Virtual Thought

Suppose I just bought a brand new video iPod. Naturally, I want to be able to watch several of my expensive DVDs on the thing since, y’know, I bought those DVDs so I could watch the movies on them. Naturally a few businesses would spring up that would fill the need of ripping these DVDs and putting them on the iPod for me so I don’t have to run Handbrake on them myself or anything. That sounds like a good idea.

Except the fucking MPAA thinks that this pre-ripping service is illegal.

What a bunch of horse puckey that is. See, the fucking MPAA thinks that you should have to purchase the same piece of media every time there is a new format. Too bad that you have a video iPod, a PSP, a media center PC and a DVD player and you’d have to, effectively, buy the same piece of media four times, one for each format... that’s the way it is, says the fucking MPAA.

Well, I disagree. The fucking MPAA thinks that this is wrong. They enforce this through the DMCA. But is it really wrong in, say, any kind of real moral or ethical sense? No, of course not. They’re worried about their bottom line.

See, the DVD costs $18.99… the vid for the iPod costs $9.99… the PSP movie costs $13.99… and the media center PC is, probably, out of luck (crappy video download services notwithstanding). So the fucking MPAA is seeing about $43 in revenue because I had to buy the same piece of media in three different formats (I couldn’t even get an acceptable format for the media center PC).

Now take the case where I buy the DVD and I rip it into the different formats I would need to play it on my media players… the fucking MPAA would get $18.99… and that’s it! Because I would take it on myself to copy the movie (which I’ve purchased!) into several different formats.

The difference ($25!) is between media distribution and format distribution. The movie is the media… what it “comes in” is a format. I don’t buy formats, I buy media.

If I buy a toaster in the USA and take it to Europe, do I pay full price for another toaster because the plugs and voltage are different? If a city re-paves the roads, do I buy another car? If I buy new socks, do I have to buy new shoes? These are all cases where some ancillary fact of the product I already own has changed around… and, yet, I don’t have to re-purchase the base product itself. In all these cases, the answer is, “No.”

Then why should I buy another format when I already own the movie?

What I’m doing by converting the format of the media I’ve already purchased is fair use. I’m making a backup. If I photocopy the first few chapters of a book I’ve purchased and carry around only that pice of it because it’s easier for me to use… fair use! If I rip my entire CD collection to MP3 so I can transport it more easily inside my iPod… fair use! And this, of course, is no different.

Makes me want to scream.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under fuckedup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.