Knock it off.
Before you read the rest of this post, a notice:
Warning: The copyright proprietor has licensed this blog post (including its non-existent soundtrack) for private home use only. The definition of home use excludes the use of this blog post at locations such as clubs, coaches, hospitals, hotels, oil rigs, prisons, schools, the birthday parties of small children, monasteries, igloos, bawdy houses, deep-sea submersibles, space shuttles and monkey (or related ape) enclosures.
Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, exchanging, hiring, lending, broadcasting, reading, laughing at, quoting, extolling, denying, decrying, considering, ignoring, or thinking of this blog post, or any part thereof, is strictly prohibited and any such action establishes liability for a civil action and may give rise to criminal prosecution, professional assassination, strategic nuclear missile launch and the selling into slavery of the first-born of all your descendants in perpetuity.
Despite the fact that you are reading this completely legally and legitimately, I will now compel you to watch an unskippable film about how copying this blog post supports criminals, murderers, rapists and terrorists, and contributes to global warming, extinction of endangered animals, armageddon and heat rash.
I think you can see my point. I rather object to having threats rammed into my face every time I want to watch a DVD that I have bought with my own money from a completely licit retailer. And today as I browsed the film racks at my local Tesco store in the hope of finding something good to watch in the evening (at the same time worrying about the state of society when finding that The Condemned was in the charts, boasting the all-star line-up of former wrestler ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and former wrestler-pretending-to-be-footballer Vinnie Jones), I noticed something disturbing. From the flat screens that Tesco seem to have installed everywhere to further the cause of a Blade Runner/Minority Report-inspired advertising-saturated future came the sounds of the deeply irking ‘knock-off Nigel’ anti-piracy advert that’s been doing the rounds on TV.
Great. Thank you Tesco and whichever anti-copying federations are active in the UK. Thanks for browbeating and berating me about piracy even as I stand there hoping to give you money. Perhaps you could put a screen up by the eggs warning me that if I were to buy them and throw them at someone, I’ll be arrested and imprisoned for assault? Or how about a sign by the bananas covering the legal perils of dropping one of their skins and explaining how I’d be sued to kingdom come? Do these people not think that suggesting their own customers are criminals just might not be the best way to go about things?
I shall leave you with this lovely interpretation of the anti-copying trailer from the IT Crowd.