It was announced that the U.S. Government was going to change the anti-piracy notices on new DVDs and Blu-rays to include not one but two unskippable 10-second notices to further harangue the people who didn’t steal the discs, telling them not to steal.
Obviously, this is either a mistake or part of a larger scheme. Of all the people the studios and government might want to harass and shame, why pick on the only people still giving them money? Why make legal movies and TV shows even harder to watch, and pirated products (which have no notices, no commercials, no previews, no time-wasting menu graphics that are keeping you from watching the damn movie you paid for) even more attractive?
It’s almost as absurd as the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” video — also unskippable — before some movies, which, in a fit of almost crippling irony, may be using music from Dutch composer Melchior Rietveldt without his permission. (Also? If I could click on the car and get one without taking yours away? And you keep yelling at me not to when I haven’t? I just might, now.)
The studios can’t be that stupid, so I assume the studios have decided that DVDs and Blu-rays are simply no longer cost-effective and streaming is the way to go and therefore they’re going to lower the demand for discs by making them increasingly unwatchable. Future changes may include unskippable half-hour documentaries on how piracy leads to record profits for movie studios the complete downfall of civilization into a brutal, post-apocalyptic wasteland, “Don’t Steal, Dammit!” frames inserted every five minutes into movies, “shame placement” programs where anti-piracy diatribes are written into the actors’ dialogue, and a point-of-sale rollout program where, after purchasing, an agent follows the customer from the register to their car yelling in their face the whole time, “You gonna steal that? Huh? You gonna pirate it? Answer me! I can shoot you, you know! I can totally shoot you, you legal owner, you!”
Later programs will instruct cashiers to physically rip purchased Blu-rays from the customers’ hands and spit on them.
I wish them luck in their new, ineffectual effort. It’ll give me more time to get some reading done.
The most effective copy-protection I’ve ever seen was on Legend of Grimrock, and it basically said “Thank you so much for buying this game. We released it DRM free because the support of gamers like you makes our little company possible.”
I didn’t buy it, but it did make me feel really guilty. Had it been a better game I probably would have bought it.