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Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

I stopped buying DVDs back when I stopped being able to skip the 15 minutes of commercials and 5 minutes of copyright notices, because apparently I need to be warned in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, etc.

I'm not paying to be advertised to. I'm not paying to be threatened with FBI notices. So my solution is I'm just not paying.

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I remember discussing with friends of mine whether or not it would be reasonable to have a DVD player that, upon encountering unskippable content, automatically skipped it. None of us could come up with any difficulty there.

As far as I know DVD is a licensed technology and the companies that produce DVD players probably have some draconic measures in the license to prevent them from doing this. I think there used to be some players with an easily accessible factory settings, and the info about how to tweak the factory settings conveniently leaked, but I’m not sure how that worked in the end.

ReplayTV tried something like that about 10 years ago with automatic skipping of commercials. They were sued into bankruptcy.

http://news.cnet.com/ReplayTV-puts-ad-skipping-on-pause/2100...

In my fantasy world where we did this, it would be hacking apart VLC or something similar (which already, sensibly, ignores this dross); not so much the physical hardware (fingers wanted to type harmware, huh) because of the problems you cite.

They can't use the DVD logo if they do that. That's it iirc.

DVD is a huge cocktail of patented technologies. You either license it properly or perish by the lawyers, that’s my understanding of it.

They also can't license the patents related to DVD playback.

I am not 100% sure you are allowed to limit who can use a patent in that fashion. IANAL, but requiring non monetary compensation may not be allowed. http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/matters/matters-9208.ht...

what's ironic is that the MPAA Anti Piracy Ad made the ONLY thing that's good about watching pirated movie is that you don't have to want the ad....as pointed out by comedian Dara O'Brian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bxqt0siy34

> I'm not paying to be advertised to. I'm not paying to be threatened with FBI notices. So my solution is I'm just not paying.

So, I take it you feel entitled to the content one way or another? Your way or the highway, right?

Not at all. He feels that he has the right, as a lawful paying customer, not to be threatened and preached to. Imagine if you sat down at a restaurant, and the server lectured you about dining-and-dashing before serving you. It's his right to be pissed off about sanctimonious bullshit from the MPAA

I understand, these are the grandparent's conditions for purchase. Someone else might have a different set of conditions. What the grandparent is asking for, then, is prices (and the product itself) to be set per-purchase, per-customer. This does not scale to Hollywood movies.

No, he's not. He is simply saying that they have made the product unpalatable so therefore he is not going to consume it.

I think I understand why the copyright notice needs to be un-skippable. But the ads/previews/whatever-else-you-may-want-to-call-them have pissed me off since they started putting them on VHS (LONG time ago).

I don't like paying for ads.

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