Dr. Horrible & Digital Rights

As I mentioned, Joss Whedon's recently released three-part online musical entitled Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is an absolute masterpiece, and I fell completely in love with it the first time I saw it, and have been continually re-watching it since.

If you visit the site now, however, you'll notice that the entire show has been taken offline - and is now only available to purchase on iTunes (and currently, in the US only). Whether or not I do purchase it on iTunes, once it's available in the UK is still under consideration - mostly due to the fact that I don't particularly want to install iTunes, or have some annoyingly DRMified version of the video.

There's also the consideration that, let's face it, in this digital age I don't really need to go and buy the video if I want to watch it - despite the fact that it's been taken down from the main site. I'm watching it on YouTube right now - and although it'll soon be pulled, I'm sure I could find somewhere else to download it all with tiny amounts of effort.

It should also be noted that anything, anything that I play on my computer becomes, from a digital (if not legal) perspective, my property. In order for the three videos I originally watched to come out on my screen and speakers, they had to be downloaded, in some form, to my computer. Had I wanted, I could have 'stolen' all three back when they were all up online for free by exploiting that fact. Does making copies of them in this way even count as theft? It's questionable.

What I'll mostly likely do, if it seems feasible in this scenario, is what I often do with indie artists of any ilk who bring me pleasure. I'll find some method of direct donation (PayPal is most popular) with which to reimburse them, and then 'steal' the content from an external source. The artist gets a slightly higher cut of the profit, I get a version of the content that's not nerfed by Digital Rights Management and doesn't require iTunes or some other proprietary software.

Legal? Probably not. Moral acceptable? I think so.