Here at The Movie Blog, we are 100% against Piracy. However, we’re also really annoyed at how studios often exaggerate and outright lie about piracy numbers… and how they go about trying to fight piracy. Still, in principle we agree… piracy is wrong.
But what falls under the term “Piracy”??? Here’s an example. The first week that Dodgeball came out on DVD, I ran out and bought myself a copy. I swear that movie has got a lot of use. But here’s the thing… about 3 months after I got it, it got some scratches on it… it started freezing in a couple of spots, and ultimately it wouldn’t play anymore at all. Fortunetly for me, the same week I bought the movie, I burned a copy of it to keep in my CD book just in case. My original won’t play anymore, but my backup does. So am I a pirate? No, I’m not.
The industry has been trying very hard to make it fully illegal for you to backup your own DVD collection, or to even allow people at all to burn DVDs in general, no matter the circumstances. Their weak arguement is that if you burn a copy of a DVD… you MIGHT sell or give that copy to other people.
This is the stupidest nonsense ever. I own a steak knife. Should that be banned because I MIGHT stab someone with it? After all, a law could be broken with a knife… best to assume I’m a criminal and take them away from me. That’s the industries position.
This morning it was brought to my attention that new proposals are on the table to outright ban anyone from burning DVDs, or have devices that can play your movies without the physical disc in the drives. The assumption is that you’re all criminals and should be treated as such.
A proposed amendment to the current copy protection license governing DVDs would completely ban all DVD backups, and prevent DVD playback without the DVD disk being present inside the drive. The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael Malcolm, the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company which successfully defeated a suit by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) this past March. The proposed amendment is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, according to Malcolm.
This is not how you fight piracy. If you’d like to read the whole report you can check it out here.
