A couple weeks ago, we repoted that Universal Pictures was intending on selling its embarrassing remake of King Kong over the Internet to customers for the low, low price of thirty five dollars. “Jeezum Crow!” was the only properly incredulous reaction to the announcement. The price was absolutely ghastly for what was being offered — basically, one huge mpeg with none of the extras, packaging or company-expenses of DVDs that sell for half the price.

Well, now there’s more details on the industry initiative to offer downloadable movies to customers. Amongst the tasty new details is the news that not only will digital movies be much more expensive to purchase than DVDs, but you won’t be able to back them up to a DVD-R or send them to a portable media player. The software will be heavily DRMed (mark our words: expect another Sony-esque rootkit fiasco). Not only that, but are you a Mac user, or just like Firefox? You’re shit out of luck — you can only buy the movies through an IE only website.

We hate to say it, but we tend to agree with the conspiracy theorists on this one. Every detail the movie industry releases about legally-downloaded movies makes it seem like they are purposely sabotaging it so they can “prove” to themselves that digital distribution doesn’t work and continue to vilify as “prates” consumers who rip their own DVDs to other devices.

Legally Downloadable Movies Come With Heavy Restrictions [Consumer Affairs]

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