Why?

Sometimes I think the universe is just out to get me, like I've been targeted to get shit on.

I own all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD (not to mention all 5 seasons of Angel, but that's not really the point here). I've watched them all multiple times. However, I think the single most re-watchable episode of Buffy is Once More With Feeling. I got the urge to watch it tonight. I was especially excited because I've never watched any of the episodes on my bad-ass widescreen monitor.

There's just one problem. The episode wouldn't play. As in, it just sat there at a black screen. I thought maybe the disc had some dust on it or something, so I pulled it out and looked at it. Nope, pristine condition. No scratches, no dust. I put it back in, still no dice. At this point I had thoughts of putting my fist through the screen. But I resisted that urge.

Ok, let's think this through. Maybe the disc has some sort of weird copy protection that doesn't allow it to be played on PCs, like music CDs have now. I tried ripping it. There was a bad sector that I had to skip, but the disc finally ripped. Let's play it!

Yeah, the sector that got skipped was the Once More With Feeling episode. Goddammit. So here I am, with a disc I bought legally, and am trying to play legally, and I can't. Why? Who the fuck knows? I sure as hell don't. And it's just that one episode. The others play fine, no problems at all. But I don't want to watch the other episodes, I want to watch Once More With Feeling, mother fucker.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I downloaded a torrent of the episode. I know what you're thinking. That's illegal. And you know what I say?

I don't fucking care. When I, as a law-abiding consumer who contributes to society, cannot legally access the content that I have purchased in a perfectly normal and acceptable fashion, what other choice do I have? I've already spent my money, it's only right that I get the content I paid for. So you can just fuck right off, you copy-protection anti-piracy assholes.