So you’ve all seen it a thousand times. Put them all in one end-to-end in a sadistic “greatest hit collection” of unecessary legal CYA, and its gotta be an hour or more of your life you’re never getting back:

The views and opinions expressed in the interviews and/or commentaries are solely of the individuals and are not the views of RIAA STUDIO DELTA ALPHA BETA, its parent, affiliate, or subsidiary companies”

I suspect that if you prompt a random citizen the first few words of this disclaimer they can parrot the rest of the verbatim, just as the show COPS tattoo’d the reading of Miranda rights into our permenent long-term memory.

I tried on several ocassions to find out why they started putting these warnings on all the DVDs–there must have been some rediculous lawsuit that forced all the studios to put this drivel on all of their drivel. I couldn’t find a single case of a lawsuit (even threatened or imagined!). They put it on there because they thought they would.

For the first few years, DVDs were pretty cool. Previews were kept in the special features where they belong, we weren’t force fed mandatory psuedo-hip/hardcore “copyright infringement is stealing” videos, and nobody cared what anyone said on the commentary–or at least they didn’t care about legal ramifications of them.

Although it is irritating enough when one trailblazing studio starting using these warnings, what I think is amazing is that this disclaimer spread like the flu and kindergarteners, from one studio to the next. Not did more than one person think it was a good and necessary idea, THEY ALL DID.

It makes me wonder though: Who is more stupid, the folks that run the studios or people that buy the products?