The premise behind most of the media we buy (music CD’s, DVD’s, video games, etc) is that we are not buying a disc with content on it; we are buying the license to consume that content through that medium only.

What this means is that, if you buy a DVD of, say, I Am Legend, you are buying the license to watch I Am Legend through the medium of that specific DVD. You do not have the right to watch I Am Legend in digital form – a download from iTunes, for example – or streamed from the Internet. This is, without a doubt, ridiculous. It is a measure aimed at preventing piracy. This ridiculous practice is accepted, however, because it has been this way for so long that people generally don’t think it’s bad.

Let’s call their bluff.

More and more companies (media, service providers, etc) are acting in ways that completely fail to take the consumers best interests into account, so lets start with this;

The movie industry charges full price for a DVD, again for a Blu-ray, and again for a digital download. If you buy all, you are paying for the cost of the film three times over, plus the cost of the medium. Let’s put pressure on these companies to provide the option for a comprehensive license.

What I mean by this is, instead of buying a DVD, complete with the license to watch the film therein on that disc only, have the publishers sell a license that simply grants me permission to watch that film on all available mediums, (Blu-ray, DVD, Download, Streaming) and it is then up to me to get those mediums. If I have paid, say, £30 for a comprehensive licence to watch I Am Legend, and I want the DVD, I only need to pay the manufacturing cost of that DVD, which I imagine would be less than a pound!

Under this license, watching I Am Legend as an iTunes download would only cost me Apple’s cut (which would probably be extortionate, but that’s a different problem). Watching it via a streaming service like Netflix or Lovefilm would cost me my subscription, but that subscription would not reflect any overpriced deals the streaming service would need to have made to get the film, because my license covers it!

This is, like a lot of things I post about, an ideal world scenario which will never happen while the current generation of media execs are living.

Like a lot of things I post about, we can look forward to this changing as the older people in charge (“the problem,” as I like to call them) of making these calls, die off.