Posted by Mike G on 12/28/05 11:44

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 19:59:30 GMT, "Schrodinger" <no@way.com> wrote:

>We have bought quite a few DVDs over Christmas, after not buying any for a
>few months.
>
>On every one there is a couple of minute long video about "Why steal
>intellectual property if you wouldn't steal anything else".
>
>This, of course, can't be skipped.
>
>I know the pre film unskippable ads (Disney specialism) have been discussed
>many times, but this is on *every* film.
>
>As long as it isn't a DVD filmed in a cinema, the advert is one very good
>reason *not* to buy DVDs.
>
>I am sick to death of the idiots behind DRM enforcement. I suppose we're
>not at the Sony stage yet - installing virii to enforce their DRM - but it's
>one step towards this crap.
>
>Sorry about the rant, but this stuff is beyond a joke.

Cast your mind back to the 80s when a lot of people owned ZX Spectrum
computers. If you bought a game such as "Jet Set Willy", you had to
hunt out a little multi-coloured card thing every time you played, as
the game insisted you typed in a code from this card as a means of
"copy protection". This was infuriatingly annoying. Of course if you
had a pirate version, it was probably cracked to remove this
protection, so the pirate users actually had a better product than the
folk who bought legitimate copies.

There were other systems in use at the time, like the myopia inducing
"lenslock" system (a password was displayed on the screen in a very
distorted format, and you had to squint through a tiny plastic lens to
undistort it and make it readable). All of them amounted to the same
thing.

Punishing the people who want to buy your products is never a good
marketing strategy, but it seems that CD, DVD and game producers
haven't learnt the lessons of the past. "Copy protecting" your DVDs
and CDs by making them non-standard (with the obvious side effect that
they will no longer work on x % of players) is a sure fire way of
turning many of your law-abiding customers into pirates. Putting
unskippable ads on your DVDs is another; installing malicious,
virus-like software on your customers' PCs when your CDs and DVDs
autorun is yet another.

What really pisses me off about the latter is that they rely on the
ignorance of the "average Joe/Jane" user who just wants to listen to
some nice music or watch a decent film, and wouldn't imagine in a
million years that a company like Sony would launch a full-scale
assault on his/her PC via a product they have paid their hard earned
money for. Anyone who knows the truth about this guff wouldn't touch
it with a bargepole.

Meanwhile the pirates just carry on as before, barely missing a
beat...

--
Mike

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