The entertainment industry should be more innovative and develop new business models for online distribution of movies, music and television programs, is a common and widely accepted vision on the future of copyright. However, when downloading from illegal sources is not prohibited under Dutch law and European copyright is too fragmented, the industry is weary about investing heavily in online distribution platforms for the Dutch market. One of the main arguments for the Dutch legislator to allow downloads from illegal sources has been that it is impossible for consumers to distinguish legal from illegal content online, confirms parliamentary history. 

Future of Copyright talks about the possible solutions a .movie extension could provide herein with Roelof Meijer, director of SIDN, the Dutch internet domain registry. 

New generic domain names

"A .movie extension would be a generic Top Level Domain or gTLD," says Meijer. "However, it is debatable to what extent some of the new gTLDs are truly generic. A .com, which has been around much longer and stands for 'commercial' is of course very general, yet .movie would naturally apply to a more particular industry. For instance, there's already a .travel and .museum gTLD, which are not called generic but sponsored TLDs. However, if consumers don’t know what they can do with a new gTLD, they won’t use it and it will have little practical use. Essential for the success of  a .movie gTLD is therefore that the consumer knows that it exists and what use it is for them", explains the SIDN director. A good point, because who ever uses the .museum or .travel extensions?

Quality mark

"The situation in the Netherlands where large amounts of movies and music are downloaded from illegal sources for free is unfair. The entertainment industry could use a .movie extension to provide both clarity about the origin of the source and function as a quality label. That would have many advantages for consumers," says Meijer. “Consumers downloading a movie from a .movie extension could be sure that they are downloading with a legal source. It also provides confidence about the image and sound quality of the download and it being free of viruses and the like." 

The .movie extension would combine well with existing online distribution platforms. Licensees that already offer legal downloads through their own websites could make a redirect to the .movie extension.  

Issuance

Someone will have to ensure that the domains under the .movie extension are only issued to lawfully acting operators. “There is sufficient opportunity for that”, Meijer replies. "Basically, any organization can submit an application for a new gTLD to ICANN, the governing body for domain registration. That could very well be the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for the .movie gTLD. They would then have the opportunity to manage and control the issuance of domain names under their gTLD. "

Procedure

The applicant for a gTLD has to demonstrate that the new gTLD has a useful purpose, that solid and fair procedures exist for the issuance of domain names within that gTLD, and the organization is able to meet technical and facility procedures and costs requirements. A gTLD comes with substantial costs, both the annual subscription for making it available as for issuing underlying domains. "Yet the registration of a .movie domain wouldn’t need to be a lengthy exercise”, says Meijer. "If there are no obstacles with the application it could all be arranged within half a year. The applications for new gTLDs should be possible in the course of 2011."

.Music

The party that wishes to obtain the .movie extension should however not wait around too long. Recently the news came that ICANN is considering to issue the .music gTLD to the music.us initiative. That caused angry remarks from the RIAA, who said to be “concerned that a music themed gTLD will be used to enable wide scale copyright and trademark infringement". The RIAA subsequently threated with legal action if ICANN would continue the release of the .music gTLD. Quite frankly, isn’t the RIAA just a little too late? Hopefully the movie industry will be faster to understand the opportunities and benefits of a .movie gTLD and start the application process.

All in all, a. GTLD movie won’t provide a rock solid solution against piracy. There will always be people who prefer free, pirated content, even with sufficient legal online supply. A well-developed .movie gTLD however still has some great advantages. It would provide consumers of online entertainment who are willing to pay for their content a recognizable legal source for guaranteed safe and high quality movies. Moreover, it addresses the desire expressed by many that the industry itself should come up with new business models.