The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

Just over a month ago, I went to Philadelphia with some friends for the weekend to take in an NFL game while eating and drinking in mass quantities. Good times were had! But this post is more about the drive back and forth to this city, specifically, how I planned to pass the time with all that driving involved. In summary, I was going to bring my iPad to watch some movies. For some reason, one them had to be Casino. Now, those who know me well know that I enjoy collecting movies, and this year Univeral had re-released several of their classic titles for their 100th anniversary. And one of them was, hey, Casino! For about $15 or less, you can get the blu-ray, DVD and a digital copy code from iTunes to put on the iPad. Nice!

Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. See, that digital copy code didn't work, stating I needed to be a USA resident to get the download. Why does that matter...it's not like I live in Iraq! When I contacted Universal by email asking for a Canadian code, it took a couple of weeks but finally someone got back to me. Basically, they said the financial rights for the digital copy versions of Casino in Canada haven't been settled yet, so you can't get a digital copy. If you go to iTunes directly, you can rent Casino, but not buy it. Yeesh, this is pretty stupid, isn't it? You got a guy here who likes to collect movies who's trying to boost the economy a little bit with this purchase, and they won't give me what they advertised and what I had paid for.

I wanted to give Universal my fifteen bucks. Really, I did! But I ended up sending it back to Amazon because my main motivation was to get it on my iPad, and they weren't going to let that happen (also because I was somewhat annoyed). In the process, I went to a torrent site and tried to download a copy. I figured since Universal didn't want my money because they'd rather squabble over a couple of bucks they'd have to share with, well, someone, over the digital copy, I hardly felt much guilt. It didn't actually play on my iPad after the fact, so I tried another movie: Prometheus. This one did work, and I watched it for free on the iPad. Before starting this entire venture, I didn't think it would lead me to try a torrent site to download a movie I didn't have the intention of watching, but that's what happened. And it shouldn't have happened!

Given that digital copies are the same quality as DVD, why not, much like CDs, allow the customer to rip the DVD on iTunes? Since savvy torrent downloaders who don't want to pay for anything will likely go after the blu-ray quality torrents anyway, why not save some agony for a guy like me, who just wants to watch Casino on my iPad dammit!, just let me rip the DVD to put on my iTunes library? The studio gets my money, I can watch Casino on the iPad...everyone wins! If that suggestion is too difficult, well, I can tell you at least $15 of movie studio revenue has been lost because of this nonsense.