the path the studios and record labels are. They can't find a way to deal with reality, so they just lash out in all directions.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, copyright