Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe physical distribution still has some advantages. Instead of sending DVD/BR by mail lets sell disk and drive in the cloud?

I know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo failed in supreme court by trying to argue they were renting remote antenna/tuner. The difference is:

1 they were leasing

2 it was OTA broadcasts, made them look like a cable company

What if you could buy a movie disk and a dedicated drive. After your first purchase you would have right to resell it back to company (at a fixed price) or anybody else wanting to watch it with a drive in same data center at whatever price you wish (open market). Subscription would cover power/colocation and egress VPN. No Video streaming would be taking place - your drive would be mounted remotely over the network and work with any DVD/BR player.

Would that survive lawsuits?

I think there was a service that operated similarly, for the sake of offering content filtering for parents. They were sued and shut down.

In general, DVD/BD streaming over the Internet would require breaking the DRM, which is a big no-no.

Its not video streaming. Real SATA BR drive is mounted remotely, either with a movie already slotted in or connected to custom bulk disk loader/changer. It shows up in your desktop as another drive letter and requires normal bluray player to operate thus No DRM bypassed.

The question is can you legally play your own disk using your own disk player .. over the network?

My understand is that having the copyright they have the right to acknowledge any copy happening even if it’s in a cache somewhere, on a wire somewhere. If you mount a drive remotely copies happens. Actually with dvd copies happens in memory too but those have been legally authorized.

In my scheme:

the disk is explicitly yours - bought at full retail price

the drive is yours, every user gets a dedicated drive in the infra - again bought at full retail price at the moment you sign up

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