Reasons not to use Netflix
stallman.org
stallman.org
You won't see Netflix intentionally not working on Chromecast in order to sell their own dongles and tie users to its own ecosystem.
Their business is video streaming, so their motivation will be to make sure as many paying users can access their content as possible.
In contrast, the giants can just use their services as a way towards greater vendor lock-in.
Recording technology seems to have given us a collective case of viparinama dukkha with respect to popular culture. Perhaps it's OK for art to be ephemeral.
For me personally, Netflix makes enough good content (and hopefully pays artists well in the process) that the amount I pay is worth it. I want them to do little or no harm, but if I only patronized businesses that actively give back to society, I'd never be able to buy most classes of goods.
However, most of Stallman's post is, while accurate, a complaint of how we are being charged minimally by Netflix for a minimal access to media. If we could pay by cash in the post, on a player that didn't protect from ripping then it would cost more.
I give this criticism knowing full well I pay for it and profit from it.
Holding ourselves and the best among us to higher standards does more than deriding the worst.
This makes no sense to me. I can't archive a live theatre performance or lend it out either, but I still consider many enjoyable evenings I've spent watching a show to be worth the price of admission. I couldn't keep the video cassettes I used to rent so I could watch again later, but I still considered the fee worth paying so I could enjoy a film I otherwise hadn't seen.
Netflix also provides a temporary benefit, but in practice it almost always has enough new films or shows that I enjoy watching but wouldn't necessarily want to rewatch to justify the monthly membership fee. Given that my alternative way to watch that material would typically be buying it in a fixed format such as DVD/Blu-ray at a higher price, even though having a permanent copy offered me little extra benefit, clearly Netflix is providing a useful service that does, at least for me, offer reasonable value for money.
Netflix
* employs 5500 people
* generates $11.7B in revenue
* pays taxes on that $11.7B
* provides me with media I enjoy watching at a reasonable price
If you don't believe those things benefit society then fine I guess, but it's not a reasonable position.
No company pays tax on revenue.
Netflix profit is less than 10% of revenue.
It's all rather beside the point anyway. Saying that Netflix privdes no individual or societal benefit is just wrong.
He's complaining that you have to pay for content? Where is the money going to come from to pay people to produce it? Is everyone suppose to work voluntarily?
{DRM tirade}
The usual argument against DRM is that you are buying content that you can't use as you please, with Netflix, you are explicitly not paying for ownership you are paying for access. Would anyone complain that you can't stay in a hotel as long as you want when you only paid for 3 days?
{Netflix doesn't let you use what you bought}
You haven't bought Netflix content, you rented it. I can't go out and sell a leased car.
Educators speak the mission of "socialization" of children, meaning teaching them to be good, cooperating members of their community. That includes being willing in general to give things to others
So if he thinks other people should give away their work. Will he come over and cut my grass for free?
Netflix is parlaying its control of users (obtained through the wrongs stated above) into a grab for control over video entertainment. Every time you hear that some video is produced specifically by Netflix, it is be appropriate to feel a wave of disgust and resentment. Those feelings will help you refuse to watch it — refuse to feed the monster.
Netflix produces content I want to see, I give them money. They pay people to produce content. It seems like a fair exchange and a much less crummy business model than most internet based businesses like Google and Facebook.
I honestly don't have answers here but being reliant on a stack of third parties just to have continued access to my favourite films isn't a prospect I look forward to.
True, in the perfect world you would have something like iTunes + Apple Music for video. Where you can buy DRM free music and subscribe to receive music with stricter rights and mix the two.
Microsoft back in the day had the perfect model for subscription music with the Zune. You subscribed to unlimited music and and you got credit to buy 10 songs a month that were DRM free.
And as we head deeper and deeper into this chaos, further away from traditional distribution into digital only, our choices are going to become easier and easier to steer, and subvert.
RMS wants all media available without DRM. If that means fighting a slippery-slope of convenience, that'll have to do. This is, after all, exactly what he's been doing most of his adult life.
It's still DRMed obviously, so RMS will hate it. And since you own it (not rent it) it costs more than Netflix.
But it solves about half of the problems he mentioned -- you don't have to agree to an EULA, you still have the right to resell your discs later, and you can mode shift and/or back up your collection (rip it to a server, stream it over a VPN, whatever).
Not if I want to watch Netflix original content. Besides, the key here is _viable_. I don't consider spending orders of magnitude more to watch the same content _viable_, and I can afford it. For those who could not it's a non-starter.
Or maybe something more recent? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079F9NCM9/
I do respect RMS, but there is a sitcom contained in these two lines.
(I have a lot of relatives who worked for the government and I was a military wife for a lot of years. This is a problem I personally wrestle with and it is likely a factor in my persistent poverty. So it isn't intended to insult anyone.)
That quote however made me exhale rapidly through my nose, and I was still chewing on some spaghetti at that point resulting in little pieces of spaghetti ending up in my nose. Totally not a recommended experience. I can't help but still consider RMS somewhat nuts.
Many of his arguments are strong and worthy of discussion, even if his overall stance is not always so - but the way he expresses them can border into childishness sometimes. It's a pity; it gives his detractors (of whom I am not one, to be clear) an excuse to dismiss him.
But his way of communicating often leads to an initial impulse to dismiss what he is saying outright, much like I would dismiss a Microsoft criticism which referred to the company as M$ or an Apple criticism that kept calling it crApple.
I remember originally ridding myself of cable, at that time the pain of spinning a disk or the fear of downloading a torrent limited the amount of video I watched in a day. Now I that I am unencumbered it has eaten into all of my other leisurely activities especially video games and music.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/cc-by-4-0-and-cc-by-sa-4...
Creative Commons licenses aren't meant to be used for licensing code, and GPLv3 isn't meant to be used for non-code projects.
Case in point: If you click on "eBooks" from the submitted site, you'll download a one-pager PDF written by RMS, and released under a CC license.
And frankly, requiring a fast internet connection is an added cost. I might want to watch something on my cheap Android, in a train, and fast internet on mobile is a no go for me.
Netflix is progress, but it's still a compromise. The fact that it doesn't have all existing catalogs shows that's it's not ubiquitous.
That's one of the reasons I find this particular essay exasperating - there is a measurable amount of serious work being distributed on Netflix, clearly made with care and passion, both in fiction and non-fiction. Yet Stallman's stance says to deplore those artists' work for their distributor's business practices. It's literally shooting the messenger.
As an early adopter of the DVD program, my biggest hangup was the weighted catalogue that required me to click through many screens of often repeated listings(crap titles Netflix wanted me to watch more than I wanted to watch) & I was never certain I had perused all titles. Without an A to Z listing, it is obfuscating my options. I don't care for tailored shit that pushes others' weighted options.
Are we ready to look back on this thread with a bittersweet mixture of regret and yearning for our naïveté ?
I feel like we’ve been down this road before , and we don’t seem to have learned much about weighing contemporary practicality against long term security of freedom. And our duty in leading the development through our choices , rather than sitting back as ineffectual actors, choosing what works best for us, without regard for the effect of our choices on the proliferation of anti-freedom techniques.
Yes, Netflix works well now. That’s not his point. There is no fully superior alternative. That’s not his point. Our choices and boycotts can effect an alternative reality. I can’t speak for him, but, even if unwittingly, that’s what he’s achieving. It’s a sacrifice we all make for the greater good to get out of a local maximum. It’s about sending a signal.
Signed , a fervent Netflix user on an iPhone :/
There’s no single company that can provide such a service and humanity cultural heritage should not be ephemeral. The possibilities digital archiving provides are huge and consequential and Netflix and other services like it are the complete opposite of what’s in our own best interest.
In many ways, this is what American capitalism is all about. Containing and replacing everything with something that you can make people pay for. From natural food to cultural artifacts. That’s why the USA is where it is today. They’ve been fed this myth of exceptionalism to cover for extreme and dangerous form of cultural poverty.
To me,netflix is like walmart and what it did to smaller stores and how the quality now is so generic and bland.
I believe DRM in media you buy should not be allowed. But you aren't buying anything from Netflix, just renting.
I'd love a FOSS Netflix client and it doesn't require any loss in security.
It’s a compromise I’m willing to make under certain circumstances, but ultimately one that bothers me.
My biggest fear is in what will be lost in the future. These companies haven’t been around long enough for consumers to know how they will retain media. Will they only keep up licenses on the most popular movies? How will you then ever get a legal copy or access to one of your favorite movies of 30 years ago that nobody else liked?
To be fair that only applies to video. With music there's a wide range of digital, DRM-free, lossless purchasing options available. However I worry that this will become a much smaller niche considering the popularity of streaming.
So no real legal alternatives then considering the paltry number of options you'll have.
Anything post-DVD would be problematic due to CSS and suchlike. Maybe whatever videos you can legally get in Ogg format.
Typos of this sort make me wonder how clearly the man is thinking. That's perhaps unfair, but that's what crosses my mind when I read something like this and on top of the general craziness of the position, it has gibberish of this sort in it.
The post rants a lot about justice, but I am failing to see where in this rant he allows for the ability of people creating videos to get compensation at all. This seems to posit that a streaming service just shouldn't exist, period. The assumption that end users have all these rights, but creators apparently have none -- that's basically the very definition of slavery, no?
A lot of these things he is protesting were created as some attempt to try to capture compensation for the people doing the work that makes it possible for the end user to get all the things Stallman is claiming is some kind of right of end users.
I'm not comfortable with the moralizing language here. I think we need to do a better job of making sure people can get their share of the wealth that they participate in creating, not because of morality or justice, but because when (for example) Amazon employees are homeless while Bezos is insanely wealthy, this is basically preconditions for bloody revolution. When the people you need to create that wealth hate you for how you treat them, this is not a good thing going good places.
It isn't that I think it is "immoral" for Bezos to make that kind of money. It's that I think he's a fool to think that bleeding his workers won't come back to bite him. When their behavior was objectionable enough, even Roman emperors were sometimes offed by the very guard unit intended to protect them.
There's an old DnD concept of "lawful awful." This is where you try to play an alignment 1 Lawful Good character who is so "good" and so rigid about various rules that they wrap all the way around to behaving like a Lawful Evil. This post sounds a bit like to me.
I have a fair amount of respect for the fact that he believed in certain principles enough to put his own time and effort into creating open source alternatives to the proprietary things he felt were inherently in the wrong. And it's fine if he doesn't want to watch Netflix and wants to layout his reasoning for it. But this post veers into trying to tell other people to also embargo Netflix. What I am not seeing is his proposed alternative. And that's a difference here between his past willingness to write the code and make it open source because he felt that mattered and this current rant.
If you have a viable alternative to Netflix that fits your high-minded morals, awesome. If all you have is a rant about how this thing is not good enough, I think that should stay in the land of personal opinion or personal preference and not veer into territory of trying to use his position of influence to get other people to embargo them.
I never even installed Netflix.