You are a criminal

Prompted by Dan's comment I think the topic of movie piracy deserves a closer examination.

We've all seen them and in my opinion they're getting more prevalent. You buy a new movie, pop it into the player, settle back to enjoy and instead you get a blast of music and a trailer telling you that you wouldn't steal a car and equating that with movie theft; or more specifically copyright theft.

Depending on what you're playing them with sometimes they're fast-forwardable, sometimes they're skippable, sometimes they're not. Then after being placed firmly in the potential criminal bracket you're given another screen (generally never skippable) telling you what you can't do and threatening you with the penalties if you do.

It's annoying and insulting, I've bought these movies; to paraphrase Dan 'Do you think pirates would copy over the anti-pirate trailers?' So the people who are most likely to see these are the people who've bought a legitimate copy.

Some take it too far, I've had discs ask me to enter which country I'm from and presenting me with an alphabetical list. Three pages later you get to United Kingdom and all it's doing is making sure you get the correct copyright trailer. As a result I now apparently live in Azerbaijan, who ironically don't seem to get one.

The next stupidity is to do with the penalties text themselves. All the studios seem to have their own boilerplate and none match up. "You can't play this on an oil-rig", okay; "You can't broadcast this to the public", okay; "You're prohibited from renting this disc out", okay; "You're prohibited from lending this disc", excuse me? It's my damn disc I've paid for it who the hell are you to say that I can't lend it to a friend. Ah, say the studios, but every time you lend it someone that's a potential sale lost. Or perhaps it could be a sale gained because they like what they've seen and want a copy for themselves. Anyway by that measure everything should have the same notice.

"I'm sorry I can't lend you a pencil, that would represent a lost sale to the pencil company and I'd have to pay them compensation" Put it like and that and the absurdity is made obvious. Perhaps I should 'sell' it to my friend, a transfer of ownership, then he can 'sell' it back to me. It's plainly ridiculous.

So what's it all about anyway? Pirates - oo ar me maties. But why do pirated copies exist anyway? Well let's start with the obvious - the studios spend mega-bucks on promotion to want us to see a movie, except you can't because it hasn't been released in your country yet. Welcome to the global network, you can't just promote the latest blockbuster in America and not expect leakage across the rest of the globe.

Step two it gets released on DVD, but here we go again often not at the same time. Say hello to the global marketplace. Oo they don't like that, better slap something on the DVD that'll stop it playing outside its designated area. If a government tried that it'd be jumped on by the WTO faster then you can say trade restriction. But hey it's all covered by the great god copyright.

It gets worse, having released different region versions at different times, they add different content to each; with normally the R1 USA releases getting the cream of the crop. That being the version you're not supposed to be able to watch.

Then we get to cost, I've already mentioned picking up the latest releases in Sainsbury's for sometimes half the cost of them elsewhere. You might say that they're not making any profit blah blah; and yet isn't it amazing how these latest releases slowly slip down in price as time passes. Is everyone they making a loss on all of them?

Tied to cost is the practise of releasing two versions at the same time, the plain old vanilla disc and the suped-up special edition, which sometimes goes for twice the price. I saw "Hogfather" in two such versions plain vanilla and limited edition with an RRP difference of £5. So what's the difference? The packaging! Yep that's it, the contents are identical. Oh, but of course you get those two-discers that do differ from their one-disc counterpart. Except when you look closer you find that the only difference is the extras, extras that probably could have fitted onto the same disc as the film.

So you've all been hyped up to see the movie but you can't. When it finally does arrive you're expected to pay £5 for the privilege of sitting in an uncomfortable seat surrounded by rustlers, coughers, and the terminally stupid. All to watch a movie on a big screen where they've turned the bass to max to hide the mumbled dialogue and the picture's slightly out of focus. Forgo that fun and instead you can pay over the odds for a disc that doesn't match up to the R1 version, that'll get discounted to half the price in a couple of months time; and accuses you of being a potential criminal if you try to do anything with it other then watch it alone in a sealed room on studio approved equipment.

Gee I've no idea why these pirated versions can still exist and do business.