It’s so you have to buy another copy.

It all comes down to money, in the end.

Shaw, which is my cable provider, has started using CGMS-A. This is causing my PVR to stop recording television shows. I often use timers to record stuff so that the wife and I can watch at a later date. The main reason is because much of it tends to come on much too late in the evening for us.

The PVR, just like VCR’s in the past, is a great solution to this problem, and one we’ve been using for many years now without issue. When we finally watch an episode we’ve recorded, we delete it. Hard drive space is limited, and I don’t care for wasting DVDR’s. Shaw’s quality just isn’t all that good, so that is another reason we don’t care to keep any of it.

Sounds like perfectly legitimate fair use, right? Well it is, yet for some reason it would appear that the entertainment industry doesn’t agree. Thanks to CGMS-A, I am now forced to track down the shows we’ve missed and download them. I pay $100 per month for my cable, so I feel I am entitled to watch the latest episode of my favorite programs when I want to, at least once. The shows I love the most always end up as part of my DVD collection, as I have no trouble buying material I’ve already seen. When your a really big fan of something, it’s easy to justify spending the cash.

The industry seems to want our money and give nothing in return for it. The really sad thing is that I’ve noticed the quality of these downloads tend to be far better than what I get from my cable company. I’m very tempted to get rid of my cable service entirely. Unfortunately, it would appear that my internet service provider has started toying with blocking BitTorrent this week. Has me thinking that perhaps I should get rid of them as well, and stop giving money to the entire industry as a whole, maybe stick to renting and borrowing from friends.

It’s funny, since for the past few years I’ve somehow managed to avoid being affected by all this corporate greed induced insanity that’s been going on. Hence, I never felt that I’ve needed to jump on the boycott bandwagon, which until now I’ve actually avoided quite actively to be honest. I grew upon the stuff, so it’s very hard to live without movies and TV shows. Especially with being ill and stuck inside all the time.

Now it looks like the industry has forced even me, the honest, law abiding, loyal customer and fan, to do something about this, and to finally take a stand with the rest of you against this tyranny. It is insane and must be stopped at all costs. I just cannot live in a world where fair use and civil liberties have been so horribly trod upon. It ends now!

What if I purchased an HD-DVD, but didn’t have the tech know-how, or didn’t want to invest the time in backing it up myself, but I could download it. The person who initially backed up the 1st DVD is actually doing soceity a valuable service. They took their time and spent it backing up a DVD and making it available over the web.

This saves countless additional man hours of redundant work as multiple people can now benefit from this single person’s work. This allows these people who would have had to find a way to back it up, plus the time involved with ripping the DVD, to focus on other tasks which in turn benefit society even further.

We should be thanking these pioneers, not suing them.