Mako has often talked very well about anti-features. The “features” in software that nobody wants and often cost money to do the easier task of not including the feature. Examples include the non-skip parts of DVDs and BluRay Discs (see here for more).

I’d like to coin a new term… anti-anti-features. These are antifeatures (i.e. a feature you didn’t want in the first place) doesn’t actually function properly itself.

The other day, I sat down with a friend to watch a movie. We had hired out a BluRay of a recently released movie, popped it in the player and attempted to hit “Pause”. Why pause? Well… movies often can auto-play and we wanted to fetch a beer, snack and otherwise prepare for the great movie watching experience.

It turns out you cannot pause the copyright notice. So if you’re trying to be good and understand your obligations under the license in which you have received this disc, you cannot actually finish reading them!

Try it – put in a DVD or BluRay and try to read the copyright notice. I bet you that for a large number of discs you cannot do so in the time allowed.

This just goes to show how utterly useless these “no skip” zones are. You will see hundreds of exactly the same notice (one for each disc you view) many, many times (each time you view it) – one would think that after the first, second, third or even 10th time you’d understand it.

Amazingly, under DVD playback software that lets you skip the “no skip” zones (e.g. every DVD player on Linux) it also allows you to pause on the copyright notice and read it.