Why the New Yorker DVD feels like microfiche

According to this Wall Street Journal Article (probably accessible for free this week only); the New Yorker DVD uses scans of the original pages to get around copyright law, which allows re-publication of articles in their "original print context," but does not allow republication in a new and different format without compensation to the original writer. As I have pointed out before, a by-product of this method is ability to see every single original page. with cartoons and ads. The downside is an inability to copy and paste and search all of the actual text. As a computer geek would say, the inability to get to the text itself is "not a bug, its a feature."