The deception of “buying” digital movies
worldofmatthew.com
worldofmatthew.com
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.
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.
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.
What an overly broad thing to say!
Unless we're calling construction workers buying F150s with 72 month loans wealthy these days.
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.
There is nothing wrong with buying a lemon car at a sufficient discount.
Thus lemon law benefits every single consumer whether buying a new or used car.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a long time, Wisconsin was a perfect example. Home canned goods were allowed to be sold, but home baked goods were not, even though canning involves many more safety risks. The Wisconin Bakers Association successfully lobbied against legislation, but home baked goods were eventually allowed after a two year lawsuit. Even after the lawsuit, the Wisconsin agricultural department insisted that "baked goods" were limited to those items that contained wheat flour. It took another lawsuit concluding in 2021 to expand baked goods to include all non-perishable baked goods (gluten-free products, etc).
Most states don't even allow this "cottage food" industry.
Granted, I'm not arguing that some grandma selling kolaches down at the farmer's market is going to build the next Hostess brand, but everyone starts somewhere.
I'm willing to believe there are actual examples out there, but this is not it. Starting a bakery is not hard. I've traveled extensively in Wisconsin and there are plenty of small bakeries. And at least here in CA, a common way to get started building a food business is to rent time in a shared industrial kitchen. That suggests there are plenty of ways for people to get started, and that food safety laws are not a big burden.
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.
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.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2017/05/what-are-the-odds-840...
https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/rawmilk-outbreaks.htm...
But this all seems pretty far afield from my point, which is that food safety laws benefit the poor. I am happy to believe that some dangerous food, like casu martzu or blowfish sushi, is also very tasty. But taking risks for exotic, connoisseur food experiences is also generally the provenance of the rich. So it seems like this also proves my point.
Further I'm aware of Food Not Bombs winning a case by claiming an expressive first amendment right to share food.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/crime/os-homeless-feedi...
Though local ordinances, they require certified and licensed establishments, so it still rolls back to the original issue.
I mean, no coincidence that they are always on the top of the list to threaten and scheme to cut by the right wing.
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.
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.
By that standard, a law completely redistributed wealth from top to bottom could still be viewed as primarily "benefiting the wealthy"...
This is how Germany got some of its welfare state way back in the 1800's. Monarchy and statesmen realized they had to quell the masses or they'd get socialist revolutions from the burgeoning socialist movements at the time, and headed them off by implementing things like universal healthcare under Otto von Bismarck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_Edition
This, lets call it, "cross pollination" would be much more difficult today.
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.
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.
>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]
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:
You probably should abandon this account and create a new one that isn't "dead" on post.
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> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Every 10 years, declare that your work is worth $x, then pay a renewal fee of $x/10 (or some other fraction based on more solid economics).
If anyone volunteers to pay more than $x in place of your $x/10 your work is now public domain.
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.
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.
It really isn't. It's a temporary privilege of state enforced monopoly.
Patent law would, ideally, be abolished altogether as I'm not convinced that other types of patents are any more legitimate than software patents. Trademarks should not expire, of course, but there should be restrictions on what you can trademark to protect the public domain (for example, the mouse corporation shouldn't be able to evade the copyright term limits by trademarking its characters).
Corporations barely need to do any propaganda because so many artists advocate for exploitative system without any prompting.
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.
So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.
People get around it by producing Fauxpaign under various other names.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.
Sharing credentials on streaming services has happened exactly because it is the most seamless way to do it.
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.
Those aren't "correcting" anything; the internet came along and stole their lunch. What needs correcting is the business model.
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?
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.
I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the book publishing business unprofitable?
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.
Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.
Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.
E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.
And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".
[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.
The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.
> it would likely restrict the choice of software players
I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.
If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.
Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.
Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.
You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no proprietary "intellectual property".
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.
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.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Especially as late as when the DVD came.
And the purpose of it wasn't geo-restrictions either.
Living in the SECAM region and wanting to watch US/british stuff makes it a lot more prominent issue that if you're in the PAL or NTSC area for instance.
Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.
With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.
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.
> 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.
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
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.
Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...
[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...]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cross-border-portability-of-onli...
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.
Piracy returns?
It never gone. 4Tb USB HD + Good Torrent Tracker = All problems solved.
Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix
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.
Another way to improve fairness to stores could be to allow them to charge a "transfer fee" of perhaps 5-10% of original MSRP for transferring any used content.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences have made multiple people this upset.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc).
Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.
I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers.
I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era.
Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
There's nothing that would generate perfect sine/sawtooth waves or perfect, undistorted echoes. So anything else just sounds unnatural/robotic.
I think it's the same with film grain, looking at flat perfectly polished surfaces can seem boring and unnatural to the eye.
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.
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!
But essentially, losless compression is all about throwing away impercetible details. Noise is an interesting case here because the presence and fequency of the noise (the texture) is significant to the viewer but having the noise match 1:1 is not. Which is why newer codecs remove the noise and then re-add generated noise during decoding.
Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.
https://www.google.com/search?q=review+picture+quality+blura...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.
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.
I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.
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>
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.
other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.
I don't have gear that can decode Atmos, unfortunately, so I haven't tried ceiling speakers myself - only at movie theaters. Why not 7.1.2? =)
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!)
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.
They have optimized for user hostility and money.
They've created a system where consumers have bought their products many times over yet still don't own them.
As an aside, games and software is 100x worse. Often times there is just no way to get old software or games running at all.
Why, when emulation of old computers is mostly a solved problem?
Which one?
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.
Damn, I must've missed the models that come with DVD drives haha.
Honestly imo even on a tiny phone you can still tell the difference between 480p and 720p, not to mention 1080p. Not having high levels of compression definitely helps but only to a degree. I have a decent DVD collection from the pre-fiber era and honestly these days I rather just download a FHD version in a few minutes it takes to complete than take it out of the box and find a machine that still somehow has a drive. It's all just collecting dust.
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.
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.
There will always at least 2 (N) groups of people who agree/prefer Nth direction
There are other definitions of buy a movie, e.g. buy the IP so you're allowed to make sequels.
It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had guaranteed with physical media.
Hard to get companies to change when people don't even realize the problem.
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
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...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18607418/andino-v-apple...
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.
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
FTFY
Or more accurately, someone's already done it and you get to be one of those friends.
Good luck winning this with Amazon, Apple and Disney on the other side.
No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance.
Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?
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.
We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license to watch a film - we called it "renting".
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.
Yes, but no one would take the physical tape away when Target or their distributor lost the right to sell the video tape.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
You're obtaining a license for exchange of payment.
You're buying a license.
The car isn't my analogy, it is yours. You're the one suggesting buying a license to stream movies on Amazon is like buying a car. I don't get how its more similar to that than buying a movie or concert ticket. You still haven't explained why you feel a car purchase is a better example other than now suggesting it is a bad analogy now that you presume its mine.
The terms of this license are clearly listed in the link right next to the Buy button. Is the person also deceived if they didn't bother reading the showtime for the ticket they bought?
I wonder how long a used-car dealership that made people sign an unfair agreement similar to streamed movie legalese, and then later came to repossess people's cars, would last.
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.
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.
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.
:)
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768...
Blu ray players are also locked down and the embedded keys are subject to revocation
The DRM does not require being online to verify once it's been set up
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.
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.
You absolutely can.
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...
I don't think any of the other Movies Anywhere apps support sharing/playing the exact same downloaded file, but cross-app downloads are supported (buy on iTunes and download on Xbox Movies or Vudu or whatever).
Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Goodwill work pretty well for me.
Vudu's current owner, Fandango Media, I have a lot less trust in because they have burnt a few bridges with previous digital movies sites (including one of their same brand; they briefly ran a Fandango branded digital movies app that closed without much notice or refunds, to be rebooted as FandangoNOW months later, in part because they bet on UltraViolet and didn't want to just convert UltraViolet purchases to Movies Anywhere like Vudu and iTunes did during that same time). So far Vudu has still seemed to be doing well under the new ownership, but that distrust in the new owner still sews seeds of doubt.
Speaking of Movies Anywhere, that is still an assurance that I trust when making purchase decisions. Even after UltraViolet died, possibly especially because UltraViolet died (and the way at least iTunes and Vudu handled that transition). Movies Anywhere seems to have won out because it is technologically simpler. Plus the Disney backing seems to work in its favor as Disney has some reason to make sure Movies Anywhere does right by families and doesn't tarnish their brand by association. I'm a little less particular which store I buy from if it supports Movies Anywhere. For movies that still aren't yet Movies Anywhere I'm much more cautious. (This was why I avoided Steam's brief foray into movies, for example. They worked with non-Movies Anywhere studios and it didn't feel all that shocking when the experiment failed and Steam stopped selling movies.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's the legality that stops this from working?
Generally speaking neither of these parts are legal in most territories without rightsholder permission.
happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the pricing structures
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
Thanks
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, there's always another option: not watching the movie.
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.
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).
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.
At the very least, I know it'll be a good movie instead of taking a gamble with an unknown quantity.
I had expected it to work like Apple's App Store, where as far as I can tell you can generally still download apps you've purchased (although older apps often do not work with newer devices and/or iOS versions.)
Since then I've moved to PDFs or Kindle. If Amazon pulls the same trick I may have to rethink my strategy.
For movies that YIFY doesn't have, 1337x is a good site.
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.
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.)
Is it, in absolute terms, still a very important concern worth addressing at some point? Sure.
We should start addressing it now. We can work on more than one problem as a species, and moreover, we should. The big problems never stop coming, so focusing 100% of our energies on that means that the smaller problems won’t get solved.
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.
I’ve been hard‐pressed to find any other way to purchase DRM‐free movies.
Awesome. Digital downloads are my favorite kind of download.
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...
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...
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.
It's already happening and nope there isn't a massive outcry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912
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.
At least that would be honest.
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.
Anyway, the article makes good points.
That being said, I've never chosen the "buy" option on a digital streaming movie.
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.
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 £10, so I actually got more than I'd spent back.
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.
The moment the rights are sold or transferred to another party, the rights should be dissolved and no protections afforded; whatsoever.
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.
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
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.
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!
maybe an analogy like if you cant be bothered to pick up one sock, odds are you wont pickup all your laundry?
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.
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.
> than buying the movie
it's "then". probably. :)
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.
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.