After dinner tonight, I walked over to the shopping mall next door to the restaurant. My wife and I had about 30 minutes to shop before the mall closed. It's been a few weeks since I had been in a mall, so I just wanted to look around a little.

Within 5 minutes, I was holding Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith on DVD.

The first thought that entered my head was, “Wow, already? Those movie pirates work fast. This movie just opened last weekend.”

The second thought that entered my head was, “This looks legit.” The box looks official. I bet there will be no difference between the DVD cover I was holding in my hand, and the official DVD cover when the movie comes out in DVD. The back of the box talks about “deleted scenes”, and “director's commentary”. It has shiny gold foil lettering, a UPC code, a hologram sticker... the person who created this DVD cover did an extremely professional job. Either that, or somewhere the official DVD cover has already been designed and someone was able to make a copy of that too.

What makes this all the more tempting was a conversation my wife and I had earlier in the evening. We want to see the latest Star Wars movie in the theater, but don't want to fight the crowds in long lines for tickets or fights for good seats. We decided to wait one more weekend. And then, not two hours later, I had the DVD in my hand...

This all brings to light one of the overlooked aspects of the MPAA fight against piracy. You can sue uploaders, and you can target file sharing programs like Kazaa or BitTorrent. But when someone can purchase a DVD at a mall that looks every bit as legitimate as the real thing... well, the uphill battle against movie copying just got steeper.