[HN Gopher] The deception of "buying" digital movies
___________________________________________________________________
The deception of "buying" digital movies
Author : worldofmatthew
Score : 485 points
Date : 2022-10-04 11:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worldofmatthew.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldofmatthew.com)
| keb_ wrote:
| If I can't buy a movie or album DRM-free, I won't buy them at
| all. This is an area where piracy ironically offers a better
| experience than the legitimate route.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Is this a surprise to anyone? I'm not being cynical. I thought
| this was well known. Is it not?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There's been a lot of discussion about this, recently.
|
| I think that some form of persistent medium might be useful, but
| the comparisons between, say, CDs, and digital music files, isn't
| really a "fair" one.
|
| One of the biggest things about _any_ physical media; whether it
| be vinyl record, CD, or even an SD card, is that the media has a
| _finite lifetime_. It may be a _long_ lifetime, but the clock is
| ticking.
|
| When we buy a CD, we aren't buying the music. We're buying the
| physical media on which the music has been placed. _Tick-tick-
| tick..._ Eventually, the CD will die. At that point, we can 't
| expect the music store to give us another CD for free. We have to
| buy it again.
|
| I grew up in the age of vinyl. I brought the same album over,
| frequently, because the records wore out. I never even thought
| about it.
|
| I could record the album on tape, and have a somewhat longer-
| lasting copy of the music, but that, too, would eventually die. I
| would often record the album, as soon as I got it, then play the
| tape, thereafter. It prolonged the life of the album.
|
| If we buy digital art (music, photographs, movies, TV shows,
| etc.), we can do so in physical media (a locked DVD, for
| instance), or as direct digital, "virtual" media (streaming,
| downloading, etc.).
|
| The first (DVD) can be copied, like I used to copy records, but
| the second (downloading, as opposed to streaming), could, in
| theory, save a full-quality copy of the art, in perpetuity. If
| you got it in a thumb drive, or SD card, then the media would
| have a finite lifetime, but the difference between that media,
| and, say, a CD, is that the copy would be direct digital-to-
| digital (I think most CD copies, these days, are also "pure
| digital"). That A/D conversion introduces some "lossiness," that
| makes the copy ever so slightly (or, in the case of cassette
| tapes, a lot more than "slightly") lesser in quality than the
| original.
|
| It's not quite as black-and-white as people on either side like
| to make it.
|
| For the record, I am not a fan of the ability to "take away" art
| that may be on physical media in the possession of a customer (as
| opposed to blocking access to art on some kind of external media,
| under the control of the publisher).
|
| Things like Kindles and iPads are a sort of "grey area," where
| the device is the media, as opposed to a player for media that is
| introduced, externally.
|
| I have no solution, but I'm not a fan of the extremist, over-
| simplified rhetoric that either side uses.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| Buy pricing also acts as an anchor vs the other options. This
| happens a lot in pricing; something seems excessively costly just
| to make the option next to it seem reasonable. Ski resorts do
| this all the time. The daily lift rate at Whistler in Canada is
| around 200CAD but a seasons ticket is 1700. It makes the seasons
| pass seem, almost reasonable.
| youdontsayitno wrote:
| digital artifacts do not play well with capitalism as it is.
| something has to be done.
|
| I refuse to watch what could have been vanish...(e.g. napster,
| megaupload, what.cd and those kinds of complete medial-cultural
| archives). Heck, we're going the opposite direction, libraries
| are starting to get mud slung. There are too many incentives to
| shift that public perception, into libraries being bad; just a
| couple more generations.
|
| sure, people whose job is to make this expensive productions
| involving lots of people need to earn a living somehow... it's an
| open problem but we need to look beyond capitalism to find an
| answer acceptable to all people, both those who come up with the
| ideas (who when coming up with them are greatly benefited by open
| access to all culture) and those living off the rent of the
| produced cultural artifact.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| There's always BitTorrent.
| thom_ wrote:
| If you pay a twice the rental cost and watch the movie a dozen
| times, that's your moneys worth. Nobody wants to hold onto a DVD
| for 20 years to rewatch an old movie again and again and again
| and pass it onto their grandkids. This is just ridiculous,
| streaming movies is absolutely the future. The days of 50tb drive
| arrays with every Hollywood movie are over not because of a new
| world order but because the time trade off and all that effort
| just isn't worth the $4 to sit and enjoy the movie in one of your
| finite days on Earth
| IYasha wrote:
| This is the "you will own nothing" part I was telling people
| about for years. They still love their Steamy pile of games.
|
| > than buying the movie
|
| it's "then". probably. :)
| efitz wrote:
| The anecdote in TFA is wrong, about "coming to your house and
| seizing your DVDs". They won't come to your house; they will
| revoke the decryption keys and push the revocation to your Blu-
| Ray player, which will then fail to decrypt your BDs. They don't
| need to come to visit; they thought of that already.
|
| And it's not just movies, it's also books and music. Many people
| "bought" MP3s or "buy" Kindle eBooks. Amazon has already shown
| that it is willing to delete Kindle content remotely [1]. And
| come on, this is Amazon. They are happy to censor on their own
| [2] and in collaboration with other companies [3].
|
| Copyright is not just a "scam" anymore. It's a tool that is being
| used to shape what information is available to us. It's an
| enforcement mechanism for the "Overton Window".
|
| [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-amazon-is-within-its-
| right... [2] https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-harry-became-
| sally [3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8523526/amazon-stop-
| selling-to...
| emaro wrote:
| If they call it buying, but think renting, then I might as well
| call it borrowing, but think pirating.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it
| is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It
| takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in
| return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are
| around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s.
| It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the
| TV and surround setup to take advantage of it. Sometimes WAY
| better.
|
| Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code
| included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So
| I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from
| home or something.
|
| Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the
| situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the
| digital version! I can even go to my local used
| bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices.
| And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Do you have to watch these non-skippable FBI warnings?
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Yeah.
| PNWChris wrote:
| The worst part is that the old "stop stop play" trick doesn't
| work on any devices I have that can play disks (Xbox and
| computers). Every time I play a disk and hit the unskippable
| nonsense, I'm reminded why nobody uses those things anymore.
|
| If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick
| still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then
| press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and
| just plays the movie.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I've been doing similar (i.e, growing my collection of physical
| medium entertainment). I also prefer physical medium and my own
| player because I don't feel comfortable with someone else
| (unseen) recording my every pause, rewind, login, etc.
|
| I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my
| psyche.
| m463 wrote:
| Except for the unskippable nonsense, and the hit-or-miss
| ability to resume a show you that you paused or stopped.
|
| other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as
| well.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play
| back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from
| Netflix et al.
| paxys wrote:
| Might as well skip the extra step and just torrent them
| directly. What you are doing is illegal either way, so why do
| the extra work?
| deadbunny wrote:
| Maybe in America (Land of the Free). Elsewhere in the world
| it's perfectly legal to backup your owned media.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yeah, no.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think this is what everyone should do instead of "buying"
| or paying for subscription services
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec
| compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and
| DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an
| Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to
| ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth
| the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.
| rdschouw wrote:
| An Apple TV 4K with Infuse app does all of this without
| problems and supports many kinds of storage backends.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I've not
| noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the
| Android OS.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby
| Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/
| rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I'm trying to think if I have any discs with Dolby
| Vision, I'm only buying 1080p blurays so maybe not. Most
| recent purchases were Dune and the new Batman movie and
| those both look and sound fantastic.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I believe Dolby Vision is only on 4k Blu Rays, so you're
| probably good.
| pathartl wrote:
| This is essentially correct. I've been bouncing between
| different boxes and HTPCs for almost a couple decades now
| and the best experience I've had has always been the Nvidia
| Shield. The only annoyance I have is I want to reliably set
| Kodi as the main launcher, which is more of Kodi's issue
| rather than the system.
|
| But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due
| to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos,
| DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will
| allow you to get much better quality out of your source
| file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just
| absolutely not worth it.
| rendaw wrote:
| How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is
| about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if
| you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while
| you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot
| of video content.
|
| I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that
| typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware
| of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without
| lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a
| particular set of skills.
| extragood wrote:
| I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video
| down to an 8 - 10 GB file size:
| https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding
|
| It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some
| custom tuned settings and has really good results from my
| experience.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Handbrake, chose a profile, use a script, use a more
| efficient codec. Doesn't take much manual work but computer
| chugs for a while.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Would this work for Dolby Vision et al?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It uses ffmpeg underneath which can handle a large number
| of formats, in theory at least. You might have to
| sacrifice some esoteric features however.
| rendaw wrote:
| Does handbrake presets give you good space savings? I was
| imagining at most something in the 10-20% range.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Most Blu Rays I have are MPEG-2. AVC compresses to about
| half the size for the same quality and HEVC does that
| again on top.
| franciscop wrote:
| Cannot wait for hardware support for AV1, since encoding
| with software takes hours for short clips.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I use a 4 bay NAS with 4TB drives. I guess things would be
| more problematic if I had hundreds of movies but I've got a
| hair over 100 right now averaging around 40GB per movie
| which is fine.
| joshstrange wrote:
| A Synology is good option here (I say this as someone with
| 2 UnRaid machines and 1 12-bay Synology). You can even get
| one that can run Plex for you as well (assuming your
| transcoding needs are minimal/none, else you might need a
| seperate box to handle the transcoding and just use the
| Synology as storage, like I do).
|
| 14TB+ hard drives are not too bad (~$235) so that would be
| 210 movies right there (though you are going to need to
| "burn" 1 drive for parity). The other option is to more
| liberally interpret copyright laws and buy the disk then
| pirate a copy that matches your requirements. Seeing how
| there are many people out there just doing the pirating
| step and that you aren't running a pay-for-plex scheme then
| I can't imagine you running afoul of law enforcement.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Even if for some reason you don't re-encode, 18+ TB disks
| are now available. This means you can fit nearly 300 films'
| worth on a single drive like this, more if you buy
| multiple. I don't think it's such a bad idea to run a
| 4-drive cluster out of a single Raspberry Pi, with all the
| drives connected over USB.
|
| You don't even need backups for this, really. If you own
| the discs and lose the digital version, just copy it on the
| disc again. If you acquired it via other means, then... it
| should be possible to replace most such data. Even if you
| do choose to make backups, then that doubles your cost per
| terabyte at most.
|
| Storage is really cheap, assuming you're fine with
| something that isn't a fancy ZFS/RAID array.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm 90% sure an rpi can't handle the Bitrate needed to
| watch a 4K video.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| You can't just throw files on there. You should make sure
| the clients you're connecting support the codecs and
| formats natively and at that point the pi is basically
| acting as a NAS. It should play 4k fine like that if it
| has the bandwidth necessary.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't think the pi itself
| has the internal bandwidth necessary.
| deadbunny wrote:
| The rPI moved the NIC off the USB bus so is actuy1gbps
| which is plenty for even 4k and it has hardware x264/x265
| so should playback fine.
| pdntspa wrote:
| You have stumbled upon one of the greatest virtues of owning
| your bits and bytes, which is something that people seem to be
| forgetting
| cxr wrote:
| > I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For
| me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any
| format.
|
| I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I
| can't vouch for this at all.
|
| I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and
| picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me
| about the experience was how much worse it was from what I
| remembered.
|
| You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement
| warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to
| individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button
| doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get
| a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".)
|
| Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you
| over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that
| haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros,
| is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"--a
| bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus,
| etc. that're _supposed_ to be consistent with the look and feel
| and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation
| cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go,
| they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two,
| because they don 't age well at all. The same can be argued for
| movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow
| much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and
| stuff to capture your attention.
|
| Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an
| obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused
| for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever
| trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on
| the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1-2
| minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it
| breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is
| that when you return to your device, it should get rid of
| itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient
| to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to
| the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu
| that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking
| forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at
| when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous.
|
| Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you
| allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have
| to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find
| the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it
| perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This
| adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up
| giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a
| streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed
| when I first picked up the disc).
|
| 1. Aka the "do not" sign
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol>
|
| 2. <https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose>
| dawnerd wrote:
| I think your problem is using a Blu-ray player. If you use
| what I'd suspect most people use, an Xbox or PlayStation, the
| experience is much, much better. Even better is just using
| makemkv and ripping just the movie. Also works for 4k if you
| have the correct drive (there's some inexpensive drives you
| have flash firmware)
| cxr wrote:
| My problem is with Blu-Ray. The moment where you're
| subverting the Blu-Ray format, you're also subverting the
| argument that Blu-Ray provides the best experience of any
| format.
|
| I had a whole paragraph in that post (but that I ended up
| deleting) about how Blu-Ray would be great if "Blu-Ray"
| were as simple as a single-file filesystem with an open
| media container format at the root, burned/pressed onto a
| BD physical disc (or some other high-density optical
| media). Like the digital equivalent of a reel (or set of
| reels) of 35mm film. But that's not what it is.
| [deleted]
| cgrealy wrote:
| >4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison,
| Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s.
|
| Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As
| internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably
| going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge
| a premium for it!)
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR,
| but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the
| Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code
| to use on iTunes.
|
| The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes
| versions look phenomenal.
|
| It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the
| quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I
| read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's
| probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an
| image looks.
| tigen wrote:
| Film grain is a funny topic... if it was the original look
| then it can be considered highest quality/fidelity to retain
| it. Filtering it makes for easier video compression.
| kranke155 wrote:
| There are sites who do this exact kind of review.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=review+picture+quality+blura.
| ..
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Wow, that's really surprising and disappointing. Usually the
| disc is considered the ideal "canonical" way to watch the
| movie, but I guess not always. I think blu-ray.com has user
| reviews that are focused on the quality of the disc
| specifically, but I usually don't look at them. I looked at
| MI:1 and they talked a lot about the grain, but seemed to see
| it as a stylistic choice.
|
| Film grain from pre-digital era movies is a divisive issue.
| All older movies originally had some amount of film grain
| from the analog film. Some people like it and want it there
| on purpose. Some people prefer the movie run through a de-
| noise filter. The pro-grain people claim this removes fine
| detail. The anti-grain people say why the hell would you want
| it there on purpose. Some modern movies even add film grain
| on purpose. See Disney's Luca as an example. I personally
| don't care for it but it usually doesn't bother me as long as
| it's not extreme.
| badcppdev wrote:
| This is a totally uninformed question. Are you sure the bad
| quality from the discs is the fault of the discs rather than
| your blu-ray reader? I'm assuming you've had good quality
| from the reader for other discs??
| deadbunny wrote:
| It's a digital signal, either it reads and works or it
| doesn't. You don't lose quality because a "bad" player.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| "Noisy, grainy, just bad."
|
| AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only
| be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film
| grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces
| among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and
| non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over
| streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression
| is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the
| DNR - but if you read online forums, _most collectors hate
| it_ and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever
| been invented.
| chaxor wrote:
| On the other (semi-unrelated) hand, film can be much, much
| better than digital for some applications. For example, a
| transmission electron microscope that uses an emulsion film
| to capture the image compared to a digital capture device -
| the film can be magnified again with a light microscope
| later for much more magnification than may be accessible
| when all of the information is registered to a single
| pixel.
|
| Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to
| everything.
| maskros wrote:
| It's not just extra DNR applied, modern image and video
| compression formats almost make it a point to erase all
| detail and texture from images.
|
| For example, compare the WebP and AVIF (VP8/AV1)
| compression artefacts with JPEG (and MPEG).
|
| With WebP and AVIF all textures and low contrast details
| tend to be erased or smoothed out, preserving only high
| contrast parts of the image.
|
| The JPEG image may have some visible ringing and block edge
| artefacts, but at least the textures and fine details are
| preserved!
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Which explains the downvotes I'm getting. I've apparently
| angered the cinephiles.
|
| Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences
| have made multiple people this upset.
| f1refly wrote:
| I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to
| your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy"
| search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose
| and complained about it in a public forum without
| understanding the mechanics.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Or maybe you're getting downvoted because you were
| denigrating other people's personal preferences when you
| called the disc version "trash." You're guilty of what
| you accuse others.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's funny if the poster is actually complaining about
| grain. Digital compression, like the one that Netflix uses,
| will often clean up the image of grain as a secondary
| effect of the compression algo.
|
| Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression
| algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was
| notorious for virtually removing all grain making it
| impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for
| years. (I work in advertising).
|
| Exactly like you said - grain is a common first victim of
| video compression.
|
| The other curious thing - modern movies that are shot on
| film / have grain actually get it removed during VFX
| stages. You have to do it so you can integrate CGI - grain
| is usually "sampled" first by the compositing software (The
| Foundry's Nuke in 99% of occasions) and removed since the
| CGI image won't have any grain from the CG renderer so you
| have to integrate it onto a denoised image. You then re add
| it at the end!
|
| Using the same software you then re-add the sampled noise
| back onto the image, and since you've now integrated the
| CGI, the noise goes on top of everything helping it all get
| integrated.
|
| Just saying this because you are right - using noise
| reduction to remove film grain for release is considered a
| sin (I myself would agree with the sentiment). Yet actually
| most films today will go through some denoise stage in VFX.
| Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually
| remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep
| the filmic texture.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent
| it? If we had originally developed film technology where
| everything looked completely clean, would anyone have
| thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how
| to make this look grainy"?
| kranke155 wrote:
| I doubt we would invent it. But there are artefacts of
| the analogue age that have more value than people think.
| My understating is that "grain" on vynil is perceived as
| increased resolution to the brain (or so I've read). Thus
| giving some scientific reason for the preference of
| audiophiles. It would be interesting to know if there's a
| similar effect to grain in film but I don't know.
|
| The other interesting thing is how beautiful and
| different grain is when it's from silver halvide film.
| I'd dare say it's truly gorgeous to watch. Such film was
| used in the 1900-1930s age and if you watch a great print
| or restoration of that time the effect is quite stunning.
| I believe John Ford's Stagecoach is a good example that
| should be relatively easy to find.
|
| unfortunately I think the same epoch has lost immense
| amounts of film due to the flammability of the materials
| (which is extremely high, as seen in Tarantino's
| Inglorious Basterds). Which is why every once in a while
| you'll get a huge fire in some film archive and so much
| of it is lost.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If film grain never existed, would we invent it?_
|
| Yes, but it wouldn't be used across an entire film.
| Likely just in flashbacks and other dramatic scenes, the
| way it's applied to digital productions today.
|
| Similar to how in the 2000's, hipster bands added
| photographic pops and crackle to their tracks as an
| artistic measure.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| They added those things to indicate age my mimicing older
| formats. They wouldn't add those effects to mimic older
| formats if older formats never existed.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some
| form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually
| grow a taste for them.
|
| Modern digital music can be completely clean and
| flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that
| can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from
| a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression
| artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate
| sources.
|
| And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch
| Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts.
|
| Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the
| distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio
| interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song,
| so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the
| recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink
| to other music producers.
|
| It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which
| itself is a great example of intentional digital
| artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on
| things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias
| like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are
| perfectly alias free.
|
| [0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after
| the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but
| very distorted.
|
| https://youtu.be/RM2cNhVep40
| dangets wrote:
| It sounds like movies need to start including gpu shaders
| with them to add grains or other effects regardless of
| the compression.
| evancox100 wrote:
| Not literally a gpu shader but AV-1 now has film grain
| synthesis as part of the decoding process:
|
| https://waveletbeam.com/index.php/av1-film-grain-
| synthesis
| The-Bus wrote:
| Netflix removes the film grain in compression then adds
| it back in: https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/Netflix-
| removes-movie-n...
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain
| making it impossible to have authentic film grain on
| YouTube for years._
|
| In the YouTube case, the low encoding bitrates make it
| really difficult to encode fine detail. (Blu-ray discs
| use H.264 as well, and at those bitrates it reproduces
| film grain well.)
|
| > _Which is an interesting thing to think about - we
| actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re
| add to keep the filmic texture._
|
| This is a great point. Even with older "remastered"
| movies, analog artifacts like film grain are sometimes
| removed during cleanup and then recreated during
| mastering.
| kranke155 wrote:
| They will 100% remove grain for restoration. It's the
| same process as VFX really, essentially restoration
| involves a lot of what's called "cleanup" work in the
| industry. In a Marvel movie cleanup will be removing
| wires from actors, in restoration it's scratches and
| other issues.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I'm not a collector, but I hate vaxy faces. Which is also
| the reason I could spot CGI for years, until we had the
| ability to simulate even a pores of skin, but then again it
| were tuned to 11 and I could spot it again.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| The biggest difference for me is the sound quality. Lossless
| 7.1 24/96 or even 24/192. Compared to, at best, DTS or DD+.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I've always understood this and it doesn't bother me, at least
| for iTunes/Apple movies.
|
| Yes, you get less than a DVD/Blu-Ray in that the media could
| potentially disappear.
|
| But you also get more. It works on your computer, your phone,
| your iPad, and instantly on every TV in your house that has a
| streaming device. It works when you travel. You can download
| every movie you "own" to every device you have, almost instantly,
| as many times as you want. You don't have to worry about storing,
| losing, or damaging the disc. You can start a movie on your
| laptop, pause, and automatically pick right up where you left off
| on your phone or iPad or TV. You don't have to go to a store, or
| order a disc online and wait. You don't have to pay for shipping.
| With Apple, and least, you don't even have to buy new media when
| new technologies appear - every video I've ever purchased has
| been upgraded to HD, and then to 4K and HDR when they became
| available, all for free. And with Apple at least, "Family
| Sharing" lets all of your family members stream or download the
| movie to their devices as well.
|
| Yes, it's possible that Apple or Amazon could take away movies
| that you own. But the public outcry would be massive. And I've
| been "owning" videos from Apple for 10+ years without issue, so I
| feel pretty comfortable with it at this point.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I was considering a top-level comment saying something similar,
| at the risk of being severely downvoted for an opinion contrary
| to such a popular Hacker News hobby horse (you'll own nothing
| and be happy), but here you are already at the bottom of the
| page, so I'm just going to commiserate.
|
| I do happen to still own a few DVD box sets from 15-20 years
| ago, and I haven't watched a single one in over a decade. I
| have no clue if they still work. I didn't even have a player
| for a long time, though my wife finally bought one a few years
| ago to be able to watch a Twin Peaks boxed set with deleted
| scenes that were not available in any other medium. As it
| stands, when I click the option to buy from a streaming
| service, I understand it doesn't mean it's forever, but I don't
| care. It just means I'm guessing I'll want to watch it more
| than once outside of the 48 hour rental window and it's worth
| the extra five bucks or so to do that. It doesn't mean I'm
| likely going to want to watch it again decades from now. Maybe
| it's just that I moved so much when I was younger, but the
| sheer number of DVDs and CDs I lost or accidentally destroyed
| over a decades greatly outweights what I have ever lost because
| a streaming service lost its license. And I'm glad to no longer
| need the external storage space.
| haunter wrote:
| >Yes, it's possible that Apple or Amazon could take away movies
| that you own. But the public outcry would be massive
|
| It's already happening and nope there isn't a massive outcry
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912
| [deleted]
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The public outcry being massive isn't going to stop companies
| from trying to exploit people. Companies that seemed consistent
| in the past have changed many times. Apple is actually a great
| example in that they were a privacy-focused company but have
| more recently forayed into scanning devices against customers'
| will and have now created their own ad business. That decision
| was made under the assumption that they own the devices they
| sell to customers for thousands of dollars not their customers.
| If the economy gets worse, you can bet they will look for
| additional ways to make money off their customers. Once you buy
| a decent amount of movies they will have lots of leverage over
| you. Look at Tim Cook's response to fixing the texting issue.
| They don't care about public outcry.
| daveslash wrote:
| Reminds me of the _" The Books Will Stop Working"_ incident from
| a few years back.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331
| imchillyb wrote:
| Only the original copyright filer should be able to protect their
| work.
|
| The moment the rights are sold or transferred to another party,
| the rights should be dissolved and no protections afforded;
| whatsoever.
| ge96 wrote:
| What's annoying is you buy a UHD movie and you can't stream UHD
| unless it's on a specific device eg. Phone or TV. Otherwise
| capped to 480p in case of YT.
| titzer wrote:
| I am hoarding DVDs and it's because a.) it's cheap, b.) it's
| reliable c.) it's future-proof and d.) I don't trust tomorrow's
| political/cultural landscape to not disappear things down the
| memory hole as well as subtly editing out offensive material or
| otherwise altering things in hard to detect ways. Case in point,
| not long ago a family member witnessed "Scrubs" being scrubbed of
| a particularly offensive joke that ran afoul of today's censors.
| With streaming, you have absolutely no control over what version
| of a movie you're seeing. What are you going to do? Store the
| bits and compare it to your neighbors'? That right there is a
| crime.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well you do you. If you ask me, DVD quality (480p) is not
| really watchable anymore these days. Looks like what VHS looked
| like when DVDs were new now that we have full HD and 4K to
| compare it to.
|
| Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly
| accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in
| a country where it's de facto legal.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| I'm pretty impressed with the upconversion quality of the
| Xbox One for better viewing on a modern television.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| > "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke
|
| Which one?
| eddieroger wrote:
| Seemingly this: https://etcanada.com/news/660724/scrubs-
| blackface-episodes-b...
| titzer wrote:
| It wasn't that, it was a one-liner by McGinley's character
| that just got inexplicably stricken.
| weekendvampire wrote:
| Agreed. Now if I have a TV show I haven't seen, I check if I've
| already downloaded it years back and watch the downloaded
| version rather than stream it. I can't trust streaming services
| to show me anything as it is, ever since Netflix removed the
| Community episode with blackface (it was parodying blackface,
| that was the point).
| throwaway2203 wrote:
| DVDs have a limited lifespan as well
| titzer wrote:
| My oldest one is 25 years old and still works with no issues.
| Technically _every_ physical object breaks down over time,
| but I expect that with proper storage and handling with care,
| a pressed DVD could last 50 years. And then you can also rip
| the bits and store them.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I have a disc from 2004 that had been in its original
| shrink wrap until this year but it had read errors when I
| tried to rip it and was showing signs of rot. Some discs
| are from bad batches, and you don't really have any way of
| knowing if a disc is bad until it starts rotting.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Luckily, the data on them does not. Storing a 5GB file
| locally is basically free, at $15 ish per terabyte for modern
| HDDs.
| shmerl wrote:
| DRM-free video should be a thing. Buy and save the file - that's
| it. If you don't have the file you can back up, it's a scam and
| not buying.
|
| GOG tried to introduce that, but legacy film industry is too
| obsessed with DRM for all its usual wrong reasons so that didn't
| work out.
|
| https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
| deadbeeves wrote:
| I don't use any paid streaming services, so forgive me if I'm
| saying something stupid, but doesn't this:
|
| >Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be
| available to you for download or streaming from the Service
|
| mean that you can download a copy of the content you bought? As
| far as I'm concerned, that's about as close to "owning" as it
| gets, when it comes to digital media.
|
| If you buy, say, a pair of pliers from a hardware store, and then
| instead of taking them home you leave them at the store and come
| back to use them every time you have something that needs plying,
| and then eventually the store needs to make room for other
| products and so throws your pliers away, you have no one to blame
| but yourself for not taking them home for safekeeping when you
| had the chance.
|
| This analogy could break down if the content has DRM. I don't
| know if it does, or if it does when it stops working, but that's
| a different discussion from "Amazon deleted my movie".
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Music is typically DRM-free so in that case you have a point.
| Movie "downloads" are typically DRM'd and only downloadable
| within the confines of an app, and you don't get to take the
| files with you if e.g. you switch devices.
| josephcsible wrote:
| For your analogy to be correct, it's not that you chose not to
| take the pliers home, but that the hardware store won't let
| you.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In this analogy, it is the case that the store won't let you
| take the pliers home, or only lets you take the pliers home
| under the supervision of an employee, and also that if you want
| to take the pliers with you on a road trip to Mexico, that
| isn't allowed, even if the hardware store has a branch in
| Mexico.
|
| Oh, and if the hardware store goes out of business you can
| never access the pliers again because it turns out they were
| leased from the plier manufacturer.
|
| Frequently when streaming content providers say "download" it
| is more accurately described as downloading a pre-cached
| version of the stream that only works on proprietary software
| which is reliant on a semi-regular internet connection. For
| example, you can "download" netflix/amazon/youtube content, but
| it can only be viewed on the app, and the app must be
| periodically reconnected to the internet.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I often wonder how much money the movie industry would make if
| they just charged $2 for HD movies and $3 for a 4k download, no
| DRM because it's pointless and clearly looking at pirate bay
| doesn't work. I think most people would just pay and probably
| quite a lot. I'd probably be spending $30 per month there and it
| would feel great to be doing things honestly but getting a file I
| could keep forever.
|
| The people intent on pirating would still pirate and the people
| who wanted to pay a reasonable cost would get as good if not
| better experience than the pirates. $10+ to "own" a movie on a
| streaming service with DRM and lock in is far too much.
| wazoox wrote:
| As Klaus Schaub said "you will own nothing and you will be
| happy"...
| IYasha wrote:
| Yeah, this is the first part, and I doubt the second part will
| be a natural reaction.
| _thisdot wrote:
| I remember a Twitter client for Android being pulled from the
| Play Store. Anyone who had already purchased it could still go to
| Play Store and download it again. But nobody new would find it.
| One would expect the same to happen for every digital "purchase"
| SergeAx wrote:
| I firmly beleive that for every movie I "bought" digitally of
| physaically I am entitled to download a torrent.
| paxys wrote:
| And a lot of people firmly believe that they are entitled to
| download a torrent without a purchase. Ultimately your beliefs
| don't matter, the law does.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Morally, you are, but unfortunately, what's moral isn't always
| legal.
| [deleted]
| Zigurd wrote:
| This is what not really owning content implies about that
| computer you think you own: If a content publisher can reach into
| your computer and turn off access to content, you not only do not
| own and control the content, you do not properly own and control
| that computer. If you did you could assert that removing access
| to data on that computer constitutes unauthorized access. It's a
| security breach.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| There's another layer to this that I haven't seen in any of the
| comments thus far, and that is the fact that the movie studios
| are putting the GOOD movies behind the "second paywall." Many
| popular titles are not available for streaming, and require a
| "purchase" or "rental," outside of the titles you're getting with
| your particular services. I have Netflix, Hulu, Prime, HBO, and
| Disney, and it seems like, about half the time I get a hankering
| to watch something in particular (instead of just "grazing"), I
| see that it's not available on any of my services, and it's a
| rent/buy title. So, yes, I have bought some movies (less than a
| dozen), and I always buy them from Apple, if I'm having to buy.
| I've been tempted several times to "buy" the complete set of the
| Office on Apple TV for $99, but I fear exactly what the OP is
| talking about: a rug-pull that causes me to lose access to the
| library.
| etothepii wrote:
| An unusual form of pluralising thief.
|
| I know it is acceptable to use the grocers' apostrophe with
| foreign words but with thief the forms thiefs and thieves are
| both arguably correct (see pre Tolkien elfs) but auto-correct
| does not agree.
| jijji wrote:
| whatever happened to downloading a mp4 torrent of the movie and
| watching it instantly whenever you want?
| realusername wrote:
| It's still pretty much the only reliable long term option to
| get a movie and be sure it'll stay viewable, nothing has
| changed.
| awoimbee wrote:
| Then the TV show you love gets cancelled because everyone is
| pirating it. I guess it's the fault of the studios for pushing
| us towards piracy, but it's a shame.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| The best anti-piracy tool of all time was old Netflix. Then
| they had to go and screw it up. Yearrrrgh!
| fbanon wrote:
| Still alive and kicking. You just need to know where to look.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| TPB has added really annoying "on-click" BS lately, super
| shady. Any alternatives you might have heard of? Not for me,
| for a friend of course...
| bheadmaster wrote:
| YIFY provides movies of decent quality at reasonable file
| sizes.
|
| For movies that YIFY doesn't have, 1337x is a good site.
| fein wrote:
| qbittorrent + jackett. Click on however many pub trackers
| you want to search in jackett then set the search plugin on
| qbit to point to your jackett instance.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Tell your friend about 1337x.to
| deadbeeves wrote:
| I just use NoScript.
| weberer wrote:
| QBitTorrent has a search feature built in.
| mindslight wrote:
| It is painful to even just skim this thread, seeing basically
| every comment brimming with frustration from being stuck in a
| paradigm that's straightforward to leave behind. So much
| wasted human potential.
|
| It's a solved problem - torrent your damn entertainment.
| Movies are just basic files sitting in a directory. Files
| that can be rewatched whenever you'd like. If you are
| traveling, copy to your laptop. If you move and haven't quite
| set up your entertainment center or Internet connection,
| watch it on a computer. If your friend is interested in
| something, copy it to their USB drive. No fucking nonsense of
| some third party capriciously disrupting your life precisely
| when you're trying to relax.
|
| Any business trying to sell me some productized solution
| needs to beat torrenting for ease of use. So far none of them
| have even attempted, because they all end up warping the user
| experience to appease Hollywood's delusion of control. Just
| say no.
| dublin wrote:
| Yeah, but that's a real problem for those of us who don't
| watch a lot of movies. Many people aren't capable of figuring
| out "where to look" at all anyway. I am, to some degree, but
| it's just not worth spending that much of my time to hunt
| them down on the rare occasions I really want to watch
| something.
|
| Also, I'll just note that we never got the 21st century we
| were promised, which was this - any movie ever made:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The fundamental
| problem is that the people who own movie IP rights are truly
| evil.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil._
|
| That is wildly overstated. The worst they can do to you is
| _not let you watch their entertaining movie_. Possibly even
| after you 've paid for it (the subject of the OP) - and in
| that case the culprit isn't even the IP owner, it's the
| distributor! And honestly it sounds like the problem with
| digital ownership is simple fraud that is a) covered by
| existing law and b) too expensive for anyone to litigate.
| Maybe a class action could do it.
|
| Here's the really interesting part - you're railing against
| artificial scarcity. Someone has a good that they _could_
| give away, and they aren 't, and you're calling them evil
| for doing that, but I ask you, in all honesty, how else do
| you make money from movies? If you can't make money from
| it, how will you convince investors to fund your next
| movie? (Now substitute "album book software" for movie and
| ask the same question.)
|
| That's not to say that IP owners can't be "evil". George
| Lucas believed it was his right to keep changing Star Wars
| over time, and it's impossible to find a legit copy of Star
| Wars that is the original theatrical release. That's some
| 1984-level memory hole bullshit and although the stakes are
| low, it's evil. Disney is arguably quite evil for a variety
| of reasons, e.g. it's unholy influence over Congress, it's
| unhealthy consolidation of huge chunks of the American
| movie market. But neither of them are evil for using
| artificial scarcity to profit from their work, because
| that's the only way to profit from data goods.
|
| (Professional open source tries to square the circle by
| giving away the data goods but charging for (actually
| scarce) knowledge. It's a good model but cannot apply to
| entertainment goods, since viewers don't need scarce
| knowledge to enjoy a movie.)
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The stakes are not low. Denying access to, or altering,
| content in this way is equivalent to vandalising the
| cultural commons (and yes, even if it's not in the public
| domain - it's still cultural commons). People should be
| more upset about this.
| javajosh wrote:
| On the scale of evil things in the world, modifying ~10
| minutes of a popular fantasy movie does not rank highly.
| The implication is scary, but the act itself is
| profoundly unimportant.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work in R&D where tens to hundreds of millions are spent on
| talent/materials/engineering to design new high tech materials
| for the world.
|
| It's strange that this much effort practically gets about 10-15
| years of protection(or less depending on prosecution time with
| the patent office), while a drawing of a mouse or "moving-
| pictures" is protected for a century.
| The-Bus wrote:
| Not using cost measured in dollars to equate the benefit of
| different things, but most studio films are at minimum tens of
| millions of dollars, with nine figures not being uncommon.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Of course, I'm just noting it's interesting that a similar
| endeavor measured in dollars is protected for about the half
| the life of the inventors in R&D, and almost 10x that in the
| latter case.
| anjbe wrote:
| The article mentions GOG's movie selection (which is indeed
| extremely limited: https://www.gog.com/en/movies). It's worth
| pointing out that Vimeo also provides some DRM-free digital
| downloads through its "On Demand" imprint
| (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/oxyana). Like GOG, though, it mostly
| contains works of a particular niche (in this case, documentaries
| and short films).
|
| I've been hard-pressed to find any other way to purchase DRM-free
| movies.
| ezfe wrote:
| The iTunes Store continues to be the only reputable place to buy
| movies, mainly because they allow downloads (except 4K...but I
| digress).
|
| In the past, redownloading movies wasn't even permitted. You
| download it and save it somewhere yourself. You can still do that
| to avoid any issues in the future, but I suspect the few
| incidents that have affected the iTunes Store are unlikely to re-
| occur. Why? For exactly the reason I mentioned at the beginning,
| originally you couldn't even re-download movies so it stands to
| reason the initial transition might've had some licensing
| loopholes.
| causi wrote:
| It's interesting that even storefronts run by the same company
| don't always have the same reliability. Microsoft fucked over
| thousands of gamers when they pulled the plug on Games for
| Windows Live, yet I can still download episodes of Invader Zim
| I purchased on the Xbox Live Store in 2006.
| jSherz wrote:
| Do the downloaded movies have DRM attached that requires a
| network connection or limits their usage?
| kalleboo wrote:
| They have DRM attached and need to be played on a computer
| that has logged in to your iTunes account and been "blessed".
| But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that
| computer offline it will be able to play those videos in
| eternity.
|
| You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only
| have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other
| computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > But unless something has changed, as long as you keep
| that computer offline it will be able to play those videos
| in eternity.
|
| I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something
| _has_ changed.
|
| During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac
| mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent
| a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed
| to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how
| often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't
| very often).
|
| Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near
| enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single
| bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.
|
| So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost
| certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's
| not perfect ;)
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _I don 't know if it ever was that way. If it was,
| something has changed_
|
| To be fair, it was a LONG time since stopped buying video
| from iTunes. Like 5 years at least. I subscribe to a
| bunch of the streaming services but instead of bothering
| to figure out exactly where something is streaming I just
| download it from the Pirate Bay where I know I can find
| everything right away.
| IYasha wrote:
| > But unless something change
|
| :)
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| 4 words that explain why, if I ever wanted to collect
| movies, they would all be DRM-free torrents.
|
| When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam
| perpetuated by corporations and governments working
| together against our interests, then they only honourable
| ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch
| movies at all.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Why eschew ripping physical media? You'll likely have a
| more uniform collection in terms of quality. Also
| depending where you are in the world, it's either legal
| or just as legal as torrenting media. In the latter case,
| it's not really enforced. It's also probably more
| honourable, if that's something you really care about.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > Why eschew ripping physical media?
|
| None of my computers has a DVD drive! Though if I was
| interested in movies, probably one would.
|
| > You'll likely have a more uniform collection in terms
| of quality.
|
| Also 4K is useless to me as I have a 1080p monitor.
|
| > It's also probably more honourable, if that's something
| you really care about.
|
| Helping systems of control that are actively hostile
| towards me is not honourable, IMO.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| You need a real computer to rip BDs. A netbook or a
| Raspberry Pi aren't going to cut it because of the CPU
| requirements. Said Pi will have no trouble running a
| torrent client though.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Found the spartan.
| paxys wrote:
| Those downloaded movies still have DRM, and can only be played
| on official Apple devices or apps. Apple can revoke the license
| whenever they want. No better than what Amazon and others do.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Can you play those downloaded movies outside of Apple
| hardware/software?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Others have mentioned that the AppleTV app is ubiquitous
| across every major streaming platform - Roku, Amazon, Samsung
| Smart TVs, etc.
|
| A little known service in the US is "Movies Anywhere". Four
| of the major studios participate in as well as does Apple,
| Amazon, Google, Vudu and other platforms. You link all of
| your accounts and a movie bought on one, automatically is
| credited to the other accounts as a purchase.
|
| https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/1150045768...
| CharlesW wrote:
| Yes. A bunch of non-Apple devices have an Apple TV app now1,
| and you can also play movies to any device that supports
| AirPlay 21.
|
| 1 https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-app/devices/
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| That's still Apple hardware/software. If you can't play it
| outside of the locked down Apple ecosystem which is
| checking your license, then you don't own it.
| ezfe wrote:
| > If you can't play it outside of the locked down Apple
| ecosystem which is checking your license, then you don't
| own it.
|
| The DRM does not require being online to verify once it's
| been set up
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _That 's still Apple hardware/software._
|
| Incorrect, Apple did not build the software for all of
| the listed devices. Apple licenses the protocols and
| provides reference implementations through their MFi
| program.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If your movie is from any of the five participating
| studios you buy the movie once and it works across all of
| the major video platforms if you use Movies Anywhere
|
| https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/1150045768...
|
| Blu ray players are also locked down and the embedded
| keys are subject to revocation
| rthomas6 wrote:
| If you buy blu-rays from those five participating
| studios, they also give you the same Movies Anywhere
| digital copy.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| US only though, so if you move you are out of luck.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| You couldn't play a downloaded title on a non-Apple Apple
| TV device or via AirPlay 2 tbf.
|
| In both scenarios the playback support is that the file
| just gives the credentials for the device with the Apple TV
| app or Airplay 2 to go and stream it from Apple's servers.
| No transfer of the video from a local download occurs.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _You couldn 't play a downloaded title on a non-Apple
| Apple TV device or via AirPlay 2 tbf._
|
| You absolutely can.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| >The iTunes Store continues to be the only reputable place to
| buy movies
|
| Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Goodwill work pretty well for
| me.
| ezfe wrote:
| I obviously meant for digital movies, even if I forgot that
| detail
| intrasight wrote:
| I think all movies are digital now ;)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am not complaining too much, but I was disappointed when the
| movies I bought on Google Play stopped being available there, and
| now are in a special area on YouTube. I still have access to
| them, but have to go to a different place.
|
| Anyway, the article makes good points.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| perhaps they can be sued for the use of the word buy?
| stewx wrote:
| One under-appreciated limitation on digital movies is geographic
| restrictions. You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then
| move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them
| anymore due to licensing.
|
| Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the
| inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can
| sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes
| movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow
| re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.
| abraxas wrote:
| Unfortunately geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits
| movie format. DVDs were regionally locked as well and even
| analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that
| were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM).
|
| That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern
| DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than
| ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there
| from the movie industry, just not the capability until
| recently.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| NTSC, PAL and SECAM wasn't a case of intentional geolocking,
| those were simply different signal standards used in
| different parts of the world. NTSC had different frequency
| from PAL/SECAM because the signal was synchronized to the
| power grid; SECAM was different from PAL because the French
| being French had to make it their own way (and then
| communist-affiliated countries adopted it).
| the_af wrote:
| > _DVDs were regionally locked as well_
|
| To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these
| things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is
| such an obviously _bad_ idea for consumers. It was such a
| relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an
| encryption key got leaked? I don 't remember the details).
| babypuncher wrote:
| People complained, but I can't imagine the user experience
| of playing an NTSC DVD on a PAL player and TV would have
| been very good, or vice-versa. There isn't a clean way to
| convert between 50 and 59.94 fields per second. You would
| have ended up with either jittery playback or incorrect
| playback speed. The field sizes are also mismatched, which
| would have required some pretty gross scaling given
| late-'90s DVD player technology.
|
| Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately,
| it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no
| region restrictions.
|
| Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping
| that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS,
| instead of using an "official" player.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
| It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away
| (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember
| the details).
|
| DVD region locking didn't need to be hacked away; it
| operates purely on the honor system. There are 8 regions,
| and a DVD contains a single byte specifying which regions
| it should be allowed to be played in. If the bit for your
| region is clear, you can play the DVD.
|
| Or, of course, you can just ignore that byte, and play the
| DVD.
| wpietri wrote:
| Now you can, but back in the day of hardware-only
| players, those were also region locked. So it was much
| stronger than an honor system originally.
| borski wrote:
| DeCSS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
| brabel wrote:
| I havea few DVDs I bought in my previous country... I
| remember first time I tried to play them in a player from
| the new country, it asked me if I wanted to "move" it to
| the new region... I think there were 2 "moves" allowed. So,
| anyway, I was able to play it, no worries.
| wpietri wrote:
| Overall I think geo-locking was bad, but I wouldn't go this
| far:
|
| > Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
|
| Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking
| enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas,
| the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without
| geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated,
| but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that
| is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more
| or gotten movies later.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to
| US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was
| developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after
| launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop
| including keys for certain defeated devices in new
| releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every
| possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking
| stolen drive keys completely pointless. As the region lock
| is enforced by software only, an unofficial player like VLC
| does not need to pay the region lock any heed.
|
| Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start?
| 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual
| machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block
| updating, Java applications... Let's just say Blu-ray is
| stuck in an odd place where the underlying technology isn't
| really that defeated, even though hackers have made keeping
| up with their stolen device keys from hacked players very
| impractical for the Blu-ray Disc Association. (Revoking a
| drive key requires a 90-day heads up for manufacturers to
| roll out new keys for the effected model, which means that
| if hackers manage to steal 4 device keys per year... from
| over a decade and a half of different players, many not
| receiving updates anymore...)
| sbf501 wrote:
| DeCSS was "cracked" because Xing accidentally included an
| unencrypted key in their firmware.
|
| The encryption wasn't cracked, it was subverted by poor
| security practices.
|
| If Xing hadn't screwed up, it may have been another
| decade before it was possible to rip a DVD, waiting for
| some other manufacturer to screw up.
| throwaway08642 wrote:
| pdntspa wrote:
| I had friends running timing attacks against the Xbox 360
| encryption key around that time, they never publicly
| disclosed their work but I saw them playing games on a
| hacked firmware around mid 2000s. No reason to think this
| wouldn't be the same for the CSS encryption key.
| loufe wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to write this, it's
| fascinating.
| josteink wrote:
| > Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start?
| 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual
| machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block
| updating, Java applications...
|
| It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the
| Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically
| doesn't act in the interest of the buyer.
|
| Given the current state of things, I wouldn't count
| Blurays as media you actually physically own.
|
| You're permitted to watch them, for now, but there's no
| guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.
| mikestew wrote:
| _It would almost seem like most of the engineering for
| the Blu-ray format went into things which very
| specifically doesn't act in the interest of the buyer._
|
| Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-
| more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the
| choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going
| with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
| taylodl wrote:
| You purchased a license to view the media content. I
| don't agree with this philosophy, I see it as a variant
| of "right to repair" that we should call "right to own",
| but that's the way it is for now.
| nmeagent wrote:
| That's the way it is just as long as we tolerate it, so
| _don 't_.
| [deleted]
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The same could be said though of DVD. Remember that DVD
| is completely proprietary - we've just done a fantastic
| job reverse-engineering it. Blu-ray, ironically, is still
| proprietary, but the specification on how the DRM is
| implemented is actually public information and you can
| just download that online. You won't get the required
| encryption key for your new device without a contract
| though for it to work, but if you want to read the
| details, that's fine.
|
| https://aacsla.com/aacs-specifications/
|
| Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale,
| there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too
| worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and
| Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited
| about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5
| with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
| happymellon wrote:
| Steam is the only online games store that has given me
| any levels of comfort that I'll still be able to get
| access to my games after 10 years.
|
| Even then, I'm still not 100% confident that I'll be able
| to access everything in 25 years time.
|
| I have no reason the believe that Sony and Microsoft
| won't shut them down like they already have done with the
| PS3 store.
| mattl wrote:
| Do you think eventually Windows will drop 32-bit support
| like Mac OS X did? What will that mean for a lot of those
| games?
| squarefoot wrote:
| Ironically, by then the best Windows 32bit compatibility
| layer might come from Linux with WINE and other tools
| using it.
|
| https://www.winehq.org/
|
| https://lutris.net/
|
| https://www.playonlinux.com/en/
| mattl wrote:
| I hope so. The Steam Deck has been pretty nice but I hate
| leaving Steam and fiddling with Arch Linux and KDE to get
| non-Steam games working.
| vel0city wrote:
| Microsoft already shut down a lot of games when they
| killed Games for Windows Live.
| kube-system wrote:
| If the bar for "owning" something is that it is
| guaranteed to function unchanged 20+ years from now
| without exception, then I don't own very much stuff.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That bar include able to resell it and inability of
| company selling to have control over the product.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > It would almost seem like most of the engineering for
| the Blu-ray format went into things which very
| specifically doesn't act in the interest of the buyer.
|
| It doesn't _seem_ like that. It _is_ like that.
|
| Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception,
| control and tactical destruction of real value is the
| only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8
| core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4
| cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with
| e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of
| value continues because we've normalised it.
| kortilla wrote:
| > We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to
| make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet
| fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton
| destruction of value continues because we've normalised
| it.
|
| This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price
| differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a
| business viable. Making an actually worse model in the
| processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the
| existing pipeline. The business wouldn't be viable
| selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as
| strong leaving out the lower income segment.
|
| The alternative world is you get no affordable processor
| at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the
| volume lost.
|
| Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower
| tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn't meet
| the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had
| proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had
| thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it
| takes to make a business viable
|
| Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business
| viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
|
| > processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen
| precisely because they didn't meet the bar for the high
| performance batch
|
| This is a better argument
|
| > The alternative world is you get no affordable
| processor at all
|
| You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't
| double every year. I would say that's probably an
| interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how
| catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In your scene you would see increased buying and volume
| at the higher price point which would offset the money
| lost at the lower tier.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > The alternative world is you get no affordable
| processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more
| due to the volume lost.
|
| No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many
| alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no
| proprietary "intellectual property".
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to
| make them 4 cores.
|
| Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four
| of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable
| those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those
| four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not
| selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong _sometimes_.
|
| I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers
| sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to
| 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even
| if they worked.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Is it really the case that dies/packages are tested and
| batched _individually_?
|
| I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but
| there are surely cases where to create a product
| differential perfectly good (and known to be good)
| devices are crippled.
|
| That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into
| scarcity.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| >Welcome to modern tech, where the management,
| perception, control and tactical destruction of real
| value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin.
|
| It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process
| that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and
| again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of
| profit to fall".
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Consistency may be running out. It may be time to turn
| this elegant observation (not immutable law) into an
| anti-pattern. As an optimist I prefer "tendency of
| systems toward failure of innovation" (AKA sloth of the
| entrenched incumbents). This is the last crisis. Because
| it's not a crisis of capital, it's a crisis of the very
| substrate (the planet) which allows for the possibility
| of capital. Schumpeter's creative destruction is now
| literally environmental destruction. A new broom is
| required. Let's hope it's not the communists again. A few
| simple bits of regulation could go a long way to correct
| things.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If binning of CPUs were disallowed, it would result in
| even more e-waste because any imperfect chips would have
| to be tossed out instead of sold with fewer cores
| enabled. Bad example.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| You have to pay for an upgrade on Windows to even play a
| Bluray movie.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Which is a good thing, if you think about it. It means
| that the vast majority of people who have no desire to
| play Blu-ray movies on their PC don't have to foot the
| bill for licensing.
| barelysapient wrote:
| And let's not forget, that if you brought your DVD player
| with you, you could still play your DVD's no matter what
| region you were physically in.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And if you ordered a disc from abroad, you could
| completely legally import a disc player from, say, the UK
| and play your region-locked Blu-ray Discs and DVDs that
| way (and still can, eBay.co.uk works fine). It's
| inconvenient but it does work, and is 100% legal and
| hack-free.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or buy a worldwide player like Philips offered in the day
| that would play all regions
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Power, tv, and plugs different.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Except if your player wasn't conpatible with your TV of
| course.
|
| At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player
| and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you
| could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting
| standard and your DVDs would be black and white or
| scrambled on the display side.
| tjoff wrote:
| True in theory but in practice it wasn't much of an
| issue.
|
| Especially as late as when the DVD came.
|
| And the purpose of it wasn't geo-restrictions either.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Liquix wrote:
| Anyone interested in the history of DVD DRM / region locking
| may be interested in the "illegal number": a hex code which
| defeated DVD AACS encryption, prompting an attempt by the
| industry to surpress it across the internet, leading to a
| streisand effect and the end of effective DVD DRM.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve.
| ..
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That was a leaked Blu-ray _Processing Key_ that was quickly
| revoked - but the industry was livid that it was allowed to
| propagate before they could revoke it (which takes 90
| days). This means, ultimately, that _if_ you have a player
| that hasn 't had a Blu-ray Disc made since 2008 inserted
| into it, _and_ are trying to decrypt a disc made before
| ~2008, then _maybe_ with the right tools you could. It 's a
| shallow victory meaningless nowadays.
|
| [Even then, a Processing Key isn't nearly as interesting as
| a Device Key, plenty of which have been leaked since
| without much attention. Blu-ray has so many keys...]
| goosedragons wrote:
| DVDs were region locked but not to the same degree. Digital
| content is on a country by country level. An American can
| easily buy and use a Canadian DVD while on vacation and then
| use it back home. The same is not true of digital content.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats
| that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs
| SECAM).
|
| I think you're really stretching this one. These were
| dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as
| much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If
| theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they _HAD_ to
| make them in the format that would work in that region.
|
| DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of
| format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the
| time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were
| less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that
| point.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie
| format
|
| when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of
| public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
|
| But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing
| to an enrire industry with no pushback.
|
| This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi
| light does not pair with the app because its was meant for
| chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not
| hia problem either.
|
| The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define
| digital ownership.
|
| If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should
| have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe
| lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
| orev wrote:
| This is out of context and has nothing to do with what they
| said. The comment is about how companies were already
| region locking content using technical means on DVDs, not
| anything to do with government involvement.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| To be fair, NTSC/PAL/SECAM were political decisions made by
| governments at the start of the television era, well before
| modern copyright maximalism had got its boots on.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Some were also technical I believe, for example with
| relation to the power grid frequency.
| anikom15 wrote:
| They were not political decisions made by governments. They
| were technical standards developed by standards bodies
| primarily made up of engineers. Then government
| institutions like the FCC adopted them for their countries.
| happymellon wrote:
| In the UK it was quite common to be able to purchase DVD
| players that were region free in most of the large electronic
| stores. The few that were region locked required something
| like the Konami code to unlock all the region's.
|
| Was region locking really that big of a deal?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Was region locking really that big of a deal?_
|
| No. Not in the US either, at least. Even if there was a
| part of the world where it was a big deal, I imagine if you
| were so big a cinephile for it to matter, you would know
| how to deal with it.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Geolocking _kind of_ made sense back when we had incompatible
| standards like NTSC and PAL. It makes zero sense (except as
| rent-seeking behavior by rights holders) for Blu-ray and
| beyond.
| titzer wrote:
| > DVDs were regionally locked as well
|
| It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-
| region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a
| Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
| jandorn wrote:
| That is feature of DRM and has nothing to do with digital
| movies. If you bought DRM locked product that you are not
| really an owner. You can play video file anywhere in the world
| and any time.
|
| Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it
| there, then you definitely not the owner...
| stewx wrote:
| Ok, "digital movies as most consumers know them". People
| aren't buying DRM-free digital movies. (Technically, DVDs and
| Blu-rays are digital as well, but we don't call them that)
| jandorn wrote:
| Doesn't matter if you are talking about downsides. Digital
| movie has no downsides, DRM on other hands has as we all
| know. Only valid complaint here is DRM and it always was.
| We were warned but nobody listened.
| KingFelix wrote:
| Final space was also interesting. Another show that got the
| chopping block for tax purposes. They were removed from AMazon,
| even if you purchased the seasons!
|
| Piracy returns?
| benabus wrote:
| Came here to say this. I thought "Now that it's not
| streaming, I've at least got a copy on Amazon Prime!" Nope.
| Not anymore. And definitely can't get Season 3 any longer.
| Complete bullshit.
| 5pComb wrote:
| -"Piracy returns?"
|
| It never gone. 4Tb USB HD + Good Torrent Tracker = All
| problems solved.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Thankfully we never went away and we have a lot of the
| shows/films/music that are no longer commercially available
| archived for future generations.
| OhNoNotAnother1 wrote:
| astorsnk wrote:
| >> You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the
| USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due
| to licensing.
|
| Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's
| not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have
| a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content
| through both and use that content anywhere without restriction.
| They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account
| to a different geo after it's created but with multiple
| accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Maybe iTunes wasn't a good example but it has happened to me
| with other services. I live in the Netherlands where I bought
| a subscription for the Formula 1 TV service. Last year I was
| in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races
| there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo
| restrictions were different.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I found this happens sometimes with Kindle books. I never
| know what will work or what will get disappeared when
| travelling.
| astorsnk wrote:
| >> Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable
| to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them,
| as the geo restrictions were different.
|
| Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK
| services offered in one EU country have to work throughout
| the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked).
| This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few
| years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the
| NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I think they're referring to the official F1TV app, which
| is region restricted in UK because of an exclusivity
| agreement between SkyTV and Formula One Group.
|
| F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients
| for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6
| simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the
| main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard
| cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside
| from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky
| borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
|
| RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that
| offered split screen and synchronization of the videos
| (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of
| the main feed, which means you either had to manually
| delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only
| works for archivee races.
|
| Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter
| can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
|
| I'm probably going to end my subscription after this
| season and switch to watching pirated streams, because
| I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid
| subscriber.
|
| [0] https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl
|
| In case robvdpol is an HN member, thanks for all the work
| you put into RaceControl. It was the best way to watch
| the sport.
| detaro wrote:
| > _AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work
| throughout the EU_
|
| Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can
| have different access in different places, _but_ the
| location that counts is the users home location. So e.g.
| a national sports league can license exclusive rights to
| different streaming services in different countries, and
| in your home country there is only one choice, but if you
| sign up with them and then travel, you still can access
| it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that
| country is with someone else.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Nothing to do with Brexit.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| in 2010 I bought an ipod touch at the px in Afghanistan and
| Apple wouldn't even let me create an account; without an
| account most of the features were not accessible.
| stewx wrote:
| Jumping through hoops doesn't work for most consumers. Nor
| should they have to do it.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| The original point was that you might loose access to
| purchased movies because the licensing doesn't allow you so
| watch it from a different locality.
|
| This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the
| only point they made.
|
| There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through
| unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing
| agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
|
| Potential buyers still have to consider the original point
| however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it _currently_ ,
| there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And
| there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre
| buying on another platform.
|
| Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for
| example?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I am on the same boat but found it more and more a PITA to
| manage as Apple started to push for 2FA (that damn prompt
| every fucking login to "upgrade" your account). Switching
| account is now way more burdensome, and it's also a pain to
| get the password prompts on updates as apps are still bound
| to your logged out account.
| warp wrote:
| I find the password prompts an improvement over earlier
| versions of iOS, where there was no way to get updates to
| those apps without logging out of the app store entirely
| and logging in with the other region's account.
|
| Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged
| in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store
| on android does support switching easily), but at least I
| can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while
| staying logged in in my main account.
| volleygman180 wrote:
| > _re-sale of digital goods_
|
| Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix
| NoGravitas wrote:
| No, introducing artificial scarcity does nothing to fix the
| problem.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| That would be one way of handling the technical how, but it
| isn't technical problems that are stopping companies from
| doing this. Places like Steam already have digital
| marketplaces yet games aren't resalable.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Steam has a list of licences I own for the games I have on
| Steam. They could easily add 2nd hand sales to the Steam
| store and just transfer that license to another user. No need
| for a Blockchain when Steam have a perfectly working
| database.
| cgrealy wrote:
| The issue with resale of digital content is that there is
| no discernible difference between new and used.
|
| Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if
| there were "second hand" copies that were completely
| identical to a new version available for less?
|
| I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th
| private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt
| small creators doing great work.
| anikom15 wrote:
| Used sellers can't create new copies of the game. Used
| markets have more of an impact on retailers and dealers
| than on manufacturers.
| dewey wrote:
| > You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the
| USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due
| to licensing.
|
| In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you
| subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU
| country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home
| country.
|
| If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access
| to the catalog of the country you are in.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| do you have a link to this law?
| dewey wrote:
| It's the Portability Regulation:
| https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-9-2-2018/4728
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > Another significant issue with digital movies and games is
| the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
|
| Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting
| (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side
| effect that if a particular online release is pulled from
| distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least
| through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
|
| Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from
| distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock
| in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but
| the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with
| digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always
| the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so
| the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process,
| especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable
| second hand market offering available.
|
| With digital media on the other hand you more or less
| immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if
| that happens...
| antoinec wrote:
| > Another significant issue with digital movies and games is
| the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
|
| I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work.
| As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else
| and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a
| lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would
| come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with
| scratches on it.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| As a buyer: to get it cheaper. As a seller: to obtain money
| for something you no longer value at its purchase price.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone
| else and not from iTunes?
|
| Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
|
| > And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than
| what it is on iTunes?
|
| Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy
| it from ITunes.
|
| Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media
| that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you
| recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make
| people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
| shockeychap wrote:
| The only problem with this is that with physical media,
| there's an intrinsic amount of "friction" that prevents
| gaming the system. It's not convenient to, for example,
| have five people buy and share one set of DVDs. The hassle
| of moving the disc around (which gets dramatically worse
| with distance) incentivizes people to buy their own copy.
| But digital buying and selling would make it rather easy
| for one person to "sell" their movie to a friend for next-
| to-nothing and then "buy" it back when they want to use it.
| And we can be a thousand miles away with no problem.
|
| There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable
| floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a
| title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
|
| I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored
| into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| The friction you are overlooking would be, e.g., the
| platform to sell the media and the likely cost to do so.
| Not only that, but you are also not aware of the
| fraudulent price that is charged for the media now
| precisely because the market is a monopolistic fraud. If
| movies were priced at what they are really worth, they
| would be some ... and easily significantly ... lower
| lower price, e.g., $.50 rent and $2 to buy.
|
| If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is
| really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming
| service and divide it by the content you consume.
|
| For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing
| (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per
| hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative
| estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie
| for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the
| industry has monopolized the market and added DRM,
| because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going
| to deprive people of their earnings.
|
| But what it's really about is, as instituting a new form
| of slavery where you are given everything for "free" just
| like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived
| of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.
| necovek wrote:
| Loaning a copy to a friend, which is what your example
| basically is, should also be protected by consumer laws.
| shockeychap wrote:
| If you're talking about loaning a physical copy of a
| movie to a friend, sure. We have to make arrangements to
| get the "thing" from one location to another.
|
| Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital
| copies - with none of the friction involved in physical
| media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by
| others.
|
| If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price
| of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.
| samdcbu wrote:
| We already have exactly this system for library e-book
| lending. There is a queue of people on the waitlist for a
| book and once loan period for the current reader is
| expires it is automatically loaned (no scare quotes
| because it is in every way a loan) to the next person in
| the queue.
|
| I don't see why the same couldn't be done for other forms
| of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
|
| This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline
| in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their
| own digital copy because they are once again able to loan
| works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of
| works that was taken for granted with physical media. If
| someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it
| once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or
| rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue
| but I think that revenue only existed in the first place
| because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing
| that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses
| actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be
| more appealing to consumers.
| necovek wrote:
| With streamed digital copies, one can limit simultaneous
| playback. Simply "loaning" it in a service where you
| select who do you loan it to will add friction, and
| considering how any little friction (instead of
| torrenting or getting BR disks) is keeping people on
| streaming services anyway, it's unlikely it would move
| the needle too much.
| cxr wrote:
| > Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who
| do you loan it to will add friction
|
| Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a
| form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel"
| allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-
| exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of
| friction involved.
|
| Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"
|
| Response: "Easy? Have you ever _used_ an app with a
| 10-foot UI that 's controlled by a TV remote?"
|
| See also: <https://xkcd.com/949/> ("File Transfer").
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > There are ways to correct this
|
| Those aren't "correcting" anything; the internet came
| along and stole their lunch. What needs correcting is the
| business model.
| Avicebron wrote:
| True, and if the market economy was working as it should.
| Then if enough people were selling old digital music at
| lower prices, Itunes would have to lower their prices.
| Essentially what their doing is anti-competitive.
| adrianN wrote:
| You could even imagine an automated system where you buy
| a song for some two cents and then sell it back after
| you're done listening to it for a one cent. You could
| have users make their collections available on a market
| place and pay them some fraction of the profits you make.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Music bought on iTunes hasn't had DRM since 2009
| mattl wrote:
| Depends where you're based. Japan had DRM on iTunes for
| some time and also DRM-free songs on iTunes were a paid
| upgrade globally for a while too.
| [deleted]
| antoinec wrote:
| I'd be curious to see if a system like that exists already
| for some kind of digital asset: secondary sales for
| something that is not limited in quantity, and can still be
| bought from the source at a higher price.
| carlgreene wrote:
| VST plug-ins have a pretty robust secondary marketplace.
| See kvraudio.com
| [deleted]
| apetresc wrote:
| Certain NFT marketplaces have this characteristic.
| LegitShady wrote:
| @antoinec
|
| steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay
| steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same
| or more money without steam taking a cut.
| bigyikes wrote:
| >as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what
| it is on iTunes?
|
| A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much
| more likely.
|
| >As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone
| else and not from iTunes
|
| Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
|
| The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods
| market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes
| unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
| IanCal wrote:
| This I think is one of the places where smaller technical
| differences make things legitimately different. I'm not
| coming from the side of "it shouldn't be allowed" or "it
| must absolutely be allowed like physical goods".
|
| Second hand items are often
|
| * Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer
| protections
|
| The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the
| second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults
| to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
|
| Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time
| commitment to it, you have to physically move things -
| there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between
| regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and
| selling it after watching is do-able but still some work.
| Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and
| selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching
| seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically
| users only need to buy in total enough copies for the
| concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this
| could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs
| a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would
| make a vast difference in total required copies floating
| around.
|
| The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If
| a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of
| what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to
| pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more
| risk.
|
| It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making
| a very large difference.
| mafuy wrote:
| I'd say this goes both ways. It's vastly easier and
| frictionless to sell content. It could and should also be
| easy to re-sell this content - it's only fair that both
| seller and buyer benefit from the properties of digital
| content.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable?_
|
| I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the
| book publishing business unprofitable?
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I'd wager that physical vs. digital media does somewhat
| affect the outcomes here...
| the_af wrote:
| It probably does, I think mostly in the sense digital
| media is relatively new and misunderstood -- even today
| -- and publishers thought they could get away with an
| iron grip they simply could not have with physical stuff.
| So it's probably not that they _lose_ profitability, but
| more that the extraordinary profit margins of digital get
| capped back to normality.
|
| Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and
| lose access in the process (so that I'm not making
| duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That
| it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way?
| Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency?
| Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?
|
| [1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off
| and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| It's rather simple, because you want to sell it. If you want
| to hold out for selling it at market price while the buyer
| will prefer buying it directly from the source, then so be
| it, or if you want to sell it immediately, you price it at
| bargain prices or even free if you don't care, i.e. value the
| item anymore. What we are witnessing here is a total
| destruction of markets and commerce between free humans.
|
| What you and many are are also missing, including the author,
| is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we
| asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of
| it. You are "buying" a movie at a price, precisely because
| the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you
| are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell
| it, and you can't rent it or even lend it; therefore it is
| not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on
| cartel control and total cornering of the market. It's
| essentially no different than the fraudulent price of
| diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where
| people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions,
| famously.
|
| Some may have heard the phrase "you will own nothing and be
| happy" expressed by your global rulers. This topic is
| precisely manifestation of that and people don't seem to
| realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think
| you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet
| realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the
| encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
|
| Especially in America there are many people who, if you were
| to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they
| think they have; and in many cases own less than they are
| even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under
| people like that on a whim ... legally. A recent famous
| example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla
| didn't like something. Slaves of the past were also "happy
| and didn't own anything" since their healthcare was "free"
| and their groceries were "free" and their housing was "free",
| etc.; all provided for "free" by government of and by the
| feudal lord or plantation owners.
|
| In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what
| the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted
| a book from users' kindles without even asking, let alone
| receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book
| that Amazon just disappeared off people's devices with no
| evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof
| of purchase people had retained ... 1984.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. That is the scam.
|
| It's no different to the rest of them. If Stadia hasn't
| already taught anyone that it is a scam then I don't know
| what will.
| jayeshsalvi wrote:
| Is there a legal definition to "buying" in consumer law? Can't
| Amazon be sued for this?
| intrasight wrote:
| It's not a "deception" if you understand that you don't really
| "own" digital content. I will "buy" it if I think I'll watch it
| again - soon. But there are so many good movies and TV shows that
| I rarely re-watch anything.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It's not a "deception" if you understand that you don't
| really "own" digital content.
|
| No, it's the wrong word regardless, and in any event I
| seriously doubt that the average consumer actually understands
| that they're being lied to.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Arr, matey! There's a solution to this problem.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| This hit me long long ago when the kindle first came out. At the
| time (haven't looked since), eBooks were the same price as paper
| back books, but with a paper back book you OWN it. You can GIVE
| it to a friend. You can SELL it. Heck, if it gets really cold you
| can even burn it. With an eBook you can read it, and thats about
| it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > With an eBook you can read it, rip it into an epub and give
| it to ALL your friends and everyone on the internet.
|
| FTFY
|
| Or more accurately, someone's already done it and you get to be
| one of those friends.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| It's usually cheaper, and they often have sales were you get it
| for 10%~20% of the paperback price.
|
| Also, for fiction, it's an advantage too because many times
| there's only a hardback + ebook release. Since hardbacks are
| the more expensive and less convenient/easy version to read -
| heavier, get's damaged more easily - you can just get the ebook
| for maybe half the price of paperback
| The-Bus wrote:
| I understand the point you are trying to make but a hardcover
| book is definitely can take more damage than an ereader.
| indymike wrote:
| There needs to be a very large lawsuit or two about this.
| Claiming you can buy something, and then renting it, even if the
| rental is 20 years is fraud.
| vel0city wrote:
| I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that artist
| everywhere they perform forever now?
|
| No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a
| particular performance.
|
| Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?
| D13Fd wrote:
| Agreed. Even when you "buy" a DVD or Blu-Ray, you are
| actually just buying a copy of the media with a limited
| license to use it for certain purposes.
|
| It's still copyright infringement if, for example, you buy a
| Blu-Ray disc and then open a movie theatre and start playing
| that disc publicly. The license you bought with the disc
| doesn't extend that far.
|
| Whether you "buy" a movie via a disc or a streaming service,
| you're really just buying a limited license to display the
| movie along with either physical or digital delivery.
| fsflover wrote:
| You don't "buy the performance" but a ticket for a certain
| time.
| vel0city wrote:
| You don't by the streaming movie but a license for an
| indefinite time.
|
| And how do you know what the limits of the ticket or the
| license are? You read the document you're agreeing to when
| buying the ticket.
| evouga wrote:
| Many people have already said this, but: buying a ticket
| to a _one-time_ event is not analogous to buying a
| license to watch a movie _in perpetuity._
|
| A better analogy, that does not involve a _one-time_
| event, would be a lifetime pass to concert venue. You buy
| this pass, only to have the venue refuse to honor it a
| few years later.
| vel0city wrote:
| On Amazon, you're literally _not_ buying a license to
| watch a movie _in perpetuity_. You 're buying a license
| to access it for "an indefinite period of time". This is
| pretty clear and easy to see in the agreement they ask if
| you read before you check out.
| danparsonson wrote:
| That's a false equivalence though - it's well understood in
| this case that you bought the ticket not the performance, and
| that the ticket expires after one use. The same is not true
| of buying films, as it used to be possible to keep a physical
| copy (e.g. DVD) that no-one could take away from you, and
| that was recent enough that I think most people still
| (reasonably IMO) expect a perpetual license when 'buying' a
| movie.
|
| We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license
| to watch a film - we called it "renting".
| vel0city wrote:
| > buying a limited license to watch a film
|
| Buying a VHS was still a limited license. You weren't
| allowed to reproduce it and sell the reproductions. You
| weren't allowed to then operate a movie theater around your
| off the shelf VHS tapes. You weren't entitled to a new tape
| once the tape wore out.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| That's not a license, that's just buying a copy enshrined
| in a physical medium. All the restrictions you mentioned
| derive from copyright law itself, not a license.
| indymike wrote:
| > Buying a VHS was still a limited license.
|
| Yes, but no one would take the physical tape away when
| Target or their distributor lost the right to sell the
| video tape.
| indymike wrote:
| > I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that
| artist everywhere they perform forever now?
|
| This is a bad analogy. A better one would be, your bought a
| car from me, and three years from now, I tow your car away
| and do not compensate you for taking the car. Because buyer
| beware, caveat emptor, etc...
| vel0city wrote:
| What part of a streaming movie is a physical item? It is
| even further removed and a worse analogy than my concert
| ticket is like a streaming movie license. With one you
| physically have a few thousand-pound piece of metal in your
| garage with a title from the government of ownership, the
| other you have a limited license on an account maintained
| by the service provider.
|
| If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I
| guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it;
| you never had the title for it.
| indymike wrote:
| > What part of a streaming movie is a physical item?
|
| The issue is telling someone this:
|
| Rent ($2.99) Rent HD ($3.99) Buy ($13.99)
|
| So I pick buy, and it sure looks like I own it because
| the other two choices were presented as rentals. The buy
| option really is a "long term rental" and should have a
| very easy to read disclaimer under it that says: "Buy
| access until 12/31/2029". That way the consumer does not
| conclude it is a purchase, like a DVD or VHS that I own
| until it wears out, or forever, whichever comes first.
|
| > If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah
| sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You
| didn't own it; you never had the title for it.
|
| I bought my car with a loan. I did get a copy of the
| title, with the lien-holder listed on the back. The car
| is mine, but I cannot sell it without the lien-holder
| releasing the lien. Legally, I do own the car. It is very
| much mine. If I fail to make payments, the lien holder
| may go to court, and the court can allow them to reposes
| (note the "re" in reposes) the vehicle.
|
| Presenting something as "buy" when it is really "rent" is
| unethical at best, and illegal at worst, and it needs to
| be litigated now.
| vel0city wrote:
| > The buy option really is a "long term rental"
|
| It isn't a "long term rental", it is a limited license to
| use it until the service provider isn't able to provide
| it. There isn't a pre-defined end date you're agreeing to
| with this buy button. Depending on the movie, putting an
| end date of 2029 is actually more limiting than what many
| of those videos will have. I bought movies on Unbox 16
| years ago which are still available today, something
| you'd ensure wouldn't be possible with forcing them to
| put an end date only 7 years away.
|
| You're literally arguing I should have had _less_
| ownership of access of the media than I currently do
| have.
|
| I'd like to understand how buying a streaming video
| license is more akin to buying a car than buying a
| concert ticket. You brushed it off as a bad analogy and
| seemingly only offered a seemingly worse one. One is
| directly a physical object with government backed
| ownership registrations, one is a limited access token to
| enjoy some media. Which seems more like buying a concert
| or theater ticket?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying
| it to only view at the one specific time and location. It is
| an event ticket. With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets
| you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity
| but that's not actually the case. We can use the term "buy"
| for digital movies if you actually are just buying a ticket
| that lets you view the movie however wherever and whenever
| the license specifies. But that information should be
| highlighted to the buyer otherwise it's deception.
| vel0city wrote:
| > When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are
| buying it to only view at the one specific time and
| location.
|
| Do I know this? Are you _assuming_ I bothered to read the
| ticket ahead of time? I bought a ticket to the Red Hot
| Chili Peppers 2022 Tour. I should be able to go to all the
| tour, right?
|
| Oh wait, you're telling me there's _text_ on the ticket I
| should have read to understand it was only for _one_
| location and _one_ evening? You really expected me to
| _read_ all that legalese?
|
| > With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it
| whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but
| that's not actually the case.
|
| Ugh. I bet I would of had to _read_ something to understand
| the limitations of what I was buying. I can 't believe
| companies expect people to read about the things people buy
| these days, totally taking advantage of everyone by putting
| knowledge behind words.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Arguing that reading anything, even small amounts of
| information located directly on the ticket or receipt, is
| "legalese" is very reductive and seems to be coming from
| an emotional rather than logical argument. Event tickets
| are an established practice that is very familiar and
| straightforward to consumers and as another commenter
| mentioned is a false equivalence for several reasons.
|
| There is an actual legal concept of an undue burden and
| that is exactly what having to read through many pages of
| fine print is. If you don't actually own digital content
| it should be highlighted very clearly, while placing a
| minimal undue burden on the consumer. Otherwise, it's
| deceptive.
| vel0city wrote:
| I want to watch Top Gun: Maverick. I go to the Amazon
| Store page.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B213HG4N/ref=atv
| _hm...
|
| I see "By ordering or viewing, you agree to our
| Terms[link to terms]" Huh maybe I should look at what I'm
| buying before I click checkout.
|
| https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-
| type=c...
|
| Hmm, what's relevant to this. Ah, Digital Content,
| generally.
|
| The Service may allow you to: (i) ignoring subscription
| talk (ii) ignoring rental talk (iii) purchase Digital
| Content for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period
| of time ("Purchased Digital Content")
|
| So obviously even "buying" the movie only gives it to me
| for an indefinite period of time. I wonder when it might
| not become available then. Let's scan more section
| headers to see if it talks about that.
|
| i. Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased
| Digital Content will generally continue to be available
| to you for download or streaming from the Service, as
| applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential
| content provider licensing restrictions or for other
| reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if
| Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further
| download or streaming.
|
| I don't get how this is an "undue burden" to read this
| before forking over $14. It is not fine print, the
| default styles render it pretty clearly on my screen but
| you can feel free to resize it to render however you
| wish. Its not a long document. It has obvious sections.
| The link to this document was a few pixels away from the
| Buy button on my screen and was easily visible. It took
| me less than a minute to understand what I would be
| buying if I clicked "Buy". They're not hiding this away
| behind some far away unrelated site or only giving you
| this after requesting it by mail with legal letterhead.
| This is pretty out there and open.
|
| To me, suggesting that people can't read this might as
| well be the same as arguing people shouldn't be required
| to read what's on the face of a ticket. The information
| is right there, it is not hidden in the slightest.
|
| > Event tickets are an established practice
|
| Maybe to you, but maybe I've never bought one before.
|
| If you're going by "event tickets have been sold for a
| while", well, so have digital movies with DRM that can
| make them unavailable. This isn't something that just
| came out this year, I bought a movie from Amazon Unbox
| _sixteen years ago_ which had these limitations. How long
| does it have to exist before it is an "established
| practice"?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| > It is not fine print
|
| definition of _fine print_ : inconspicuous details or
| conditions printed in an agreement or contract,
| especially ones that may prove unfavorable
|
| definition of _inconspicuous_ : not clearly visible or
| attracting attention; not conspicuous.
|
| You can note that you had to click on the "Terms" link to
| get to those...
|
| > I don't get how this is an "undue burden"
|
| If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every
| digital movie purchase, it is considered an undue burden
| to me. You can calculate the amount of reading time that
| would take. I'm not going to.
|
| I'm not going to argue with you anymore as I feel I'm
| wasting my time but in short I don't want to live in a
| dystopia where companies start foisting time wasting
| tasks on me until I give in and accept their unfavorable
| terms on everything.
| vel0city wrote:
| > definition of inconspicuous: not clearly visible or
| attracting attention; not conspicuous.
|
| It is a link probably millimeters away from the Buy
| button on the screen to read before even clicking Buy,
| and then Buy asks you if you did read it before it
| charges your card. I don't know how that's "not clearly
| visible". If there wasn't a link on the page, or was tiny
| and at the very bottom of the page, sure I might agree
| but that's not what's going on here.
|
| I guess its "fine print" when you don't want to read it
| but I'm just overly reductive when I don't want to read
| it. That must be the distinction.
|
| > If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every
| digital movie purchase
|
| I mean, you don't have to every time. This argument seems
| to be coming from an emotional rather than logical
| argument. These terms don't change very often and they're
| very similar for every digital movie platform. Once
| you've skimmed it on Amazon there's not really a point to
| reading it again. I'll look over the ingredients list on
| a food product once but it's not like every time I eat a
| Snickers I re-examine the ingredients label.
|
| Do you really not bother reading contracts when you agree
| to them?
|
| Your main point is essentially that consumers shouldn't
| have to actually pay attention in the slightest to what
| it is they're buying. That they have practically no
| mental capacity to glance over the terms of a service
| they're agreeing to when they click "agree".
|
| > I don't want to live in a dystopia where companies
| start foisting time wasting tasks on me until I give in
| and accept their unfavorable terms on everything.
|
| Cool. Nobody is forcing you to buy these movies. I
| haven't bought a digital movie in decades precisely for
| these reasons. But I don't act like it is this massive
| undue burden for me to read about the thing I'm buying.
| It took one minute for me to scan that document and
| understand what buying a movie on Amazon is like.
| npteljes wrote:
| That doesn't compare. If I go to Amazon, look for a Harry
| Potter collection, I'm presented a Buy for kindle button. Not
| a "rent for some time, but read fast because we might take it
| away whenever" button. If they said rent, lease, license,
| borrow, peek momentarily into, it wouldn't be misleading.
| senko wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Good luck winning this with Amazon, Apple and Disney on the
| other side.
| senko wrote:
| Copyright, as it exists in the 21st century, is a scam.
|
| It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the
| little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very
| rich and powerful organizations and megacorps.
|
| I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right
| to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have
| value.
|
| However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, broken,
| dismembered, and sown back together in a Frankensteinian
| abomination and now serves only to line up pockets of people in
| the publishing industry. And the US has, through its trade deals,
| exported this thing worldwide.
|
| Disney lobbies for life of author + 70 years copyright duration
| not out of goodwill towards authors (in fact, it's been trying to
| wriggle out of paying royalties to some of them!). Amazon uses
| copyright as an excuse to push DRM, locking out competition and
| limiting users' rights (Kindle, Audible DRM). DMCA is constantly
| abused to take down fair-use content.
|
| Meanwhile, book authors are struggling to find a reason to write
| books, since many barely recoup the costs. Musicians decry
| royalties paid out by Spotify (that aren't actually so small, but
| the majority of the cut is taken by the music industry).
| Photographers try in vain to stop people just copy/pasting their
| photos online (what are they going to do, sue everyone?),
| including in some cases big companies that didn't even bother to
| check the copyright.
|
| They aren't being protected. They are being milked.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Does the US have any state or federal laws that don't benefit
| the wealthy at least as much as a regular citizen?
|
| As far as I'm aware, even laws for the small business play into
| the favor of larger corporations either directly or via
| auxiliary laws.
| wpietri wrote:
| Food safety laws are a good example. By acting as a floor on
| manufacturer and restaurant hygiene and ingredient quality,
| they help the poor a fair bit more than the rich.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The rich also need to well... eat. It benefits them as much
| as anybody.
|
| For example milk started to be regulated more only after
| someone in Al Capone's family got poisoned and he bribed
| the right people to make it a thing. You're kidding
| yourself if you think any of that was to benefit the poor
| in the first place lmao, just happens to be a side effect.
| wpietri wrote:
| The rich do need to eat, but they can and generally do
| eat from places with much higher margins and higher-value
| brands. Those places have less incentive to cut corners
| and more incentive to keep their customers healthy. The
| poorer you are, though, the more constrained your choices
| are and the more risk you may have to take. Food safety
| laws act as a quality floor (or a risk ceiling if you
| prefer), so they help poor people more than the rich.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| While this is true, the OP's argument could also include
| other reasons they wanted this such as avoiding costly
| sickness in their employees.
|
| I can assure you that amazon and walmart care at least a
| little about the health of the minimum wage workers they
| depend on to move inventory.
| est31 wrote:
| Amazon is famous for _not_ caring about the health of
| their workers, compared to competitors in the same
| industry. They pay above the market and replace the
| market 's healthy workers with workers with health
| issues. They don't care to optimize their process towards
| worker health as currently the supply outstrips their
| demand.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-
| suffer-...
|
| But I do agree with your general argument, a healthy
| workforce is better for a country's economy.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Rich people can eat at at places to nice and clean that
| the work areas are probably cleaner than some of the
| tables and chairs in the customer areas of low end dining
| places.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The sources rich people buy their food from have
| historically been less likely to be unsanitary.
|
| A lot of our food safety regulations are a result of
| public outrage over horrendous conditions in factories
| that produced low cost foodstuffs primarily eaten by the
| poor in the early 20th century.
|
| Though you could easily argue that the rich still benefit
| from these laws because they help insure a healthy labor
| pool.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches from
| feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can handle
| that.
|
| One needs only to taste legit French cheese, compared with,
| say, Austrian manufactured French cheese, to know food
| quality laws have little to do with actual food quality,
| and Austria has one of the strictest food legal systems in
| the World.
| cgrealy wrote:
| Food laws are about safety, not taste.
| wpietri wrote:
| > One needs only to taste legit French cheese,
|
| Not sure how you got from food safety to how much you
| like the taste of particular cheese, but to me they're
| very different problems. I'm only talking about food
| safety.
|
| > They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches
| from feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can
| handle that.
|
| Not generally, but perhaps in your area. Where I am there
| are special exemptions for charitable organizations
| giving out food:
| https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/lscfo.asp
|
| There are still some requirements, which I think is good.
| Nobody, homeless people included, should receive unsafe
| food.
| bitwize wrote:
| Real French cheese is made from raw milk, which is banned
| under USA food safety laws. It is objectively much
| tastier than the pasteurized stuff, and nobody dies from
| eating it.
| 9991 wrote:
| Ah, yes, taste, the most objective of the senses ...
| WesternWind wrote:
| Could you link me to something showing that that's an
| issue? Because the issues people run into as volunteers
| that I've hard about tend to be city ordinances, not
| state or federal food safety requirements.
|
| Further I'm aware of Food Not Bombs winning a case by
| claiming an expressive first amendment right to share
| food.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Compliance with those laws help big ag and Starbucks WAY
| more than small farmers and small cafes, and pose barriers
| to entry.
| wpietri wrote:
| How does compliance help them more? I'd think it's just
| the opposite. E.g., I live in a city that posts health
| department scores in every restaurant. This makes me more
| likely to eat at a small place because I can know that
| they're not cutting corners on safety. Whereas, having
| worked in high school at a large chain restaurant, I
| would expect those places to do well just through
| corporate persnicketiness.
|
| I agree they pose a barrier to entry, but I think that's
| good. People not ready to run a clean kitchen should are
| not ready to serve food. Now it's possible that the bar
| is unnecessarily high in places. But I live in a city
| with lots of restaurants and a relatively low number of
| chains, so I'm sure it's not always the case.
| dpb1 wrote:
| social security, medicare, medicaid, WIC Programs, public
| schools, public transportation, all come to mind.
|
| I mean, no coincidence that they are always on the top of the
| list to threaten and scheme to cut by the right wing.
| rndmize wrote:
| This seems like an odd question to me. Social security?
| Medicare? Free education? The entire welfare state? The vast
| majority of regulatory apparatus, which is generally
| implemented when wealthy/owner class people cause damage to
| employees/poor people to a degree that political action is
| taken (NLRB, FDA, OSHA, EPA, CFPB, etc.)? The great volume of
| services provided to all citizens, for free - weather
| forecasting, GPS, state/federal parks, federally funded
| research; laws like the CRA, VRA or ADA which help those
| disadvantaged by racism, disability, etc.
|
| Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't exist,
| or that the wealthy don't have advantages in getting laws
| passed that favor their interests, but there's a great deal
| of stuff that gets done that is specifically for the poor or
| the average citizen.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > This seems like an odd question to me. Social security?
| Medicare? Free education? The entire welfare state?
|
| These benefit the wealthy. They are used the quell the
| thirst for wealthy blood that would otherwise be prevalent.
| They are crumbs thrown to the masses to keep them from
| revolting during uncertain times.
|
| > The vast majority of regulatory apparatus
|
| I'd argue most regulatory bodies are captured agenies in
| the US. The delineation between _state_ and _industry_ has
| been fading for decades. They either look the other way, or
| overregulate to choke out any competition that would unseat
| existing players. Regulation in the US is almost entirely
| in service to capital.
|
| > weather forecasting, GPS
|
| Again, these are likely more in service to the economy
| (capital) than normal citizens.
|
| > state/federal parks
|
| Fair enough. I'd add libraries to this list as well. These
| institutions are actually kind of an odd exception to
| America's complete obsession with privatization,
| consumerism, and capital.
|
| > laws like the CRA, VRA or ADA which help those
| disadvantaged by racism, disability, etc.
|
| Again, fair enough.
|
| > federally funded research
|
| Yes, often funded by the citizens such that private
| industry can sell the result without recompense.
|
| > Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't
| exist
|
| It's the the rule, not the exception.
| Retric wrote:
| US automotive lemon law for example doesn't specifically
| benefit the wealthy or large corporations.
|
| What muddles the picture is people do benefit from economies
| of scale. So, if you make the law actually hostile for large
| companies both the general public and corporations are worse
| off.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| Lemon laws only apply to cars sold with warranties.
| Wealthier people are more likely to buy new cars, or used
| cars with warranties. Poor people are relatively much more
| likely to buy cheaper used cars without warranties. Rich
| people also buy more cars over their lives, increasing
| their chances of coming across a lemon. Therefore, lemon
| laws are relatively more beneficial for wealthier people.
| [deleted]
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but if a construction worker
| buys a new Ford F150 that is constantly breaking, that is
| a much bigger problem to him than if a wealthy person
| buys a Range Rover as a 3rd vehicle for Tahoe runs and
| that vehicle has some recurring check engine lights.
|
| Unless we're calling construction workers buying F150s
| with 72 month loans wealthy these days.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| No, I think the OP is suggesting that the more likely
| scenario is some professional-class "weekend-warrior"
| type bought the F150s with the 72m loan, which later on
| was resold to the working-class construction worker on
| the secondary market.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I suppose. Even lemon laws are funny if you follow them
| to their conclusion, so maybe OP is right.
|
| Once a vehicle gets lemon lawed, it gets sent to auction
| where it is disclosed to dealers, and then it's just sold
| again to the public as a used car without the ability to
| be lemon lawed at that point.
| Retric wrote:
| Sold yes, but also marked as a lemon.
| https://www.lemonlawlawyerscalifornia.com/2022/08/how-to-
| kno...
|
| There is nothing wrong with buying a lemon car at a
| sufficient discount.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| There are some laws around maintaining the history the
| car. Sales must be recorded, certain accidents. I think
| certain types of flood damage. Getting a carfax is a must
| if you are buying a used car.
| Retric wrote:
| Every car initially comes under warranty and if a used
| car was returned under lemon law you can find out before
| buying it.
| https://www.lemonlawlawyerscalifornia.com/2022/08/how-to-
| kno...
|
| Thus lemon law benefits every single consumer whether
| buying a new or used car.
| Adraghast wrote:
| > if you make the law actually hostile for large companies
| both the general public and corporations are worse off
|
| What an overly broad thing to say!
| Retric wrote:
| Hostile as in preventing the existence of rather than
| simply detrimental.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Progressive taxation?
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Copyright law was created by and exclusively for lawyers and
| the oligarchs who can afford them on retainer. Just look at
| what Disney has done to us and you'll lose all sympathy for the
| mouse: https://i.imgur.com/58gB0hq.jpg
| FalconSensei wrote:
| on the other hand, I don't think Mickey should go public
| domain.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why? I see no reason why it shouldn't go public domain. If
| anything it might be possible wash some of the stain of
| Mickey Mouse.
| retrac wrote:
| I think the best example to work with is Star Wars, or
| maybe The Lord of the Rings. The harm of eternal copyright
| is probably best demonstrated with these. They've both
| entered popular understanding, becoming casually referenced
| all over the place. "We need to make a little stop in
| Mordor first" is probably more widely-understood than most
| references to Greek mythology at this point.
|
| The people who grew up in the culture permeated with such
| stories are stunted expressively. Because they're denied
| the use of an ever-growing share of the tropes and
| characters of the common culture. Many Disney films
| themselves are retellings of classic stories in the public
| domain. If you want to reference the original Cindarella,
| or Greek mythology, or Oliver Twist, you're free to do so.
|
| You cannot do that with Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn. Now,
| maybe you shouldn't be able to within the author's life.
| But how many centuries should we keep this privilege? Would
| you or I (or Disney) be able to tell a new story about
| Hercules if copyright had been around 2000 years ago?
| Imagine Shakespeare still under copyright! No Hamlet or
| Macbeth characters in any other works without permission.
| We can strike several important 20th century books right
| there. In the future, the equivalent of Shakespeare will
| still be under copyright long, long after they are dead.
| Derivation and reuse are normal in art. Disney can borrow
| from the public domain to make Cindarella, but it in turn
| will never become public domain.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Lord of the Rings drinks from European mythology, and
| Star Wars toke more than a few clues from a particular
| film of Kurosawa. Both evolved in interesting histories,
| innovated a lot and add their own work and merit, of
| course. This happened in part because they were not sued
| by former authors.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Oh, I almost forgot it... and Star wars toke also "more
| than inspiration" from the french comic Valerian. The
| designs from the imperial probe droid in Hoth or the
| Leia's bikini were taken directly from the comics with
| minimum changes, and without asking anybody.
|
| This, lets call it, "cross pollination" would be much
| more difficult today.
| anjbe wrote:
| Star Wars is a particularly salient example because the
| original cuts that made the films such cultural icons are
| completely unavailable from anyone other than third-party
| sellers, due to the wishes of the (former) rights holder.
| After the Special Editions were released, the theatrical
| editions made it onto DVD one time, and never did again.
| J.J. Abrams has indicated that there are difficulties
| behind the scenes (perhaps some clause in the Disney
| purchase) that prevent the originals from being made
| available for sale. So people who want to avoid the CGI
| and bad redubs of the Special Editions are stuck
| scrounging eBay, or more likely, grabbing an "unofficial"
| scan of the theatrical editions.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| You may have avoided mentioning this on purpose, but I'll
| go for it. The "Despecialized Editions" [1] of the
| original Star Wars trilogy are an amazing project to take
| the HD special editions and edit out all of the changes
| to match the theatrical edition. They look a lot better
| than the scans I've seen, but still match the old VHS box
| set I grew up watching.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_E
| dition
| FlingPoo wrote:
| Another project to fully restore the original Star Wars
| trilogy is 4K77/4K80/4K83 [1]
|
| [1] https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/
| thefringthing wrote:
| > the theatrical editions made it onto DVD one time
|
| Even then, it wasn't really what was being asked for by
| fans. The goal at that time was to get LucasFilm to
| release the pre-Special Edition versions of the movies,
| which were available on VHS and Laserdisc, on DVD _at DVD
| resolution_.
|
| LucasFilm insisted that it was impossible to reassemble
| the negatives and that they had no suitable print from
| which to produce a new digital scan. Instead, they
| released digitized copies of the Laserdiscs on DVD bonus
| discs.
|
| Since then, enthusiasts have managed to produce Blu-ray
| resolution versions of the original movies first by
| piecing together a variety of sources and later by
| acquiring and scanning surviving prints.
| zeruch wrote:
| I do.
| moffkalast wrote:
| At this point it should've been public domain twice over,
| it's old as dirt.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| What is casually asserted can be casually denied. Can you
| elaborate your reason for thinking this? Is it a special
| carve-out for Mickey, or would you also include, say, Alice
| in Wonderland?
| tremon wrote:
| Indeed. Why should Mickey be governed by different rules
| than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, The
| Sorcerer's Apprentice, Pinocchio or The Ice Queen?
| noasaservice wrote:
| In a way, Mickey Mouse is under both copyright and
| trademark.
|
| If someone wanted to do "The New Stories of Mickey Mouse"
| they should be free to do so.
|
| If someone wanted to _act_ as Disney using Micky Mouse,
| then they should be sued into oblivion for acting as
| another company.
| xani_ wrote:
| That's a fair compromise. Original author owns the rights
| to a given piece of art in whole and trademark from
| title, so they can profit off their work and make next
| title without being mistaken for someone else.
|
| Everyone else is free to do with IP, do remixes etc. and
| if they make something with original IP that is better
| than originals, so be it ,competition actually working.
| noasaservice wrote:
| To be fair, I am a huge proponent of most trademarks.
| (general shape, color, and such I'm not a fan of)
|
| A trademark means if I buy AMD, I'm not getting "shitty
| rebrand of chip 10y old by jank fab". Or it means if I
| buy branded food, I know what I'm getting.
|
| Trademarks are essential for the protection to know the
| goods you buy from a company are what you're expecting.
|
| And that's why I'm realllllly curious when a whole bunch
| of big companies sue Amazon for allowing counterfeit co-
| mingling (or being charged $$$$$ for separate SKUs),
| relating to trademark dilution. This is straight up
| provable damage.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| What about the ballet _The Sleeping Beauty_? Disney used
| Tchaikovsky 's music heavily in their adaption despite it
| being less than 70 years after his death (and even further
| from being 95 years from its premiere).
|
| That's always my go-to example for copyright because:
|
| 1. Disney has benefited both from extending copyright _and_
| from the previous shorter duration of copyright
|
| 2. The fact that a work from the 19th century would still
| be under copyright in 1959 is astonishing to many people
|
| 3. Disney's _Sleeping Beauty_ , despite opening to mixed
| reviews, is generally well received today and is a great
| example of what we are missing out on; this work (judged
| "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by
| the LoC) could not have been made if today's rules existed
| in 1959.
| tzs wrote:
| Your chart shows two copyright term extensions since Mickey
| Mouse was created.
|
| As your chart shows ever since the first Copyright Act in the
| US, there has been a major revision every 40-70 years,
| typically to update for things that have changed since the
| previous Act such as new technology.
|
| As far as I've been able to tell Disney has nothing to do
| with creating the 1976 Act, which was the first time their
| copyright term was extended. The 1976 was created largely to
| address the massive changes in technology and international
| trade since 1909.
|
| As part of that there was wide consensus that the US needed
| to make its copyright law more like the rest of the world, to
| pave the way for the US joining the Berne Convention. The
| change in terms came as part of that, making US copyright
| terms match what nearly everyone else had.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| You stopped just short of the worst one:
|
| > _The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act - also known
| as the Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or
| (derisively) the Mickey Mouse Protection Act[1] - extended
| copyright terms in the United States in 1998. It is one of
| several acts extending the terms of copyrights.[2]_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
| joshspankit wrote:
| I'm going to pile on, but it's important that it's part of the
| copyright discussion:
|
| Current copyright is _dramatically_ limiting culture and
| cultural growth.
|
| Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not
| inadvertently copying _anything from their entire lifetime, and
| that of their parents_.
|
| It's rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had
| never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists
| taking one of two paths: 1) working in secret, trying
| desperately to thread the needle between making a living
| creating and losing it all by being discovered. 2) Forgoing the
| idea of true creative expression altogether, and limiting
| themselves to samples that they can pay for up front.
| rsch wrote:
| Steamboat Willie is from 1928, almost a hundred years ago.
| And it is still under copyright.
|
| So you can make that "the lifetime of their grandparents"
| too.
| mmmpop wrote:
| I'm 35 and my grandmother was born in the late 40s, my
| great-grandparents.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm 36 and my grandfather was born in 1907. YMMV.
| slim wrote:
| it's actually shrinking the realm of ideas (culture) by
| design. since ideas are "property" their value is function of
| their rareness. economic forces are literally creating
| artificial scarcity of ideas.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| What do you think a reasonable form of copyright law would look
| like?
| buttercraft wrote:
| A decade or two tops. That is enough time to monetize your
| work. Then, you get out of the way and let others benefit
| from your work just as you benefited from the works of so
| many others who came before you. You're still free to keep
| creating new things.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Just like patents are right now.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 10-year extensions with graduated costs. You get first 10
| years upon publication, for free automatically, or for a
| nominal filing fee to register your claim. The next 10 years
| costs (extending to 20 total) now costs a meaningful fee.
| Maybe a fraction of sales structured like a license owned by
| the public/government, maybe a known schedule of fees based
| on the type of work, but either way it is a non-trivial sum.
| Then at 20, 30 and 40 there are further extensions each with
| higher costs, stopping at 50 years total. The copyright isn't
| tied to the creator's lifespan. Maybe we extend from my
| proposed 50 to 70 years to match current expectation, so
| Mickey gets protected (or would have) but there is a social
| benefit that gets shared.
| xani_ wrote:
| That's even more corporation favoured. It's much easier to
| stomach the price as corporation than author...
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Only for "non-profitable" works. It is a downside in the
| tradeoff. But even then the escalating price for
| extensions should offer an incentive to limit what works
| fall into this category and subsidize society when they
| do.
|
| We are not just balancing the individual creators vs
| corporations, but also creators of derived works, and
| societies benefit at-large of more creative works in
| general. We want to maintain and compensate creators
| "enough" to maintain incentives for creation, but
| otherwise maximize the commons.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Not if you're still making money off of the work. But if
| you're _not_ making money off of it, it 's an incentive
| to let the copyright expire. Corporations _might_ sit on
| things that they 're not making money off of in order to
| try to make money off of them later, but they'd be
| limited to 50 years, which is a vast improvement.
| abetusk wrote:
| Personally, I think this is the best solution I've heard.
| It still has problems in that copyright holders need to be
| proactive and it punishes work that can't pay the copyright
| extension fee that doesn't become popular until later but I
| think these are reasonable compromises to make to serve the
| larger good.
|
| I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any
| meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing
| arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright
| reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for
| copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms
| and extension protocols.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension
| fee
|
| One tradeoff is to have the fee be proportional to the
| revenue it is generating. But this could encourage
| extension-by-default, rather than making it an
| intentional decision the copyright holder has to make: Is
| it worth "buying the monopoly rights." I think I would be
| ok with that if the increase for future extensions was
| steep. But that does also come at the cost of the second
| part,
|
| > that doesn't become popular until later
|
| You have a small-time creator that doesn't extend, and so
| loses out on massive potential revenue derived from
| future popularity of the work decades later. This would
| be unfortunate ... but on the other hand I think society
| would be more likely to make this true and create
| interesting derivative works if there were more works
| that were derivable. You need to keep durations short to
| make that happen.
| anikom15 wrote:
| Copyright is a _right._ Having to pay for it sounds absurd.
|
| I have a much simpler solution: copyright terms are
| fourteen years from date of publication. There are no
| extensions.
|
| It could even be a lot shorter nowadays. Nearly all media
| gets nearly all of its profit in the first year. A lot of
| commercial software goes out of date in a few months rather
| than yearly releases.
| mtgx wrote:
| Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it
| originally had.
|
| Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage
| creation and innovation.
|
| But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't
| necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome
| thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-
| seeking fat cat.
|
| Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to
| benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be
| encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by
| the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after
| launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get
| royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating.
| There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of
| most books drastically drops after 10 years.
|
| This benefits society at large, since it creates more
| competition, both from the original author of a work, but
| also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the
| original work.
|
| That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to
| give one company the "right" to make money off an invention
| for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from
| it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon
| that original idea afterward.
|
| But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like
| an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget
| that no idea is 100% original.
|
| In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the
| shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just
| rehashing of old works - so that also means that if
| enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would
| drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit
| from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas
| anyway.
|
| I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series
| to get a new perspective on this based on the history of
| copyrighted works:
|
| https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
|
| Instead the benefit of creative works would almost
| exclusively to middle-men who created nothing.
|
| 7 years is sooo short. Many TV shows and book series take
| longer than that from start to finish. And often times they
| grow in popularity.
|
| Movies based on books frequently come out more than 10
| years after the book resulting in a surge of popularity.
| With 10 years the original author would see no benefit from
| either the movie or their new book sales! There'd be a lot
| of fat cats, just not the actual creator.
| noasaservice wrote:
| You're dead-on-arrival. I vouched cause it was a respectful
| answer.
|
| You probably should abandon this account and create a new
| one that isn't "dead" on post.
|
| --------------
|
| > Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it
| originally had.
|
| Samuel Clemens stated that if copyright was shortened to
| this long or shorter, then he would not issue books.
| Instead he'd public chapters as to restart the clock for
| each. And naturally, would arbitrarily lengthen copyright
| to however long he'd string readers by.
|
| As for me, I have no answers. This problem is larger than I
| think anyone can view.
| saurik wrote:
| (It is interesting, as if you go back, mtgx has been
| banned since 2019 because of a "personal attack" on
| Carmack 100% is NOT personal and that, supposedly, their
| views are "predictable", which, if applied fairly, would
| get most of us banned as we are all broken records ;P.)
|
| Regardless, that copyright was 7-10 years originally is
| close but not quite right in a way that matters: it was
| 14 years with the ability to request a 14 year extension.
| (This being the same in the US law which came much later,
| but was originally from the Statute of Anne in the UK.)
|
| So like, 10 is close enough to 14 and yet, not only do
| those 4 years feel (to me) like they matter a lot, it is
| arguably 28, and 7 is definitely underselling the
| protection they were being granted. That said, it also
| only applied (in the US) to books, maps, and charts, so
| in some sense wasn't even the same, broad concept.
|
| The discussion of how long over time is interesting as,
| in a very real sense, our ability to monetize copyright
| quickly has _increased_ : the Internet lets you
| immediately address a nationwide market, while it easily
| could have taken decades with nothing but (expensive to
| use) printing presses making materials to distribute
| around using (slow) horses and (for even wider
| distribution) boats.
|
| These days, I almost get the impression that a lot of
| media companies try to make the vast majority of money
| off of something in the first few MONTHS and then nigh-
| unto discard it entirely--not even bothering to finish
| things for later syndication--while they move on to new
| content and new IP.
|
| They are then occasionally mining their old catalogs of
| IP to do like, a "reboot", but I frankly feel like no one
| would stop making content if they lost the ability to
| later do that, and I also doubt that the original
| creators are being compensated much for that later
| possibility (as it is so hit and miss).
| zsz wrote:
| This is precisely why those laboring under the misapprehension
| that the same mechanism used for this can somehow be used by
| them to make things more "fair" are, at best, delusional. The
| results will always be "more fair" only to a certain group;
| moreover, that group will always exist in some form or other,
| as precisely such has always been the actual outcome of any
| fascist/mercantilist/communist system: only the name and
| presumed principles vary, but the effective outcome is always
| the same and always toxic to the rest of society.
| RunSet wrote:
| "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor
| alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to
| steal their bread."
| abetusk wrote:
| What's also bad is that most of the artists that don't benefit
| from copyright in it's current form are proponents because it's
| such an emotional issue.
|
| Corporations barely need to do any propaganda because so many
| artists advocate for exploitative system without any prompting.
| talkingtab wrote:
| All over the world people take a stand against tyranny. This is
| just internet tyranny. The button on Amazon says "buy" but the
| fine print says "borrow".
|
| A class action legal solution with a lawyer would mean that even
| if we won, each user would be award one free movie while the
| legal team got millions.
|
| At the very least every single person in the US who ever clicked
| "buy" can take Amazon to small claims court. Maybe you lose, but
| Amazon will get the message.
|
| In New Hampshire a small business took Instagram to small claims
| court for terminating their account without reason. Instagram
| sent lawyers, but the case was appealed to the NH Supreme Court
| for review. (They sent it back!) Imagine if every person who had
| an account terminated for no reason or lost access to a movie
| they "bought" then took the case to small claims court.
|
| The problem is that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook can _buy_
| laws. I 'm not saying these are the only ones, just big internet
| ones. And the courts enforce these laws. Sounds anti-democratic
| to me.
| misterbishop wrote:
| I hate this as much as anyone, but it's wild that nerds make
| their stand on the sacred right TO WATCH A MOVIE.
|
| We face incredible political oppression and extreme economic
| exploitation in the context of global capitalism melting down.
| There are more important things than whether your $10 Hercules
| purchase still works in 20 years.
|
| By all means be angry about this, but try to connect it with
| things that have actual stakes in people's lives. This isn't even
| in the top 20 worst things Amazon does.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > There are more important things than whether your $10
| Hercules purchase still works in 20 years.
|
| How you handle the small things is how you handle everything.
| I'm glad to see something breaking their trance. Let's hope
| they keep going!
| misterbishop wrote:
| nonsense. the political activity required to solve the big
| problems would sweep these little bullshit issues off the
| table.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I think the point was lost. My point if the requisite care
| isn't there to deal with small issues, then you're not
| gonna have the care to deal with things that demand so much
| more (big things).
|
| maybe an analogy like if you cant be bothered to pick up
| one sock, odds are you wont pickup all your laundry?
| remote_phone wrote:
| I have bought around 100 movies on iTunes. I get the argument
| that I don't "own" the movies but it's too convenient. And the
| best thing about iTunes is that it upgrades the movies when new
| features come along. I didn't have to pay extra for 4K or Dolby
| Atmos when the movie itself got upgraded. That itself is enough
| for me.
| js2 wrote:
| So here's what I do when I buy a movie, either on Blu-ray or via
| iTunes. I download the remux from Usenet. If there isn't one
| (rarely), I wait for the Blu-ray to arrive and I rip it myself.
| There's a U.K. release of _Wages of Fear_ that you cannot get in
| the U.S. any other way than purchasing the Blu-ray from BFI. (The
| U.S. Criterion Blu-ray release is missing 5 minutes of footage.)
|
| Even for movies I rent or stream, I often download the remux to
| watch it, then delete it after watching. It's the only way to
| avoid bullshit like streaming apps (all of them except Criterion,
| no matter your settings), not letting me watch to the end of the
| credits in peace. Or subtitles which are shown below the frame
| for movies which are wider than 1.78:1. Or, let's say you want to
| watch _RRR_ in its original language with English subtitles.
| Netflix only has the rights to the Hindi dub.
|
| I want my money to go to the filmmakers and actors and production
| crew, but these fucking studios and streaming companies, man.
| Please, let me pay you to watch the movie in high quality and in
| peace. Why is it easier for me to pirate content? Like, it takes
| me 30 seconds to go to https://radarr.home.mydomain.org/, type in
| the name of the movie I want to watch, click search, click
| download, wait 5-10 minutes, and now it's there for me to watch.
|
| Contrast that with going to Just Watch, maybe the movie is on a
| service I pay for, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's on Blu-ray, maybe
| only on DVD. Want to watch _Happiness_ (1998)? Too bad, not
| available anywhere except maybe you can find a used DVD on Amazon
| for $50. How about _The Heartbreak Kid_ (1972)? (Oh, hey, how do
| you like that, someone put up a copy of it on YouTube last year.)
| But time and again, movies just aren 't available. I really don't
| understand why they get locked away. What's the incremental cost
| of taking a movie which has already been digitized for DVD or
| Blu-ray and making it available on a streaming service or for
| digital rental or purchase?
|
| Come on Hollywood. Get your shit together.
| drstewart wrote:
| How big of a problem even is this?
|
| Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know
| anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's
| likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much
| content out there that the number of people that even care to
| rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
| evouga wrote:
| For me it's the convenience. If all movies were available
| reliably from a single streaming service, I would use it
| instead (as I did Netflix, in the early days). At my current
| stage of life, $10 here or there to buy a movie is irrelevant;
| the hassle of figuring out which streaming service (if any) has
| the movie I want to watch is not.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Content is not fungible. When I want to watch _Terminator
| (1984)_ and nothing else, then no amount of having other
| killer-robot films on your platform will satisfy this want.
|
| As to why people who buy prefer to buy physical? Because
| there's actual ownership. I haven't even as much as
| investigated my options for buying 4K content, because I am
| 100% sure it doesn't exist in a form that's not hooked into
| some DRM system (AKA worse than useless). With physical
| content, at least you retain the control.
| cgrealy wrote:
| > With physical content, at least you retain the control.
|
| To an extent, yes. Practically, you have control. Legally,
| you have still purchased a licence to view that content on
| that media in limited scenarios.
|
| You can't (legally) copy it, or display it in public (for
| free or money).
| bombcar wrote:
| If the cost to rent is X and the cost to buy is some multiple
| of X such that I suspect we'd rent enough to overcome the buy,
| I will buy, fully knowing I may lose access to it some day.
|
| Same reason that when I go to rent from RedBox and they offer
| the rental for $1 and let me keep the DVD for $2 or whatever
| I'll just buy.
|
| It's much more likely that my entire Amazon/Apple/Whatever
| account gets banned for something than they revoke access to
| more than a small subset of the movies, so for me the risk is
| worth the reward.
| mttjj wrote:
| I buy digital movies all the time. Not often at full price
| because there are sales and deals on iTunes weekly (daily). To
| me, "buying" a movie for $4.99 or even $8.99 (which is only a
| dollar or two more than the rental price) is worth it on the
| off-chance that I may want to watch it again in the future. My
| digital iTunes movie library is nearing 900 movies at this
| point. All backed up and downloaded locally so I reduce the
| risk of what this article is talking about happening to me.
| abruzzi wrote:
| damn, you're way ahead of me, almost double my number. I
| haven't looked into local backups. I'll have to see how that
| is done (and buy a bigger harddrive.) I didn't really realize
| that Apple made this possible since I only use an AppleTV to
| purchase and view movies.
| mttjj wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately you can't download the 4K versions. But
| for me that's an OK tradeoff since I've never once had to
| use the downloaded version to actually watch something on
| my AppleTV; everything has still been available in my
| account for streaming. Not to mention that over half of my
| library is movies from the 1930s to 1960s - way before 4K
| was even a concept. So except for a handful of recent
| movies, I've got the highest form downloaded anyway.
|
| I have a Mac mini that exists almost exclusively to be the
| backup for all my digital content should I ever need it.
| All the movies are downloaded to a 14TB external drive
| which is then cloned to another 16TB external drive and
| also fully backed up to Backblaze.
| groovybits wrote:
| Hi, can you explain (or link to) the process you use to
| download them? Is it manually one-by-one? Or is there a
| way to batch backup?
|
| Thanks
| mttjj wrote:
| Use the TV App on macOS. Just go into the list view and
| right-click on a movie (or multiple) and then you can
| download it. I let the TV app do all its own
| folder/library management. I've just configured the
| library to be on my external drive instead of my internal
| drive (you can do this from the TV app preferences).
|
| Note that this doesn't remove the DRM or anything like
| that. This is simply storing a local copy of the iTunes-
| protected video on your Mac. But if the movie isn't
| available to stream anymore or your internet is down, you
| can use Home Sharing on the AppleTV to connect to your
| Mac and stream the downloaded version.
| groovybits wrote:
| Awesome, thank you! Have you attempted transferring those
| backups from one computer to another? (i.e. upgrading
| from one Mac to the next)
| mttjj wrote:
| Yes in the sense that I plug in my external hard drive to
| the new computer and point the new computer's TV app
| library to the existing library on the external HD. Then
| it will prompt for authentication the first time I try to
| play something. After that the movies will play.
| abruzzi wrote:
| I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any
| streaming servies because my experience with them has been
| horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds
| or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When
| I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple
| seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be
| around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service
| that wasn't doing as well as hoped. I've never had content
| pulled.
|
| I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I
| rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the
| entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort
| food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on
| iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something
| like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
|
| If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for
| people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less
| worried about them pulling content they lost a license to
| because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world
| than licensing for free streaming.
|
| (Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I
| did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm
| just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
|
| EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost
| Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it
| on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed
| hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I
| searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not
| available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of
| nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie
| rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the
| license.
| joshmanders wrote:
| Last I checked I was nearing 1,000 movies on iTunes/AppleTV
| that I "bought"
|
| I also haven't noticed any missing or anything, but my
| understanding when I click the "buy" is I'm not buying to OWN
| the content like I'd expect with a DVD/VHS, but buying the
| right to watch it as long as the content is available as many
| times and whenever I want.
|
| I personally think people are clinging too much onto the
| description of "buying" that comes with physical goods, not
| digital goods.
| gcp123 wrote:
| Parents with kids who like to repeatedly watch certain movies
| and shows.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yep, we've bought every season of Blue's Clues and Daniel
| Tiger on Amazon because they started out as included / free
| content on some service and then became "buy or rent" after
| our kids were hooked. I'm happy that they're not physical
| DVDs because those would have been destroyed long ago from
| getting handled too roughly too often. With four kids, we've
| gotten our money's worth.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Is this the new "who watches TV? I haven't owned a TV in 20
| years?" Obviously someone is buying them or do you think six or
| seven platforms are selling movies just for grins and giggles?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Many new movies don't have a "streaming" license for a while
| and your only option is "buying" them.
|
| It's also cheaper if you have a family and don't intend to
| watch it together at once, or even in a single day. It's also
| more flexible regarding which device can play the movie (iTunes
| rentals were bound to the device clicking the play button lady
| time I tried)
|
| It's way more niche than a few decades ago, but there's a bunch
| of cases where buying is a better choice.
| vel0city wrote:
| > your only option is "buying" them.
|
| No, there's always another option: not watching the movie.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| I bought "Bullet Train" over the weekend on Amazon for an at-
| home date night with my wife (rental was not available yet). It
| costs $20 which we justified as being the cost of 2 movie
| tickets. Doubt I will watch it again so really I was just
| paying for access
| drstewart wrote:
| Good point. Early release access definitely seems like an
| almost separate use case bundled with the "Buy" feature, but
| like you mention most people aren't doing this to buy the
| movie but to watch it earlier.
| filoeleven wrote:
| The number of people could indeed be quite low, but I'm glad
| the use case is supported.
|
| I buy digital films occasionally, only the ones that I know
| I'll want to re-watch every year or two. It's a much nicer
| experience to call one up on a whim than it is to find out
| which (if any) streaming service currently has them, sign up,
| then cancel. That's worth the $10 or $15 I paid, especially
| considering that the wine consumed during each viewing matches
| or exceeds the same cost, depending on how many folks I'm
| watching them with.
| onychomys wrote:
| A couple of months ago I pirated "You Won't Be Alone". I
| finally got around to watching it last night and today I'm
| going to go buy a digital copy of it. Note that I already have
| a digital copy, it's what I watched last night! But the film
| isn't available on any sort of disc, and it was an amazing
| movie and I want to support the filmmakers any way I can. I
| honestly have no idea how much of my $20 is going to flow from
| Amazon to the production company to (hopefully) eventually the
| director. But what else can I possibly do?
| hatware wrote:
| Last year, I bought a blu-ray player and two blu-rays to see if
| buying the media was worth it. At the very least, I'd have
| alternatives in case power goes out for an extended time. One of
| the blu-rays I bought was It's a Wonderful Life.
|
| At the penultimate scene, with the bell ringing on the tree when
| George is back home with his family, the blu-ray just stopped,
| glitched out, and I could not get it to play properly. Something
| to do with firmware and others were experiencing similar issues.
|
| I tried! It's incredible that even when you follow all the rules,
| you still get the shaft.
|
| Never again.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| "Buy" is just "Rent" without a specific end-date. Is this not
| commonly understood?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Not among most people who aren't interested in these things. I
| think it's very reasonable for consumers to expect that "buy"
| means to keep in the way that it means for most other things.
| People should not have to be experts in how content licencing
| and distribution works to not get screwed over.
| dalf wrote:
| said differently "Buy ... the right to make it available at
| will at the place of purchase as long as the content provider
| licensing does not change, and as long your internet connection
| allows it"
| Wazako wrote:
| The problem with all these stores like Steam, Playstore, Apple
| store, Nintendo Store, ... where you buy a license and not a
| file.
| least wrote:
| When I had a 28.8k and eventually 56k modem and had to download
| individual songs off of Napster and then Kazaa, of course it made
| sense to have a local download because that was the only viable
| option. I could download music while using AIM or IRC, but that
| would eat heavily into the limited bandwidth that I had.
|
| I eventually convinced my parents to upgrade to a 1.5Mbps cable
| connection when I was a senior in high school. That was when
| Oink's Pink Palace was a thing. I downloaded tons and tons of
| music and basically filled up the what was at the time absolutely
| massive 500gb hard drive with music. If something had a lot of
| people leeching I'd download it just to get my seed:leech ratio
| up. If I liked a single song from an artist I'd go and download
| their entire discography.
|
| Unfortunately that all came crashing down when that hard drive
| failed and I had no backup (maybe smarter/richer kids had backup
| drives, but I did not). I realized then that the whole thing was
| silly. I hadn't listened to half the music I downloaded. It was
| more an addiction to collecting music rather than listening to
| it.
|
| Eventually Spotify came around and that basically killed my
| desire to hoard music. I currently use Apple Music for the
| majority of my music listening needs. If there is something that
| I cannot find on there I might still download it. I've even added
| some songs with Apple's service to host your files on the cloud
| so I can listen to it on all my devices. I feel much freer to
| explore music rather than spend my time figuring out how to
| download and store it which is wonderful.
|
| I know that movies are not the same as music and the services are
| frankly much worse. It doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to
| stream high quality music than it does to stream movies,
| especially with all the various technologies like Dolby and what
| not. Still, I do think that it is unnecessary to maintain massive
| collections of them in formats that are degrading sitting on your
| shelf or as digital versions taking up a ton of space and care to
| ensure data integrity. I _know_ there are people that download
| movies and shows onto their home servers _just to have them_ or
| _just in case_ someone who has access to their plex wants to
| watch it.
|
| DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life. If you take
| care of them they may last long enough for you to pass them on to
| your children, but you're just placing a burden of leaving behind
| a ton of things that aren't _really_ important to you or them.
| Having recently gone through trying to clear my grandparents '
| house full of junk, I would not want to place that burden on my
| future children. If they are really meaningful to you then by all
| means, keep them. But I don't think most of them are. Maintain a
| small collection of the genuinely important ones. Make sure to
| get copies that aren't beholden to the whims of
| licensors/distributors... but maybe don't stress too much about
| the rest.
| vivegi wrote:
| The closest analogy I can think of is this:
|
| Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and
| builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. You enjoy the
| facilities -- pool, spa, restaurants etc., during your stay. At
| the end of your stay, you lose the privileges of staying at the
| resort/using the facilities.
|
| Even if you bought a timeshare in the resort, you still do not
| own it. Heck, the property developer also doesn't own it
| (remember, they just hold the 99 yr lease)!
|
| Electronic-sell-through/Download-to-own is pretty much that esp.
| if the player is controlled by the platform. You may download the
| artefact (or the player software may do it for you), but
| playability is dependent on the platform still holding rights.
| This is implementation dependent and you have to look through the
| Terms of Service to really be sure.
|
| All streamers who license third-party content do it for a limited
| period (from a few months to several months or a year). I
| wouldn't be surprised if many of the platforms have licensed the
| "Download to own/Electronic-sell-through" titles only for a
| finite period. Those titles will go away / become unplayable at
| some point in the future (unless you downloaded them from a DRM-
| free platform). When the eventual consumer backlash occurs, the
| platforms will point to their ToS.
|
| And to add to this complexity, copyright rules are quite
| different across jurisdictions.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Real property like resorts all exist in the real world. There
| is no copying a resort. You can't just instantly copy a
| building. You can't just create more physical space on this
| planet. The limits of physics renders such property inherently
| scarce.
|
| Data is different, it is infinite. You can copy it infinitely
| at nearly zero cost. You can transmit it to anyone anywhere in
| the world at nearly zero cost. Any attempt to own bits fails
| because of the inherently infinite nature of data. Any notion
| of property is imaginary, an illusion. Intellectual property
| degenerates into number ownership, it's that ridiculous.
|
| If you follow this logic to its conclusion:
|
| > the player is controlled by the platform
|
| Then intellectual property will lead to the end of free
| computing as we know it today. We cannot have computers that do
| what we want while simultaneously preventing us from copying
| data some rightsholder "owns". The copyright industry will
| lobby the government until free computing is illegal and all
| computers come pwned from the factory so that we can only
| execute "legal" code. This also goes hand in hand with
| government desire to control cryptography, paving the way for
| total surveillance and oppression.
| LocalH wrote:
| The color of bits simultaneously doesn't exist at all, and
| yet is very real
| vivegi wrote:
| The reason why the long-term property lease analogy is
| accurate is because in most jurisdictions copyrights lapse
| after a stipulated period. That is inspite of corporations
| like Disney that have used copyright law to their benefit to
| extend the lifetime of their IP.
|
| Taking your point about "free computing", I wonder why we
| haven't had the equivalent of open source software and the
| success we have seen over the last few decades hasn't spawned
| open content movement where we could get great movies, music,
| books etc., Sure, there are pockets of availability that is
| an exception, but not the kind of mainstream success that we
| have seen with open source software.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Leasehold is a scam, and should not be legal in the first
| place. It benefits no-one except the original freeholder's
| great-grandchildren or whatever, and vastly complexifies
| matters for everyone else.
| majortennis wrote:
| I purchased a track on beatport and later wiped my usb and
| realised I lost it I returned to beatport to find out it was a
| one time only download of that track. Very dissapointing when you
| try to do things the "right" way and are punished.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _If you buy a DVD or a Blue-Ray at a retail store, you are able
| to play that disk for as long as that disk physically works
| (often over 20 years). There are very few if any countries that
| would allow a shop to send around bailiffs to seize DVDs already
| bought years past, because the distributor no-longer has the
| rights to distribute the content.
|
| If a retailer dared attempt such seizure of people's Property,
| there would mass outrage. The media would shout about the
| retailer being thief's, questions would be raised in parliament
| and the business would most likely face legal problems._
|
| On the other hand, if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray
| you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player,
| I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage, even
| though the end result were the same.
|
| My suspicion is the level of public outrage is less about some
| deeply ingrained sense of natural rights and more about what kind
| of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar. Which is a
| problem, really.
| charles_f wrote:
| > if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the
| blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure
| there would be the same level of outrage
|
| I don't see what leads you to that conclusion. I've also never
| heard about that happening, and I don't suspect this would
| happen unless something actually illegal was happening (illegal
| copies and such). The justification for actually blocking you
| from watching that movie for which you own a digital copy would
| be pretty hard to find. And the work around is relatively easy
| - dont connect your blueray player to the internet. With
| streaming services, you're at the mercy of the service provider
| to just lose a contract with a studio and stop providing their
| content.
|
| > less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights
|
| At this stage fairness is proven to be deeply ingrained, even
| in animals. There is something deeply unfair with losing access
| to something you were supposed to own, just because they can,
| and some corporate bean counter decided to not renew some
| licensing contract on their catalog because the competition
| offered a percent more.
|
| > more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel
| unfamiliar
|
| 9/11 was a one-off, I didn't get familiar with this type of
| terrorist event. On the other hand, school shootings happen so
| often that I'm not surprised by them. Both still trigger
| outrage.
| akomtu wrote:
| The biggest deception was convincing the public that knowledge is
| a thing, so it can be bought, sold and change "owners".
| Convenient access to movies can be indeed sold, but not the
| movies themselves.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Perhaps not the movie itself, but the media and its content are
| things that can be sold.
|
| VHS, DVD, BluRay. If you have the media and a compatible
| player, you can watch them. You can lend or sell them. That's
| not very different to a physical book.
|
| Even video-games are a bit like that. It's true that you may
| lose access to updates the game received after the physical
| launch but as long as you have the media (BluRays, cartridges,
| whatever) you can still play them on a compatible console, lend
| or sell them.
|
| With digital "purchases", you can only do what the platform
| allows you, for as long as they allow it, for as long as they
| exist.
| vehemenz wrote:
| What it could possibly mean to suggest knowledge is or isn't a
| thing?
| swayvil wrote:
| I think it means that knowledge and material things are quite
| different.
|
| For example, a material thing cannot be duplicated a million
| times in a second. Or transmitted a million miles in an
| eyeblink.
|
| And knowledge has no mass.
|
| We could probably draw a bunch of other distinctions too.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I didn't get the impression that the parent was offering
| such anodyne observations, to be honest.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| Are knowledge and information the same thing?
| akomtu wrote:
| I think these are synonyms.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't much care for this weird equivalency that a motion
| picture is "knowledge", but regardless should every bit of
| knowledge be offered and given freely? Given that I know where
| I was last night and you don't is it within your right to
| demand it from me? Is it enough you want to have that knowledge
| that requires you then get it?
| akomtu wrote:
| I said knowledge can't be owned. I didn't say that everyone
| is obligated to educate others. It's fine to keep a secret.
| It only gets murky when the secret becomes public.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What is the threshold for "public"? The movies are still
| only licensed for viewing by those who paid. Once someone
| has the knowledge they a free to disseminate it?
| poiuyytrewq wrote:
| it was the same sh*t when the first kindles with digitals books
| came out ... you don't "own" the book...
|
| same goes with full-online games... you don't own the game, you
| just have the right to play on servers... when the server shuts
| down, you have nothing left
|
| buying physical stuff may be the "old" way, but it's reliable
| stuff
| fortran77 wrote:
| Would it kill these platforms to, at the very minimum, give you
| credits for another movie in the case where the movie you
| "bought" becomes unavailable?
|
| That being said, I've never chosen the "buy" option on a digital
| streaming movie.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Would it kill these platforms to, at the very minimum, give
| you credits for another movie in the case where the movie you
| "bought" becomes unavailable?
|
| In practice this usually happens, but I'm not surprised nobody
| commits to it in writing.
|
| I know in the two instances of video services I can think of
| shutting down in the UK, Sainsburys gave customers
| Ultraviolet/Google Play codes and refunds, and the BBC Store
| gave Amazon credit rounding up to the nearest PS10, so I
| actually got more than I'd spent back.
| tantalor wrote:
| That's a reasonable solution because it doesn't create a
| liability on the provider to refund your purchase in whole.
|
| I wonder how it works on the backend. When you "buy" a digital
| movie, does the publisher get a royalty? Then for the credit
| the provider could just eat that extra cost since it likely to
| be very rare. It still kind of sucks that the publisher can
| reap the royalty payments for all the "sales" and then turn
| around and pull the license.
| boros2me wrote:
| One idea I keep thinking about (which I'm sure interferes with
| some sort of copyright law) is: 1. User buys a physical copy of a
| movie/music 2. Instead of sending the disc to their house, it's
| sent to a storage facility 3. In the storage facility a digital
| backup is made and uploaded to a cloud storage 4. User is given
| access to the backup which they can watch/listen to 5. User would
| be the owner of said physical copy and when they sell it, all
| digital backups would be erased.
|
| What's the legality that stops this from working?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 1DollarScan.com is an interesting service that does this for
| books. You can order books direct from Amazon, and they will
| digitize them for you
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > 3. In the storage facility a digital backup is made and
| uploaded to a cloud storage
|
| Generally speaking neither of these parts are legal in most
| territories without rightsholder permission.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| One thing to note is this would be very expensive from a
| bandwidth perspective, of course depending on streaming
| quality. A 2 hour 4k video is about 40GB of data transfer, I'm
| presuming if someone buys something over rent they're going to
| watch it at least 3x... A quick google suggests 120GB can cost
| $6 to move.
|
| happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the
| pricing structures
| [deleted]
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/2011/10/streaming-movie-service-zediva...
| boros2me wrote:
| 2011 wow... Thanks for sharing!
| pontifier wrote:
| A key problem with zediva was that they were only offering
| rentals, not ownership. Ownership of a particular copy gives
| you rights that you don't have when renting.
| paxys wrote:
| Unauthorized reproduction, even for personal use, is illegal
| under IP laws. This company would get sued by movie studios 5
| minutes after it launches.
| pontifier wrote:
| This is what I'm attempting to revive with Murfie/Crossies.
|
| Right now, I'm dealing with unrelated problems with my
| warehouse so the service is only partly functional. In my
| opinion the basic model, with true ownership, should be
| completely legal under copyright law.
| obblekk wrote:
| We should require companies to use the word "license" rather than
| "buy," unless you receive a universe-wide, irrevocable, non-
| exclusive, transferrable at will, independently verifiable
| license (i.e., what it means to actually own a digital product).
|
| I suspect that would quickly create a much more robust market in
| services offering upgraded worldwide licenses, and so on, and the
| market would clear at some price for those upgrades.
| josh_fyi wrote:
| Has anyone tried a legal challenge to the word "buy"? It seems
| like a straightforward case of misrepresentation.
| dqpb wrote:
| If you sue Amazon, can they ban you from using their services?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This sort of thing does have a chilling effect. I've had
| issues with Sony and google. With a physical store? I'd have
| simply done a chargeback. With my them? I'm basically
| guaranteed to be banned from their services. That sort of
| thing doesn't happen in physical stores. One doesn't get
| barred from walmart if you have a beef at the return desk.
| ticviking wrote:
| I expect that such a case would be enormously expensive, and
| bankrupt one or both sides in the process.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but this ruling
| from the EU, coming from reselling oracle licenses, comes to
| mind:
| https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| It's faster to build alternatives...
|
| There will always at least 2 (N) groups of people who
| agree/prefer Nth direction
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Yes, check out the _Andino v. Apple_ lawsuit
|
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18607418/andino-v-apple...
| izacus wrote:
| That won't fix the core problem though - the platforms will
| just use another word for it and you still won't be able to
| take your content with you on a vacation or give it to your
| friends and family.
|
| It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had
| guaranteed with physical media.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I think getting rid of the deception and forcing companies to
| be upfront about what they're selling would be a significant
| improvement.
|
| Hard to get companies to change when people don't even
| realize the problem.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| 'License' and 'EULA' basically do what you propose in the
| software world. They were a ploy to get more rights form
| 'buyers' than copyright allowed.
|
| It works so well that a lot of people think companies can't
| sell software without giving the right to unlimited copies,
| even if a book or dvd are trivial counterexamples.
|
| Basically the button 'buy' changes to license
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| Exactly this. Those of a certain age will remember the days
| when all media was physical media. People could purchase new,
| used or trade for a copy of this media. People had some
| amount of freedom regarding how they handle and/or distribute
| this media. It could be resold. A corporation could not
| immediately and arbitrarily decide to revoke your right to
| use the media or place many restrictions on _how_ you used
| it.
|
| While streaming media has some notable conveniences in
| certain cases, the downsides to the consumer seem to outweigh
| those benefits. It's as if there is a coordinated assault on
| ownership rights across many industries which is being led by
| the ubiquity of actually-broadband internet connectivity, the
| streaming technology that exists across many industries
| (gaming, movies, music and even general software) paired with
| corporation's insatiable desire for growth at all legal (even
| some not) costs. Because they now can, they will.
|
| As one who prefers freedom of use to maximum convenience I
| think it wise to purchase physical media when possible and
| back it up in a manner which is suitable to your long-term
| accessibility needs. Maybe I'm just a crabby old guy...
| netsharc wrote:
| There's probably wording in the agreement (linked next to the
| checkbox we automatically tick before clicking the button) that
| says you're buying a license to watch the movie as long as the
| movie is available on the platform.
|
| There are other definitions of buy a movie, e.g. buy the IP so
| you're allowed to make sequels.
| ticviking wrote:
| The point of such a lawsuit would be to establish that a
| reasonable person thought they were "buying" it in the same
| way as a DVD, and the idea that it was time limited or could
| be unilaterally revoked was deceptively hidden.
| janzaib wrote:
| JadoJodo wrote:
| The way it seems to work from what I understand:
|
| Movie Studio offers (what is effectively) a lease of Digital
| Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer is then allowed to
| sublease copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital
| Retailer's lease ends, so does End Consumer's sublease.
|
| How it seems like it OUGHT to work:
|
| Movie Studio offers resale rights of Digital Media to Digital
| Retailer. Digital Retailer then sells copies of Digital Media to
| End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's right to resell ends, End
| Consumer is allowed to procure/store their copy of Digital Media.
| atoav wrote:
| If your button says "buy" and you do indeed "rent", you will
| loose my respect immediately and Inwill go out of my way to avoid
| buying _anything_ from you.
| ordiel wrote:
| Worth to mention, at least in google services you are allowed to
| (at least up to last time I checked) download such file and from
| there o werds is yours as in the traditional sense, you are
| allowed to write it to a DVD or back it up on whichever way you
| prefer, and as loong as you preserve proof of purchase you are
| more than fine
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-04 23:00 UTC)