Posts Tagged ‘John Riccitiello’

The annual Reuters Global Media Summit starts Monday and runs through Thursday in New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, and Taipei, featuring exclusive, private interviews with top executives from media and entertainment companies.

Content from the four-day event can be found on its site, and Reuters Insider subscribers will have exclusive access to live recordings of the interviews.

Executives scheduled to participate include: Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes; Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman; Publicis CEO Maurice Levy; News Corp. deputy chairman, president, and chief operating officer Chase Carey; Financial Times CEO John Ridding; Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello; WPP CEO Martin Sorrell; Disney-ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney; Pearson chief financial officer Robin Freestone; Star TV India (News Corp) CEO Uday Shankar; Vocento CEO Jose Manuel Vargas; Penguin Books CEO John Makinson; United States Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun; Next Media CEO Jimmy Lai; Kabel Deutschland CEO Adrian von Hammerstein; World Wrestling Entertainment COO Donna Goldsmith; Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick; The New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; The New York Times CEO Janet Robinson; Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick; Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose; MLB Network CEO Tony Petitti; Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Robert Bowman; Informa CEO Peter Rigby; DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy; Motorola Mobility president Daniel Moloney; Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake; and JCDecaux co-CEO and chairman Jean-Charles Decaux.

EA CEO John Riccitiello isn’t buying into the whole Spore-DRM controversy. As Silicon Alley Insider reports, he said in a recent interview that the game is still selling well, despite the stringent copy protection that has many buyers up in arms:

“I personally hate DRM…. But I don’t like locks on my door, and I don’t like to use keys in my car… I’d like to live in a world where there are no passports. Unfortunately, we don’t—and I think the vast majority of people voted with their wallets and went out and bought Spore.”

The article pointed to a couple of recent quotes from record label execs saying that there hasn’t been a mass movement to DRM-free music either, although Amazon’s MP3 store has captured roughly 5 to 8 percent of market share.

It’s true that many customers don’t care. But it’s also true that there’s a difference between locking the front door and, say, telling you that you can only listen to your music in the living room and not in the den, or that you can’t upgrade your computer without having to phone a bunch of companies and ask each one for permission—which is where Riccitiello’s analogy falls apart.