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November 20, 2003
DVD clutter
I watched the DVD of X-Men 2 this evening, and like Nicklas I was surprised at how much junk there was before the main menu came up. I've come to expect the copyright warning you can't jump out of, but this time it's much, much worse: instead of just displaying the text on the screen, you get to listen to it being read out! Then as a little bonus you get trailers for forthcoming releases, albeit ones you can skip by pressing the Menu button. (Come to think of it, if they'd also forced me to watch a trailer for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before showing me the film I'd paid for then I might well have been forced to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. And I wouldn't be buying many DVDs after that, would I?)
Bad as the pre-film trailers are, it's the spoken intellectual property protection announcement that's the real problem here. A silent copyright notice isn't half as distracting. Especially if you're watching on a computer and can just bring some other program to the foreground while the notice sits there. Now I also have to mute the DVD Player's sound.
The thing is, I can't imagine that intrusive announcements actually help defeat piracy. Has there ever been a documented case of somebody watching a copy of a film on DVD, only to read the copyright notice, suffer from a crisis of conscience and smash the DVD/ring up the distributors and grass up the counterfeiter? Has anyone ever ended up in court and been acquitted of a charge of counterfeiting DVDs on the grounds that they didn't realise the disks contained someone else's intellectual property? All this system does is irritate the paying customer - though as Nicklas notes, not quite to the point where you'll boycott a DVD release of your favourite film or TV show.
Posted by John at November 20, 2003 10:50 PM
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Comments
That message was annoying to no end. I bought the dvd, I know it isn't a rental. What are they thinking on Fox? No, sorry. Let us all just step away from that last question, before we open a barrel of worms.
Posted by: Nicklas at November 21, 2003 05:21 PM