Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Today for the first time, you can buy a new Hollywood movie either in DVD format or via download. As the proud owner of a downloaded movie, you can do anything you want with it, except, um, play it on a DVD player, play it on anything other than a late-model Windows Media Player, transfer it to an iPod or PSP, or transfer it to more than two PCs.

And, please, let's not argue about whether two PCs is reasonable. First, it's not. I upgrade PCs about every two years, so my copy would have an expiration date of 4-6 years, whereas physical copies don't care how often I have to replace my DVD player or VHS deck. Second, we should not be arguing over how many machines we can use to watch a movie we've bought and paid for. We should be fighting the reconfiguring of our computing environment solely to support the introduction of artificial scarcity. If we bought it we ought to be allowed to play it anywhere as often as we want, make as many copies we want, and even grind it under our heels in contempt, although I'll grant that that last one is tough to do with a digital version.

By the way, because the downloadable version, because it is lower quality, has no manufacturing costs, and restricts how we use it of course costs about twice as much as the DVD, for the obvious reason that Hollywood pricing is done by babboons.