I picked up the image that appears below the fold from Boing Boing, and while I don’t have particularly strong feelings about copyright, digital rights managment (DRM), or the future of media distribution like the Boing Boing crew, I do very much agree with the sentiments it expresses:
[A warning to my language-sensitive readers: naughty language ahead, including the Queen of Naughty Words. Not just once, either.]
These anti-piracy warnings are actually just one aspect of one of my biggest pet peeves, which is the way so many DVDs throw up a bunch of impediments to actually reaching the content of the discs. Trailers for other movies, ads for television and soundtrack tie-ins, commercials for stuff that has nothing to do with anything, those damn anti-piracy screens, and even overly elaborate menus with animated intros really annoy the hell out of me. On most discs, you can opt out of all this crap and skip straight to the menu; on many discs, however, you can’t (DVDs produced by Universal are notorious for non-skippable pre-content content). Either way, you shouldn’t have to skip all that crap. You paid to rent or own the DVD, so why shouldn’t you be able to instantly access the part of it you really want to see?
If I controlled the universe, every DVD would boot quickly with a simple, non-animated, easy-to-read and easy-to-use menu. Trailers for other properties would be accessible from the menu for those who are interested. Legal warnings, if they’re really necessary, could follow the main program, like they used to in the early, early days of VHS. (Sorry, I don’t believe piracy is really that big of a problem; I just don’t.)
Maybe I care more about all this stuff than I thought I did…
Caring is a small part. What gets us fired up is when DRM is taken to imply a “fear factor” amoung users. Silently abusing the viewers with wasted minutes of space. In fact, the advertisment dollars gained shows an offset too monies lost to so called piracy.
Don’t be mislead we are in favor DRM for the artist, however they have yet too see any of these dollars. We joke around here about the effect the new formats have, because of the extra space. Which of course they claim is needed for better content, but did anyone actually measure the additional space they can devote to advertisment.
We just finished doing a promotional DVD for an electronic distributor, we in turn convinced them to contact the manufactures they represent an sell the “AD” space remaining on the disc. Truthfully, those dollars covered 1/2 the production cost.