Cutting edge obsolete technology

I always feel a bit stupid when I purchase a movie on DVD. With networks getting faster and hard drives & flash memory prices dropping, it’s only a matter of time until a gigantic catalog of movies is available online or on USB keys sent back and forth in the mail like Netflix rentals. Things are moving in this direction already: Sony wants to create an online movie service like the iTunes Music Store and a huge amount of movies are already available online on Usenet, BitTorrent, and various P2P networks. The upshot is that all those movies I have — because the technology companies and the media companies are making it so I can’t make copies of my movies to move them from the DVDs to whatever the hell device I’m going to play my movies on in the future — I’m going to end up purchasing them all again (or worse, renting them each time I want to watch them…movie and music ownership may soon be a thing of the past if the media companies have anything to say about it). Which is great if you’re a big media company but makes me, like I said before, feel a bit stupid when buying DVDs.