Today I convinced a room of people to illegally copy their DVDs and Blu-Rays

I’m pretty passionate about data preservation. Now, I wanna be clear. I’m NOT a pirate. I never download anything from illegal torrent sites. I like to make sure I have backups of my DVDs and Blu-Rays, mostly because I’ve been affected by disc rot before.

It’s becoming increasingly relevant though. With the Sony thing a couple weeks ago there comes to light another need for people to crack the encryption on their devices to retain their streams of purchased content ad infinitum. It is unfair to the people, who are tricked into signing contracts they were never meant to read. Contracts which state that “No, you did not buy this movie, you bought a license to play it which can be irrevocably cancelled at any time for any reason by the people you bought it from”.

I’m never going to advocate for real piracy, filesharing and illegally sending copies of media around. Pay for the media you enjoy. I’m an artist and I release my work for free, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t want anyone stealing it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t copy it though. Make backups, several actually. (One backup = none backups).

This isn’t just for protection though, it’s for convenience too. With Plex and Jellyfin you can have your entire dvd collection anywhere. If you’ve got a portable blu-ray player, one BD-R-DL can fit close to 40 90-minute films on it at 480p (standard DVD resolution), that way you only have to bring one disc on a trip, and not the original copy.

I think it’s time for a change. These laws about intellectual property protection and copyright enforcement are outdated, and far too aggressive. To date, the media I have personally [redacted] for my own enjoyment (not for [redacted] purposes) could add up to [redacted] years in federal prison if a judge was having a particularly bad day. I think despite the law, we have a moral imperative to protect our media. The corpos want to make sure it’s unavailable so we have to keep buying it, but fuck em.

Love y’all