Similarly, with guns arent there laws which prohibit them from being sold to felons or people with prior convictions? I guess what I am saying is… there is some semblance of care taken to ensure that guns dont fall in the wrong hands… I have never been asked whether I have ever previously pirated a movie or a software before buying a DVD.

Again, I havent thought about it… Maybe owning a handgun makes gun crimes easier, but that is why we put rules in place which dont let felons own them… Think of this rule as the encryption/DRM aspect to this issue.

Media producers hate fair use; they want you to have to pay through the nose for anything you want to do with their product. Remember VHS being compared to a serial killer, back in the day?

If you rely on encryption/protection/DRM/whatever to protect the content, it’s either an offline or an online system. That is, either it doesn’t require phoning home to the company that sold the movie (so you can use the copy freely without a net connection), or it does (and at least sometimes you’ll have to allow the playback system to verify that permission to use the copy is still granted). In the former case all details of that protection must necessarily also be available offline — so one determined person can reverse-engineer the protection. In the latter case you prevent many legitimate uses, and you have to somehow preserve the metadata necessary to make the call home (yet another thing to not forget). Consider a Windows install DVD; if you buy a new computer and want to install it there, you need the license key to do so, and without it the DVD is basically worthless. Either way you end up imposing costs on all the people who legitimately make copies (not a great way to treat the customer), and in the offline case the lawbreakers will end up getting their illegal copies anyway. The online case is trickier but not necessarily insurmountable — applications of cryptography and computational complexity can make it practically impossible to retrieve the unrestricted copy from the restricted one — but the burden on legitimate use is still too heavy relative to the deterrent capability.

The popular conception is that you buy a DVD, when in fact the creator merely grants you the right to perform it privately. Forcing users through hoops to use copies is, psychologically, a bit of a rude awakening if you’ve assumed you actually own the DVD in question.

Also, a parallel to your initial question offered as something to think about (I assume you would answer this question the same way most commenters here would, and thus what this suggests about copying copyrighted material): wouldn’t being able to own a handgun make it even easier for gun crimes to be committed?