So, last night at the Wal-Mart, I did my part for Sam Walton’s heirs and picked up a copy of Blade Runner: The Final Cut for $15.99.
Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite films. When I first saw it, I was a gay teenager pretending to be a straight teenager. At the time, I was pouring a great deal of energy into hiding who I was, and I lived in constant fear of my essential difference being discovered and exposed. So, like a lot of gay teenagers, I learned what to do (and what not to do) and what to say (and what not to say) in order to appear to be as heterosexual as everyone else.
As a result, the story of Blade Runner’s replicants resonated strongly with me. The replicants looked human — and, if they played their cards right, they could pass for human — but they were, in truth, different in ways that threatened and angered “real people.” For a closeted fundamentalist teen, their predicament felt terribly familiar.
But I digress. I came back from Wal-Mart with my legitimate, legal copy of Blade Runner in hand, eager to pop it into my trusty MacBook, rip it to my iPhone, and watch it during our swiftly-approaching trans-Atlantic flight to Paris. Imagine my surprise when I popped the DVD into my computer, started my ripping software, and discovered that this latest version of my favorite film features a copy protection feature that prevents me from copying the movie for my own personal use!
I’m a legitimate customer. I’ve done the legal, upstanding thing and purchased a copy of the movie I want to watch. And now, thanks to some irritating digital rights management software, I’m not going to be able to enjoy the movie as planned. (The DRM is so thick on this disc, by the way, it appears to be interfering with the playback of the movie, causing the sound and picture to go out of synch time and time again, even when played on a brand-new player.)
As if that weren’t irritating enough: illegal copies of this very version of Blade Runner are already widely available on file-sharing networks.
So, as a consumer, here are my options:
1) Pay sixteen dollars for a DRM-ed version of the movie that can barely even be played on a new DVD player.
2) Pay nothing for a DRM-free version of the movie that I would be able to watch anytime, anywhere, on any device I like.
Anyone who can’t see the outrageousness of this situation is clearly a company-owned replicant, posing as a human being.
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