Monday, June 12, 2006

A copy better than the original

A pirated DVD has higher customer value than an original DVD if the viewer is only interested in the movie and nothing else. Any DVD bought today is likely to have extra goodies that appeal to movie fanatics but not casual viewers, and as sure as there are endless end credits mentioning everyone including the guy who cuts the poodle of the guy who calls the caterers there will be an anti-theft ad, a cop threat and usually some trailers before the movie starts.
Here, I'd like to administer a selection of kicks in the crotch for a number of people, beginning with the utter bastard who designed the DVD specs. I won't even go into how evil the region-encoding scheme is, since anyone with a room-temperature IQ or better will immediately understand how this feature is useless for anything but gouging customers and/or censorship. I'll skip that and go to the fact that the DVD-manufacturer can set "control bits" for any segment of content on a DVD to disable functions in the player. For instance disabling fast-forward or skip, while showing adverts for the upcoming bennifer movie or Disn*ys soon-to-be-released "classic" cartoon movie about the inquisition, with laughing and singing torturers sticking glowing pokers up the genitals of laughing, singing prisoners while lauging and singing wall fixtures make comedy remarks about what's going on. How anyone could argue for these control bits with a straight face is beyond me. All they can be used for is annoying people.
DVD seemed like a good idea at first, but since these swine misuse the control bits on every disc released, it means that VHS actually works better for the customer. VHS movies are cheaper, give at least tolerable picture quality and handles better. How pathetic is that?
The cop warnings are hilarious. The FBI wants to tell you that if you even think about watching this movie along with other people they will take you to prison for a term between six and eighty years, where you'll be gang-raped continuously for having the gall of seing a movie together with other people who didn't pay. If you make a copy, say for the reason the original is getting scratched, you owe the poor movie company up to 100.000 dollars in lost revenue for your already-paid-for copy. And you go to prison and get to meet Bubba again, as above. However, in the rest of the world, or "terra incognita" as americans know it ("terror inconita" if you are the president) the FB* are about as relevant as a flock of seagulls since they are an american branch of law enforcement. The seagull analogy may or may not be chosen because of the loud, screeching behaviour and copious shitting of said birds.
Now, as the day progresses and you begin to seriously doubt that starting a DVD was a smart thing to do, you get the MTV-cut "anti-theft video", where the long-suffering and near bankrupt movie company flat out accuses you of stealing their stuff. This makes sense to company executives with bodyguards and no-one else. In any other line of work, routinely accusing your paying customers of being thieves would lead to ruin. In a society where people had some semblance of backbone they would knock on these executives doors and go for their throats. How dare they?
What makes this completely idiotic is the fact that any pirate who knows ANYTHING about DVD authoring immediately cuts out the cop scares, the insulting accusations and the shitty ads when copying the DVD so the people who download never see them anyway. ONLY the paying customers get insulted by this crap. Therefore, the pirated version of the DVD actually has higher customer value than the original.
Way to go, boneheads. Your parents must be SO proud of you!

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