Okay, I've had it: It annoys me to no end that movies I paid money for can't be ripped onto my hard drive (legally at least). It's not that big of a deal right now while most people work on laptops with 40-80 GB hard-drives and desktops of 100-200 GB hard drives. If the DVDs were compressed down to, say, 1 GB each, you could only comfortably put about 10 DVDs on a laptop or 70 on a desktop (I'm assuming space for work, pictures, music, etc.). But in 2 or 3 years, when laptops are packing 200 GB hard drives and desktops come equipped with terabyte drives, some of us users are going to be seriously miffed that the DVD collections we've spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on can't make the transition with us to a disc-less digital media library. I can just see the extreme media buffs out there when they discover they can't rip their 1000+ DVD collections onto their new media PCs. And if you think I'm paranoid in my view, just picture what would have happened 4 years ago if the early adopters of the Ipod had come home to discover that their entire disc-based music collections were encrypted and couldn't be placed on their computer or Ipod. It would be different if we wanted to take something analogue like a record and rip it onto our computers, but we're talking about something that is already in digital form.
Hollywood doesn't appear to realize it yet, but they could be headed for some piracy from places they wouldn't normally expect it. After all, how much would you begrudge someone a downloaded or ripped copy of their favorite movie if they already owned it on DVD? Yes, technically it would be illegal to break the protection encryption, but from a publicity perspective (and publicity is how they must wage the fight against intellectual property theft as they can't chase down even a fraction of a fraction of those with ill-gotten content), I could see public opinion very much in the corner of the person who simply wanted access to what they already own.
And yes, I know some of you are saying, "Can't I just bring my favorite DVD's with me to Boise?" Believe me, if it's a big deal to people to bring one beautiful, Zen-like pearl rectangle with them to hold their music collections, it'll be a big deal to never have to get up and change DVDs again. Want to watch Home Improvement, click the button, want to watch Lost, click the button, Sopranos, click the button. You get the point. 6 years ago, people would have asked why you would want something like an Ipod since CD Discmans were so convenient (and cheap) - where are they now (on a train with white sprouts coming out of their ears)? And I know movies are 2 hours long, but can you imagine flipping from the Blimp reading "The World is Yours" in Scarface to Sam Neil finding brachiosaurs on an island off "the coast of Costa Rica" to the scene in the First season of the Sopranos in which Tony gives his "I came in at the end" narrative? All without having to "switch discs"!
Maybe this won't be a big deal, but I think it will be. I have to think people with video Ipods are already ticked (and some are already ripping movies to the Quicktime format). I'm pretty sure Hollywood may have outsmarted itself with its unconditional disc encryption. I predict that once user hard-drives are big enough to hold most home DVD collections, it is likely that an underground DVD "crack- rip-watch" technology will gain mass acceptance (it's really only early-adopters right now), and/or old fashioned file-sharing of movies will flourish like never before. Any way you flip it, it's dangerous to deny people access to what they already own.
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