DVDs whether purchased or rented begin with copyright warnings. These cannot be skipped or fast forwarded which means one has to sit through them every time the disk is inserted in the player. Because UK DVDs are region 2 which covers Europe and Australia and other parts you often have to sit though the pointless legalese in several different languages.
The point is that regardless of whether renting or owning DVD, I am a paying customer and not violating their copyright and yet they are punishing me. Do these warnings deter piracy? I suspect not. On rental DVDs they even have an advert comparing film piracy to other acquisitive crime which again cannot be skipped or fast forwarded. The movie below is a spoof which is pretty close to the originals bar the extreme consequences.
Digital technology has made the creation and distribution of films cheaper and easier than ever before. The best result for the consumer would be an increase in choice delivered by more titles from a larger number of creative people who can express more and varied views. The worst scenario for the consumer is that the studios pile more money into producing a small number of hackneyed blockbuster films and then promote them until everyone is sick of the ads. They then print millions of disks and use copyright law and their monopoly position to charge £15-£20 for a disk that has cost them less than £0.50 to manufacture. How else are they going to cover the $100m film budget plus the $40m promotional budget.
Until the gap between the cost of manufacture and the price of the product closes, there will be piracy both by individuals and at an industrial level. Good films can be made for £10m-20m. In the mean time we have to pay though the nose for films and sit though the warnings which are there only to serve the people who are doing us a disservice.
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