Step 1 (complete once per movie)
Insert DVD -> Rip with DVD Decrypter -> Encode just the movie with Handbrake -> Copy to fileserver or HTPC ->

Step 2 (subsequent watches)
Watch movie

The fact that my daughter is scared of “play” screens (no I don’t understand it either) and they’ve given me a really good reason to rip the disks I legally own.

If anything, it’s “dating vs. hookers”.

And only when you limit the field to “sexual intercourse” , which is only a tiny fraction of dating, unless you are a less than 16 years old.

I tried to rip it, that did not exactly go well.

So? I know every line from every episode of season one

ARGGGGHHHHH

Please let me legally buy a show, without all the poop.

WTF? I BOUGHT IT! You know who never sees those commercials? People who pirate movies.

As far as trailers before DVDs go they aren’t there so much for retail purchasers of DVDs as they are for the people who rent them through Netflix and Redbox.

let’s say you pay a legit hooker for sex but before sex she has to deliver a 15 minute lecture on the immorality and illegality of free sex.

meanwhile there are unauthorized sluts that give you sex for free albeit with the danger of getting STDs or getting busted.

your choice.

It’s true that most DVDs let you push MENU right after the initial FBI thingie to get right to the second FBI thingie, then the flying logos, then on to the main attraction. But why do they make it so HARD to do this? Once the trailers begin, you can’t escape them. It infuriates me every single time I encounter this anti-user “feature”.

My method of not supporting the companies that foist the annoyance upon us all is to check out the DVD from the public library, thereby depriving the studios of my royalty payments in a totally legal way.

[And yes, I am married to a librarian. They rock.]

I know this to be the case here in Finland. The article in “previously” is old and was sadly overturned on appeal; we’re trying the European Court of Human Rights but mostly from the angle that forbidding distribution of DeCSS violates free speech (’cause they did that too). (The local appeals court does appear to be taking a fresh look in the matter in another case, so with extremely good luck they also might overturn the previous interpretation still.) It _is_ legal to circumvent DRM but only for your private, personal viewing (not storage).

Also, Finnish law mostly comes from the EU directive; I believe that it’s quite common in the EU these days that even private copies of DRM’d materials are illegal. I believe, but am uncertain, that this is the case for US also what with the DMCA.

Yeah, that means among other things no backing up and no format transformations. Servers you right for _buying_ the stuff.

Not sure where it’s likely to crop up , but I promise not to undercut your profits from it :)

I don’t know , but when DVD pressing costs are at scale , including the box probably less than 25 cents, I feel a little abused at paying a 1600% markup for even a 30 year old movie and
then as your info-graphic pointed out being subjected to endless commercials.

Of course it’s not enough to sell me the movie once.
First sell it to me on tape with some screwy copy protection
that makes even honest viewing full of this flickering.

Then retire the technology so I have to buy the DVD with some sort
of screwy copy protection so the chances of it playing are sketchy and of course a new machine.

Now retire that technology and bring out Blue-Ray or something
else and tell me I should again purchase the content and of course the new machine

So buy then , I’ve paid probably over $100 for some 30 year
old movie purchased over and over and I’m then subjected to
force fed ads to enjoy something I’ve supposedly purchased.

This idea of charging me repeatedly for the same lunch is not new.

Over the air TV I get for “FREE” and watching ads was a reasonable trade. Here in the states , cable TV was originally
sold with the promise that if we paid for the content that
we would get a clear picture and no commercials , since we had of course paid to view the content. That promise lasted for about a year or until the ink on the legislation dried that made cable operations a legal business.

Now the cable companies have their hand out at every turn, and
we have wall to wall commercials , including in the package we pay for, channels that pitch things at us in 24/7 commercials.

Corporate back scratching games that attempt to see how many times we can be charged for an Internet connection, despite the fact we can probably only surf one at a time anyways.

Car insurance companies that want to see how many times we can be sold a policy , even though there again , we probably can only physically drive one car at a time , and it’s very unlikely that
the parked one is going to run into anything.

House insurance companies seeing how many times they can sell
us that product, saying of course that if your house catches on fire thats one policy , but if the fire’s brother the water comes in you must buy insurance again.

To say that I must be sold a health insurance policy , but
if my teeth get sick ,I need to buy another policy
if my eyes need attention I need to buy that too.

At the end of all this I say hoist the Jolly Rodger
as no matter if I dedicated my life to never paying a thing again
I will always be a junior punter in Piracy compared to the
poor corporate “little red riding hood” victims with those oh so large teeth.

–Doc

The usual analysis goes something like, “Filesharing isn’t piracy– actual pirates murdered, raped and stole– but theft of goods is an entirely different category of law from copyright infringement!” Which is solid analogy-busting, and (IANAL) legally sound, but… a bit dry, when put like that. Not really a competitive meme against, “The pirate hordes raped my music!!”

So instead of saying it’s “not piracy”, I think one needs to expand upon this piracy analogy. The imagery is just to rich to set aside.

If people who copy files are like pirates of the high seas then the rest must (analogously) follow:

The pirates of the Caribbean would have to be able to sidle up alongside a Spanish galleon of the treasure fleet, copy all the gold inside, and then sail away without ever communicating with the galleon’s crew in any way. The original gold, of course, sails on for Spain.

The copied gold can (of course) generate even more gold exactly like itself, much as has been seen in fairy tales and movies for centuries.

The Spanish Empire is outraged. Surely this will cause the collapse of the imperial economy! And so warships are dispatched to sink the pirate ships.

The effort backfires horribly. Not only do they fail to catch more than a few pirates involved in the initial copying, but they randomly attack anyone with copied gold, declaring it “counterfeit”. But the gold is as real as the original, and Spanish trading partners are dismayed that this effort is driving people away from Spanish-marked doubloons, out of confusion, fear and disgust at these attacks upon the entirely non-violent pirates and their growing legions of friends.

Then some clever Spanish rival asks, Where does authentic Spanish gold come from? And soon the wider world becomes aware of the coercion and torment that the once-free artisans of the Spanish colonies endure to mine, forge and transport these glittering treasures. Oppression and slavery are plain to see, if anyone looks, at every level of Spanish gold production, rewarding only the “entitled”, whose primary contribution is a ceaseless dose of lecturing that this slavery is for the moral benefit of the enslaved.

Spain is unable to regain its honor in this, as they can demonstrate no tangible harm. Their economy not only does not suffer, but improves due to the better distribution of prosperity the piracy has brought. The choice still lay ahead: Will Spain use its treasure only to fight its own colonies that produce it? Or will it realize that it need the colonies more than they colonies need Spain, and change its ways accordingly?

There’s the analogy.

Postscript. In actual history, of course, plunder and slaves were something rival empires adopted as models from one another, and they felt little shame for it for centuries. Real piracy was often a part of this rivalry, or was inspired by it. But it’s also true that the Spanish Empire collapsed, in large part, because hyperinflation prevented it from financing the rule of its holdings. Hyperinflation brought on by hoarding colonial gold.

It doesn’t matter if you are a paying customer… once you rip it you are guilty of what they call piracy.

http://laurelrusswurm.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/personal-use-copying-vs-bootlegging/

They (including the Movie & Music Companies, DMCA, FBI, ACTA) make NO distinction between personal use copying of things that you have legally purchased and a commercial bootlegger who prints and ships thousands of DVDs for commercial profit.

That’s why the FBI warning spells out “non-commercial” or “without profit”.

When I was a kid I thought it was so cool that my friend’s dad made audio cassette copies of his records. Living in a world of scratched LPs I vowed that when I was a grown up I’d do the same. If you do that now you’re a pirate.

The problem isn’t the companies. They’re just greedy. That’s their job.

The problem is the governments, who should be protecting consumers from these corporate ripoffs.

Governments not only allow it but are now consciously acting as agents for these corporate interests with secret treaties like ACTA.

If the catch you you can be fined or go to jail.

Does that stop me? No. Is it likely to get me in legal hot water? Not unless I make the rips available to others or sell the original DVDs and keep the rips.

I have DVDs that–after only two watches–have developed either DVD rot or delamination. I store all my DVDs in an appropriate manner but not in a humidor or sealed room. Laws be damned; in this case I’m going to make sure the money I’ve spent on the hundreds of DVDs I’ve bought isn’t going down the tube.

Still, for me the final result of having ripped DVDs stored on a networked fileserver means I can watch the movie from any compatible location in the house with no mucking about at all. They’ll never be watched twice simultaneously–which would likely break the agreement of “private viewing”–because that would be pointless.