As Rashmi mentioned, we’re going to be taking a look back at 10 years of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act this week, in a series of video interviews with innovators, academics, policy advocates and industry representatives. Here’s the first part in that series, an interview with Vijay Raghavan, who serves as a Director at Qorvis Communications and who co-founded the now extinct video-to-iPod service, Load N’ Go Video:
[video:http://www.vimeo.com/2039581 width:430 height:241]
Three years ago, Vijay co-founded Load N’ Go Video with the intention of providing a service to consumers who wanted to watch video content on their iPods without the hassle of ripping DVDs, re-encoding videos and uploading videos to their iPods. Load N’ Go sold both iPods and studio DVDs and would pre-load any DVDs you purchased from them onto a video iPod for your mobile viewing pleasure. While the Load N’ Go team thought that the service they provided was perfectly legal, the Motion Picture Association of America and its member companies begged to differ. A lawsuit was brought against Load N’ Go and the end result was that the company went out of business. In the above video, Vijay walks us through the history of Load N’ Go and the role that the DMCA played in its demise.
[Note: Vijay is incorrectly identified in the video as a Senior Associate at Qorvis while his current title is Director. An updated version of this video, which corrects this error, will be posted shortly]