WARNING - RANT ABOUT THE STUPID MOVIE/MUSIC STUDIOS
Again I find it hard to love the movie studios - I want to buy the movies/series, I like, but when I cannot play the product I buy for my hard-earned money, I get really disappointed. Then I go ahead and steal the product on the net, and it just works - no fiddling with odd settings, no ripping the movies, no getting stuck with wintendo - IT JUST WORKS!!! hard to say about the DVD, I bought expensively in the store. This puts the movie studios in a really bad barganing position - waste your money buying the product or just steal it and it works?!? Any business with so bad practises deserves to DIE! when the stupid fat cats in the head offices realises that they should provide a product people want and not just some stupid DRM infected P.O.S. (and its not point-of-sale).
Why cannot I just plop the DVD, I bought, into my computer and using well-defined and open interfaces read and play its contents, but I have to use special tools to decrypt (tools that the studios tried to crush) and my HW refuses to read the disc stating that reading a movie disc is not supported - I bought a goddam DVD drive to be able to read/play DVDs.
Again, when I steal the product off the net, I just enter "mplayer <file name>" and it works...
Why is it that the movie studios think they can dictate when we should be allowed to see a movie? what is this? USSR? China? North-Korea? When you release a movie to theaters, do so all over the world - that would stiffle copying of the newest movies because it runs in the theaters and the theaters still delivers an experience. Its really not that expensive - it used to be with the celluid movies, but time moved on - shipping a HDD to a movie theater in the opposite side of the world costs less that 100 USD - and producing the HDDs costs even less with proper software (ie. copy this file to these 20 locations) - you could even use a P2P method to distribute the raw digital movie to the theaters faster - just encrypt the content and distribute the key over a different channel - eg. send a snail-mail with a smart-card containing a large encryption key.
Luckily, the region locking has sort-of become a non-issue for anybody knowing just a bit about DVD players (or buys el-cheapo from China) - they choose a player that does not enforce the region printed on the disc, but plays it anyway. Again - hurt your good customers but allow the knowing to escape your Machiavellian regime.
I bought the movie - not a set of FBI-warnings (which the pirate cares not about and removes to avoid wasting time) / trailers (for movies I did not put in the drive) - I just want to see my goddam movie - NOT ALL THAT CRAP!
Usually, I do not invite people to commit crimes, but the movie studios simply went over the line - steal STEAL what you want until the studios understand what they are doing is WRONG! Any good company understands to deliver what the customer want - not nescessarily what they board decides the customer should want - the ones that does not understand this should go the way of the dodo. I bought a couple of box sets with series, I love, but I will do so no more as I cannot watch what is on those DVD - studios: FAIL!