Jason Scott is aware and respon­sive to people’s con­trary opin­ions, but he’s not backing down, not one inch. Instead he’s cranked out an enor­mous nar­ra­tive blog-​​essay on why he feels as he does regarding King of Kong, a story which starts a little after his birth, moves through his ado­les­cence and takes the reader into and beyond the filming of the BBS doc­u­men­tary. In case anyone was unaware, he feels quite strongly about this.

There’s also some inter­esting tan­gents about his atti­tude towards selling prod­ucts in the age of copying:

“These three items are all you get. No booklet, no inserts, no nothing. DVD, cover, plastic case. The ques­tion nat­u­rally comes as to why you even need to be buying this phys­ical item at all; there’s absolutely nothing spe­cial about it. An ISO and two TIFFs will give you the same expe­ri­ence. And there’s even a bonus: putting this DVD into your drive makes it attempt to install the InterActual DVD player, a soft­ware DVD player that, among other things, phones home to New Line Cinema, dis­trib­u­tors of the DVD. Oh, that’s excel­lent, that’s truly awe­some. We’re told that we can’t expe­ri­ence the full fea­tures of the DVD without installing this soft­ware, which I am going to assume for the time being is an utter lie; feel free to cor­rect me if you know differently.

I’m saying a rel­a­tively puffy tor­rent could give you 100% of the expe­ri­ence. This is petty and trivial but it is true. And osten­sibly a tor­rented ver­sion wouldn’t ask you to install a home-​​phoning soft­ware DVD pro­gram every time you stuck it into your com­puter. That this does that very thing sig­nals, to me, old-​​style thinking and cyn­i­cism about the audi­ence and their role in the own­er­ship of this DVD, that is, gape-​​mouthed zombies.”