I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention or not, or perhaps don’t even care. If you don’t care, you might want to start paying attention, because at some point recent changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make you pay for your own content multiple times.
With the recent changes software companies are being told they can’t produce software that would let consumers make copies of the DVD’s they’ve already purchased. You might think that makes sense, but have you ever copied a CD so you and your spouse, or kids could listen to the same CD in each of your cars or one for the car, one for the house?
If I had an easy way to do it, I’d make copies of all of my DVD’s and keep the originals stored on a bookshelf like I keep books. When the kids wanted to watch a DVD, they’d pull out the copy of the DVD to use. Then, when they forgot to put it back in the case and it got kicked under the entertainment center, I wouldn’t worry about it getting scratched.
My real dream would be to somewhat of a media jukebox distributed throughout my house. I’d love to burn all of our music and DVD’s into a single computer and storage network and be able to access the files from any TV, audio device or computer from anywhere in the house.
With these recent changes I’d be breaking the law. It seems to me that once I purchase a DVD or CD, that I should be able to do pretty much whatever I want with it except for distributing it outside of my own home or personal property. Nope. I’m a felon instead.