So I rented Safe House the other day. Absolutely generic film done in shaky-cam (which I loathe). It had surprisingly good hand-to-hand fight scenes, and it looked as if the DVD’s bonus material had a featurette on their choreography. Cool!
So I go to the bonus section and play the featurette, and I get this screen:
WTF? To watch this movie, I endured six movie previews, two tv show previews, an ad for a video game, a self-congratulatory ad for all of Universal’s Blu-Ray collection, and an ad for a theme park ride. And then they tell me that the version they’ve sold to Redbox is crippled in an effort to upsell me. Seriously?
This, after blocking video controls that would allow the owners of DVD players to skip advertisements; legislating that you are not allowed to duplicate an item you bought; locking it with Digital Rights Management encoding; seeing their former executives appointed to Cabinet posts related to intellectual property; furiously lobbying Congress to pass Draconian legislation; being caught red-handed gaming takedown-notice systems to eliminate competition and create de facto exclusives on artists they represent or are considering representing; having no fear of reprisal for malicious or incorrect accusations — the list goes on for miles.
Can these people still wonder why the world at large not only refuses to conform to their antiquated business model and archaic and increasingly irrelevant notions of copyright? Do they have any idea that people are refusing to adhere to their paranoid litigation and legislative efforts not because people are cheap, industry-destroying scofflaws, but because there is such joy to be taken in making the bully lose? Do they have any idea what’s in store for them now that they have gotten ISPs to collude with them on narcing on their customers?
The funny thing is, in the long run I don’t think we really have to do all that much to stop Big Media. They shoot themselves in the foot with astonishing regularity and precision. The ill will created by these drawbridge-raising, self-protective, out-of-touch, screw-you-jack-just-give-us-your-money measures is them bringing their own rope to their slow-motion hanging.