Josh Nichols

Anti-piracy ads make me want to pirate

I’ve seen the F.B.I. anti-piracy warning of doom way too many times in my life. No matter how many times I angrily mash the ‘menu’ button on my remote, I can’t skip it. Now we have unskipable anti-piracy advertisements too. I’m done dealing with this “Operation prohibited by disk” bullshit. My movie viewing habits are going to change. Hollywood, are you listening?

Being a Web designer, I’m pretty sensitive to usability problems and not allowing a user to do what they want is a huge one. The next DVD player I buy is going to be a player that never prevents me from doing what I want. If I have to buy a region-free one from Hong Kong to do it, so be it.

If I’m going to go that far, I might as well just stick with my current DVD player and buy the region-free bootlegs off of Ebay. Sure, they’re cheap and poor quality, but I’m never prevented of jumping to the menu. Another option is P2P networks. In just a few searches and some clicks I’ve got a decent quality ‘rip’ that can be played on any computer. If it’s a Divx encoded file, then I can play it on a bunch of Divx certified DVD players too. I’d consider the iTunes store for movies and TV, but the DRM keeps me from playing the file on something other than my iPod. (I’m not buying the iTV, so don’t even bother going there.)

Is this the best the movie industry can do? Have they not learned anything from the music industry’s screw ups? I see video going the way of audio and soon I’ll have my collection of .avi videos right next to my collection of .mp3 songs sitting on my computer ready to be played on whatever device I want to put them on. Whether those videos come from store bought copies of DVDs or from ‘other’ sources is completely up to the movie industry.

Here’s a hint: Don’t insult me and let me play my videos however I want to.