Off Topic With Ashley

I think I’ve been won over by the pirate arguments, to the point where I’m reluctant to buy physical media any more.

I used to buy discs, quite a lot of it in fact. I’ve got a pretty reasonable CD collection and an impressive set of mainly sci-fi shows on DVD, but increasingly I’m considering getting rid of them because all they’re doing is taking up space in my garage. Not only that, but my DVDs are rapidly falling into obsoletion as the covers fade and newer releases trump them with the 1080p fucking-high-definition card. I used to believe in physical media as some kind of holy grail feel-it-in-your-hands physical product, but now I’m not convinced.

I was exceptionally bitter when my DVD collection was bested seemingly overnight by identical blu-ray releases. That alone was enough to put me off buying subsequent releases of my favourite TV shows, but the fact that the upgrade path of blu-ray involved both such a massive outlay as well as the proprietary lock-in via obscenely offensive DRM which prevents my content from ever being played on my computer or my phone, I was extremely hesitant to purchase anything physical all. The stalemate has continued and even now seven years after release I only know of one person with a blu-ray player; it seems the benefit of high definition content in the living room doesn’t justify buying an entirely new DRM-capable home entertainment system.

I subsequently discovered that iTunes offers high definition digital episodes that shit all over the DVDs I’d been buying up until now, and it seems the deal has been cemented; I’m going to go digital. The stumbling block is that Apple either can’t or won’t support Linux which basically means I don’t have access to their proprietary online store, and can’t legally purchase anything from it. It gets messier: most of the iTunes catalog is available via illegal means, costs nothing, and does away with the digital restrictions and software installer.

It’s understandable that in the corporate world the idea of locking in consumers and imposing harsh restrictions and penalties for not doing it right sounds fantastic. The problem is that the entire concept of “selling” discrete blobs of infinitely reproducible content online for three-bucks a pop is a false economy and it’s been shown not to work. We’re increasingly seeing laws being introduced and passed to try and sustain this practise, but it’s still wrong.

When you can get a comparable product online for free without ads, free of unskippable piracy warnings, no artificial digital restrictions on play counts or display resolution, and the ability to make backups… Why wouldn’t you choose the more consumer-friendly option?

My main problem now is that in going digital I’m finding it more difficult to be legit than I am having pirate content delivered to me for free. It’s a dilemma I’m not comfortable with because I desperately want a collection of high definition content I can browse and enjoy like I used to my DVDs stored in boxes downstairs, but the legal avenues for purchasing music, films, and TV online are fraught with the same and worse DRM restrictions as blu-ray. These restrictions subsequently introduce platform incompatibilities and have basically shattered my dreams of a sweet, legal digital collection.

It would be nice to think that with such a massive global network as the Internet we could come up with something a bit more effective at empowering consumers without criminalising them, but with the current media climate that seems to be a fair way off.