Why is technology seem to be designed to prevent me from doing things that are perfectly legal but could be used for illegal activities? Examples:

• iPods not allowing you to copy your music back to your hard drive. I don’t use my iPod to send my music to my buddies; what I do use it for is a backup system to ensure that my music never gets lost (if my hard drive crashes) but I have to hack it to get this functionality.
• Macrovision making it a pain in the butt for me to setup my home entertainment system in useful ways.
• Preventing screenshots from DVDs which doesn’t really matter since I can just crack the DVD but it’s annoying.

The reason for this post? I was just watching a DVD that I OWN and that I PAID good money for. I saw something funny, a marking on the ground that indicated where the actor should stand and was not meant to be caught on camera. I wanted to post this on my blog to share with others; this obviously falls under fair use if not journalistic freedom. Are we so paranoid of this evil thing call piracy that we’re willing to give all our freedoms up to a handful of major corporations? Is it really such a big deal to prevent the average person from doing what they want since the real pirates (in every instance) have ways around all known protection measures? “If I can read it, I can copy it.”

I’m very annoyed. Here’s the error message I got and am just too lazy to rip the DVD for one screenshot: