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On protection of commercials…

I'm a QuickTime clip fanatic. I'll admit it. I love collecting movie previews, music store videos, and Super Bowl (and other funny) ads. I don't share them with friends, I don't publish them on P2P networks, I just build my own little entertainment library for future use. It's fun, for instance, to go back and watch movie trailers after having seen the full movie to see just how they differ (you can occasionally find scenes that made the preview yet didn't make the movie).

When QuickTime trailers and music videos first began appearing, saving them was easy. With the passage of time, though, things have changed. Producers are now starting to take advantage of QuickTime's ability to mark clips as non-savable and non-cacheable, making it much, much harder to capture these clips. While it's still not impossible, it's definitely tougher. Which leads to the subject of my brief rant...

Why are producers making it harder for consumers to record (and yes, potentially share) these video clips? After all, what are they? They're commercials! Producers should want us to copy them, distribute them, post them on P2P networks, write about them and offer them for download from our blogs, etc. The more they get spread around, the happier the producers should be. Videos help sell songs; movie trailers help sell movies; commercials help sell products. So why, exactly, do we need to be prevented from saving and potentially sharing these things? Throw this one in the category of things I just don't understand...



Welcome to The Robservatory

Welcome to day one of The Robservatory, my first attempt at a "real" blog (I run a private WordPress powered site for family-type updates). In the years that I've been running macosxhints, I've done my best to keep it relatively opinion-free, and just focused on the hints. After all, that's what the site is for -- it's about the hints, not about what I personally think about the hints. So while I might make an occasional comment on some feature, technology, or program as an aside, I never go into any real depth on the subject, as I want to keep the focus on the hints themselves.

Enter The Robservatory, the new outlet for my opinions. As it reads in the sidebar, if it doesn't really fit on macosxhints.com, you'll probably find it here. Generally speaking, what I write about will tend to be related to Macs, OS X, computers, hardware and software that I find interesting, fun and/or interesting web sites, and my work in the technology business. There may be other random topics, though, as things come up, so don't be surprised by anything you may find here.

To get things started, there are three stories here now, as you can see. Early next week, there will be two new articles, one covering things I do not like about OS X, and the other taking a look at, well, the many looks of OS X.
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