Gantman

The entertainment industry is getting nervous about efforts like Google’s 1Gbps fiber network that will deliver blazing fast broadband connections to American consumers.  Why?  Because they will use those networks to steal movies, of course.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) devotes a lot of its day fretting about copyright infringement issues, so the thought of a broadband network capable of moving the contents of a DVD in less than one minute has them worried.

Howard Gantman, an MPAA spokesman, warned South Korea’s super speed networks “decimated” the home entertainment marketplace thanks to widespread piracy.

Gantman, speaking to Bloomberg News, believes faster speeds make content theft easier, creating an almost on-demand experience that slower file swapping networks never delivered.

But there is no evidence the handful of gigabit broadband networks now operating in the United States are hotbeds of copyright theft.  Google itself stresses they are not getting into the triple-play broadband, phone, and cable TV business in Kansas City to embolden movie thieves.

In fact, Google thinks faster broadband speeds will only fuel growth in the authorized content business, where consumers can get access to higher quality movies and TV shows without buffering or reducing video quality to stream effectively on slower networks.