The place: a high school classroom. The time: mid 1980s. A teacher stands at the front of the room, rolls up his sleeve and shows the students his watch.

"I paid $200 for this. It's a nice watch and it came with a two-year warranty. Now, who thinks that sounds like a good warranty?"

Most of us put up our hands; two years seems okay, and better than one.

"Really?" the teacher says. "$200 is a lot of money. Don't you think it should be covered for five years, or 10?"

Years later, that teacher's point has stuck with me. He was telling us that companies will often portray something as a deal or an advantage when in reality they're offering very little, or even just covering themselves. In the watch example, the manufacturer wasn't giving buyers two years, it was limiting its responsibility to only two years.

Which brings us to Apple and a recent announcement with 20th Century Fox. From the press release: 20th Century Fox and Apple today announced iTunes Digital Copy, which provides customers who purchase a DVD with a free iTunes Digital Copy of the movie. Just like movies purchased from the iTunes Store, an iTunes Digital Copy can effortlessly be transferred to iTunes and then viewed on a PC or Mac, iPod with video, iPhone or on Apple TV. The first DVD to make its debut with iTunes Digital Copy is the DVD premiere of the Family Guy Star Wars spoof, “Blue Harvest,” which is being released in stores [Jan. 15]. Fox and Apple are planning to deliver many more DVDs with iTunes Digital Copy this year.

That sounds like a good deal—everyone likes free stuff—and in one way it is: if you like a movie enough to buy it, why not also put it on your iPod? Fair enough, as far as it goes. But I hear the voice of my old high school teacher: this is not a magnanimous effort by two big companies to give us something, but rather an effort to limit how we use a product that we have paid for.

After all, if you pay money to buy a movie, why shouldn't you be able to watch that movie anywhere you want? You should be able to watch it on a TV in the family room or den, on a laptop on the train, on your iPod at work, on another brand of portable media player, or anywhere else. You paid for it.

Instead, Apple makes iPods and iPhones which support video and which have great screens, yet they do not include software which allows you to copy your existing DVD collection to the device. Why? Because Apple wants you to buy another copy of those movies from its iTunes store or, in this case, buy a special-edition DVD that lets you do what you should be able to do already.

Oh, and even if you buy one of these special-edition DVDs, you can only use the included digital movie on one copy of iTunes. You can't lend it to a friend, even though you paid for it.

All of this is part of the movie industry's on-going struggle over how to handle movie distribution in a digital online world. I have sympathy for their plight, and I don't condone piracy. But this move isn't the answer. Why only one copy of iTunes, and more importantly what about all the movies we've already purchased? Savvy consumers who want to watch movies on their iPods will either use widely-available software that rips DVDs to an iPod-playable format or will just download illegal video files off the Internet. Those are not great solutions but, when an industry doesn't give its customers what they want and instead limits our choices in the guise of a value-add offer, the movie studios and Apple should be too surprised when it happens.

Peter Wolchak