The other day, I rented Down Periscope, a comedy flick. I've seen it before (just about everything that I rent is something I've seen before), but I always enjoy it. This time, I did something a little different. I copied the disk to my hard drive so that I could watch it at will. I believe that the technical term for that is 'illegal'.
Afterwards, I mulled over why I had done that. After all, Netflix will let you keep the disk indefinitely. I pay about $18 a month to rent three, so if a single DVD costs about $20 (does it? I have no idea), then after about three months, it'd be worth it just to buy the darn thing. But if I had a video that I really liked, and I wanted to keep it for a year -- I could, no problem. In fact, I would bet that NF would be delighted -- they get my money; they have to do nothing in return. So why copy it?
The only thing I can think of is that this makes it mine. I'm not locked to 'got to have the disk in the drive'; don't hear the drive whining up when I turn on the laptop. I don't have the speakers getting automatically turned on after I was careful to turn them way down, or off, for some late-night watching. It takes less juice to watch it from the hard drive than to spin the CD. Its not much of a reason. There's a decent chance that I'll keep the video, too -- not planning to steal it, but that might be the result. And that, I'm sure, is illegal. But the convenience to me is worth the moral transgression.
Strange, huh?
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