Last night, after successfully pulling a clip (not the entire movie, mind you - a clip) from a movie to use in my weekly cable show, the software I have been using without incident for the past 12 episodes broke.
It was broken while trying to read Ultraviolet - a disc that, in addition to holding an absolute mess of a movie, is notorious for having some of the most pervasive and destructive copy protection around. And when I say the software broke, I mean that it can no longer read any disc in my collection without crashing, including unprotected discs of my own work.
There are plenty of solutions to my problem, of course - all of which I’ll be exploring. In the meantime, however, I’m using a much slower and clunky process to get my clips. One which necessitates copying the entire movie to my hard drive instead of a 3-10 minute clip like I usually do.
And it occurs to me that this situation is exactly the sort of thing that represents why I got into the debate over intellectual property early on. DRM is invasive. It is destructive. And it is a violation of our rights.
As an independent reviewer, I have a legal right to use materials from the movies in my review. This is not a debate, and I will not argue about it with anybody. It’s explicitly stated in copyright law, and it has precedent in the Supreme Court. Duplication of copyrighted material - including excerpting at length - is permissible so long as the purpose of the finished product is review of the media in question. At length hardly matters in my situation, however, as no clip has ever gone longer than two minutes.
This kind of DRM represents the movement of the industry in recent years to destroy the rights of its consumers. Make no mistake about it - it does not hurt the pirates, it only hurts the everyday consumer and the independent media. If you go to any pirate movie server online, the chances are that you will find a pristine copy of Ultraviolet available for download because somebody felt that it was worth working at it to crack it. But the end user who wants to move the film from their DVD onto their iPod, or the independent reviewer (me) who just wants to sample a clip from it to go into their program - these people are shut out of the equation altogether.
Oh. And did I mention who released Ultraviolet? Sony. Yeah. The people who put a destructive rootkit (read: virus) onto their music CD’s as “copy protection.” Class act all around, they are.
[...] at Glen’s Popcorn you can read about the hassle I’m having with this week’s episode. Truth be told, [...]