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Hollywood Escalates "DVD Ripping" Case To International Incident (torrentfreak.com)
A group of Hollywood studios and technology partners have asked the U.S. Government to assist in solving a long-running court battle against the Antique based software company SlySoft. Despite an earlier conviction SlySoft continues to offer its DVD and BluRay ripping tools. To progress the matter, rightsholders have asked the U.S. to place Antigua on the Priority Watch List. "Circumvention through programs such as SlySoft's AnyDVD HD is a source for widespread, large-scale and commercial copyright infringement by users located in the United States, as well as Antigua & Barbuda, and many other countries," AACS writes (pdf).
Who bothers with DVDs anymore? Unless your tastes are way off the beaten track, everything you might want is available for streaming anyway.
There are still many DVD's that I can buy used cheaper than the "own it on streaming" price, *and* the DVD is really mine, so I can rip it to multiple formats for playing on a TV of mobile device. It's not like a streaming move that I "own" where the streaming provider decides where I can watch it, and can lock me out of my owned movie for any reason, including bankruptcy.
Though as people move towards streaming, there are fewer deals to be had on used DVD's.
I am totally amazed how much new DVDs cost though. Saw one at the local drug store, the sort not frequented by posh purveyors, and a DVD for a low rated movie from last year was going for $20. I was completely surprised, it's so expensive and few people ever watch one more than once or twice, and it wasn't the sort of movie one would want to collect. It was also a price increase over buying it on Amazon too, but it was at the checkout line so presumably it was intended to be one of those impulse buys for people who don't shop around.
One excuse with some movies is that if you've got toddlers that the $20 DVD will be played at least once a week until it wears itself out (at which point the parents are ready to shoot themselves).
Now the armchair economic excuse to go out and see the movies at a cinema is that a ticket and drink and hotdog is less than the cost of a DVD...
For streaming, they never let you own a movie. It's $5 to "rent" which is more expensive than pay-per-view on some cable/satellite services. There often is a purchase option to "own" but in that case you are still not allowed to make a backup copy so that you can watch it after the streaming service goes bankrupt. DVDs have additional benefits that you can take them with you camping, onto an airplane. Annoying is that they're not that much cheaper than blu-ray; worse both physical forms on amazon are cheaper than the streaming copy, despite the extra costs to produce and distrubute, someone's getting ripped off in the transaction and it isn't Amazon.
I use AnyDVD because Hollywood insists upon putting region coding on all the DVDs. I have DVDs in German, Mandarin and English and that would require 3 different DVD drives as Hollywood insists upon region coding things so that one drive won't support all of them.
It's ridiculous, but there you go.
If they didn't bring this case up, I would have never known about this software.
Great publicity job Hollywood.