Media Companies Want to Control Us
Sunday, August 8th, 2004321 Studios, the company that sold DVD-X Copy and DVD Copy Plus, was sued out of business. The judge ruled that it violates copyright law to make a copy of a DVD. Apparently, I don’t own the DVDs in my collection, I merely purchased a license to view them. And now that we know CDs and DVDs can rot more quickly than advertised, it’s only a matter of time before I own a collection of shiny drink coasters. And my 2-year-old son is determined to scratch and otherwise abuse “Daddy’s frisbees,” so having a backup would be nice.
Why do I have to watch commercials and introductory messages before I can watch the movie on a DVD? They’ve instructed my DVD player to block the fast-forward function so I have to watch. Ridiculous. It would be nice to rip the movie to a new disc where it can play immediately.
It would also be nice to consolidate all my music and video on one server and access them from anywhere, including a Home Theatre PC hooked up to the family TV. Once everything is encoded in OGG and DIVX, I can get rid of those awkward discs that I have to keep switching.
Neilsen just reported that the most sought-after demographic, young males ages 18-34, are watching less network television. Instead, they use cable channels, the Internet, video games, and home videos. Guess where more advertising is going to show up?
And big media companies are pretty amped about DRM. If Disney gets their way, all distribution channels will have DRM mandated by the FCC. So we can look forward to a future where little discs litter our entertainment center and force us to watch advertisements until the content that we thought we actually paid for rots away.