The Oatmeal's excellently biting satire on simply trying to watch a TV show I think encapsulates what TV and many walks of life seem to be increasingly like today. (view the full cartoon)
Highly litigious and overly bloody complex.
What's even sadder is The Oatmeal resides in the USA, and as frustrating as it is for him, it's nowhere near as maddening as it is in Australia. There is no netflix and no Hulu. Stream from Amazon? Pftt please! Not a chance.
Of course we need laws, and piracy on the whole is not a great business model, but when presented with 54 pages of terms and conditions on a Disney Blu ray of Snow White, (if I recall a Boing Boing article from several years ago) shown before you can even watch the movie, it's becoming less easy to blame pirates.
The lawyers, policy makers and DRM mad studios are continually painting themselves in to a corner of complexity. For example, buy a region free Blu Ray from overseas, (it's region free after all and likely way cheaper) and the DVD and digital copy you often get with it, are... region locked. Madness. Like buying a car, but it comes with the wheels clamped. WTF are they thinking?
Yet even more the majority of us just click yes or I agree/'next' rapidly when installing software or entering some lengthy agreement. (Because life and time are wasting away, and even though you are quite possibly signing over the blood of your next unborn child, it's nearly beer o'clock). So what's the solution?
Buy less, care less, do what you feel is right. Or of course, borrow the TV show/movie from a friend, or you could read the book : )
However whilst these controlaholic's attempt to turn your movie or world in to a litigious pile of rigid processes and region regulations that in reality resemble the solidity of a 7-11 slurpee, it's at least always reassuring to me we are hurtling rapidly through space, very close to a giant firey ball, whilst floating on moving plates which have a giant pile of lava bubbling underneath. Mmm.. Security!
Control and restrictions in an uncontrollable world that naturally pushes to be free of restrictons? Good luck with that.
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