Ianiv blogs about one of my pet peeves: DVDs that force you to sit through ads before you get to see the movie you paid them for.

But with this DVD first you get a copyright notice, then a short clip about how bad it is to download movies (stop saying copyright infringement = stealing!) and then 2 or three trailers for movies I’ve never heard about before. And you CANNOT STOP IT. If you press stop you get the nice “Operation not permitted” message. If I turn the player off and back on and then press menu I get the same crap. No way of skipping it.

The message it sends from the movie industry to the audience is as unambiguous as it is contemptuous: To us, you’re all just a giant wallet waiting to be drained. And we’ll use whatever technological advance we can to do it.

Of course, they’re shocked, shocked that audiences aren’t rushing to support those self-service messages about movie downloading.