Starting things off

This is not going to be an indicative entry for this blog. I am not political. I am not an activist. I do not rally behind causes. I do get fed up with excess amounts of bullshit though. Today's post spawned from some bullshit that I read about today on boingboing.net...a site I will no doubt refer to numerous times over the course of this blog...assuming I keep it up to date.

Disney is a company that I like. Contrary to "popular" beliefs, I do not find it an evil world-consuming empire. I really enjoy going to Disney World and I enjoy their movies and cartoons too. However. (Notice that that "However" got it's own sentence to itself!) Disney has just jumped on the Blu-ray disc train and released their first Blu-ray disc: Sleeping Beauty. Great film. I like it a lot and used to watch the hell out of it when I was a kid and we had our own Beta-copied-from-TV version at home. Disney slapped a giant-sized disclaimer in front of the new edition of Sleeping Beauty.

Blu-ray is a new form of media. It is a highly-evolved version of DVD and Blu-ray players have capabilities much more in line with computers than with basic one-sided home video playback. Thus Blu-ray has new copyright laws and fine print associated with it that didn't used to exist.

I understand the reason for copyright laws. I understand that artists need to be given credit where it's due and rewarded for making us happy and keeping us entertained. What I fail to understand is why Disney needs to put 120 pages of disclaimer in front of the feature on their Blu-ray release of Sleeping Beauty. I'll start a new paragraph for that to help drive the point home.

120-fucking-pages of disclaimer is what you get when you first pop in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I haven't seen this myself, so I don't know if this applies to Disney, but there are some websites which know whether you've scrolled through all the fine print or not before they let you hit the "accept" button to move on through their content. If this disc has the same coding, that means I have to hit the "forward" button on my remote 120 times at least before getting to the actual movie. If you live in a house with more than one kid, and you watch a ton of Disney movies, and you own a Blu-ray disc player, you're going to burn though three to five remotes a year if this insanity becomes the norm! It's just ridiculous and it hints at what we already know: lawyers are infesting the world with more proliferation than rats in NYC.

Remember when you'd pop in a video and that red or green or blue screen would come up with the FBI warning? You'd fast forward through it yet still have time to read the whole thing. Then DVDs came out and there was the FBI screen and then a disclaimer and then the same one in French and then finally the movie would come on. Those were the days. You'll be begging for those days soon. You'll be begging for the days of seeing just the FBI logo and knowing immediately what it all meant, but not being that affected by it. Think about how long it took to sit through that screen. It always seemed like an eternity to me. (It's enough time to get the popcorn in and out of the microwave though.) Now think about how long it would take for 120 pages of information to scroll by giving you enough time to read every word. You wouldn't be of proper Mousketeering age by the time it was done.

I'm not saying don't buy the disc. I'm not saying we should start a letter-writing campaign. I just want the word out that DRM and DMCA and all those other wonderful inventions of copyright management are bullets headed straight for the collective foot of music and movie production companies. People have been successfully sued because of illegal downloads, but that hasn't stopped or curbed illegal downloading of MP3s. Tighter grips don't offer more stability. Rant over. Seacrest out.