¶Gee, thanks a lot
It might surprise some of you to learn that I've never ripped a DVD. The main reason is that I don't really have an interest in doing so; my DVD collection is fairly small and I've already watched Alias and Slayers a thousand times. I don't travel much, either, so the portability issue hasn't cropped up.
I was tempted to learn today, though.
As I was walking out of the local neighborhood tech store, I spotted a DVD version of Office Space, which is a movie I like, but haven't seen in a while and never bothered to get, so I grabbed it and bought it along with the rest of the stuff I had. When I got home and started populating my new hard drive, I popped the DVD into the DVD player for background entertainment and waited for the standard FBI screen to expire so I could get to the main menu.
Only to be subjected to another clip comparing DVD piracy to shoplifting and other kinds of theft and some rather horrible music. That was practically a full minute long.
Now, I'm going to warn you that I really don't care to get into any arguments about whether copying a DVD is piracy or theft or copyright infringement or whether it is legal, ethical, moral, social, methyl, episcopal or whatever. I really don't care to have such a flamewar on my blog, and if anyone posts a comment about that I'm just going to delete it on the spot. I will say, though, that my thinking upon seeing this clip was more along these lines:
WHAT THE F*CK??? I BOUGHT YOUR DAMN DVD, THAT'S WHY I'M OUT TEN BUCKS! IF I HAD PIRATED YOUR STUPID MOVIE, THEN I'D BE WATCHING IT RIGHT NOW INSTEAD OF SITTING THROUGH YOUR PATRONIZING, UNSKIPPABLE PROPAGANDA VIDEO!!! WHY THE F*CK ARE YOU PUNISHING ME???
I haven't bought a DVD in a while and I had no idea they were now doing this. Putting in a 1-2 second FBI warning is one thing, but why should I buy a DVD ever again if they're going to force this irritating, condescending garbage down my throat every time I want to watch a movie that I legitimately purchased? Is it any wonder that people pirate movies now with this stupidity going on?
Update:
I received a request by email to tone down the language in this post. I refuse to do this. I am very offended by the contempt shown by the addition of this video and I want to make it very clear that I consider the addition of such a video to a product to be very inappropriate. A friend of mine brought up the very good point that he has videos intended for children that have this video prepended, which starts with a clip of a woman having her purse stolen. I don't condone piracy -- but this kind of treatment is NEVER called for.