A couple of weeks ago I pre-ordered the new Harry Potter film, (The Goblet Of Fire) from Amazon. On the day of release my DVD showed up at 6:30am, a tribute to the efficiency of Amazon and the GPO and I must not complain about being woken up early if I order items that don’t fit through the letter box.
In the old days of Video’s my new acquisition would have included trailers for up and coming releases which I could choose to watch, (they were quite interesting) or fast forward to the main feature. In these times of DVD, things have changed and I’m forced to watch all the junk on the beginning of my disk because I’m forbidden to skip it. Instead of the trailers, I’m treated to a Warner Brothers audio and visual “blamming” about how piracy is theft. I find the assult on my senses so jarring and out of context with the Harry Potter film I’ve purchased that I have decided that in future I will copy films like this to blank DVD’s. This enables me to edit out all the junk, including the blamming and the menus to features I never want to enjoy. Of course this has the knock-on effect of generating a second copy which means I can lend it to my friends without having to worry if they never return it.
I strongly suspect that I’m not the only one who has opted for this course of action as a response to the blamming. Perhaps Warner Brothers should reconsider what compulsory viewing they put on their DVD’s in future, it might cut down on the counterstrike piracy from irritated, (honest) customers.