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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

> But if I watch one Netflix show, I can't just subscribe to that show, I must pay for a ton of stuff I'm not remotely interested in.

When I want a song, I've always just bought it. I still do. I can do basically anything with the file other than redistribute it. I can even play music while offline! I only use streaming services like Spotify and YouTube for songs I don't regularly play.

I'm very frustrated I don't have the same option for movies and TV. Sure, I can buy the physical media, but there's all sorts of legal shinanigans when it comes to ripping blurays and such. My ideal solution isn't one big streaming service that has everything. I want an "iTunes for movies".

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There... is an iTunes for movies. I mean, I own hundreds of iTunes movies, some of which I purchased 13 years ago. Microsoft, Google, and Sony all have equivalents.

You're not owning them. You own a license to watch on Apple's terms and as long as iTunes is around. Microsoft shut down the drm servers and killed their clients' ebooks in April:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318852

That’s not strictly true. If the movie you purchased was from one of the five major studios that support Movies Anywhere, you can link your Amazon Prime, Google, iTunes, or Vudu account (along with others) and any movie purchased on one can be transferred to the other services.

https://moviesanywhere.com/welcome

And if I want a DRM free copy so that I don’t have to ever keep track of this landscape of shifting alliances? This is way more mental overhead than I want to devote to movies.

qbittorrent has a built in search function that works great for me. Fire up a vpn and dump the file in my jellyfish indexed folders and away we go.

You’ve never been able to buy commercial video without copy protection. Even in the VHS days you had Macrovision.

Not true. Perhaps you meant to say that copy protection has existed for a long time. But plenty of commercial video has been available without copy protection.

if you are referring to mainstream commercial movies by the major studios, Macrovision was introduced in 1984 for VHS tapes. DVDs from mainstream studios also had DRM.

What commercial video from the major studios have not had copy protection?

I'd have to go to my fathers house to find the stack of VHS tapes that were duplicated from rentals. Meanwhile I have my own modest stack of DVDs that I copied in the 2000s using whatever generic DVD ripper was available for windows at the time. I recall once or twice being unable to rip a DVD for copy protection reasons but it was rare.

Either there was no copy protection, or the copy protection was so trivial to circumvent that I never even knew it was there.

Generic DVD rippers used DeCSS to remove DRM. There were also plenty of devices that could remove MacroVision while you were copying.

I never said that the copy protection schemes weren’t easily circumvented. I said that commercial video has always had copy protection.

So, a point irrelevant to any part of the actual discussion.

I said.

You’ve never been able to buy commercial video without copy protection. Even in the VHS days you had Macrovision.

That statement is factually correct.

The reply:

Not true. Perhaps you meant to say that copy protection has existed for a long time. But plenty of commercial video has been available without copy protection.

Which is factually incorrect.

The reply:

I copied in the 2000s using whatever generic DVD ripper was available for windows at the time. I recall once or twice being unable to rip a DVD for copy protection reasons but it was rare.

Since even the oldest Windows dvd copy programs like DVDRipper could crack DRM doesn’t prove anything...

Are you now saying that being factually correct is “irrelevant”?

But using programs and devices that removed copy protection somehow proves that it didn’t exist?

It's definitely factually incorrect that all VHS tapes had macrovision. I know we did not have any kind of stablilizer or special copy machinery used to duplicate VHS tapes.

Only that I'm not part of the target audience: "Open to U.S. residents 13+". Looks interesting though never heard of it before. Some questions: How often can a movie be transferred, will it retain all audio streams, subtitle options and the quality that I bought? What if it's not available on any other platform or Disney (the parent company) decides to shut it down?

It’s not transferred. Once your accounts are linked, any movie that you purchase or redeem from one of the participating studios automatically shows up in all of your libraries as purchased.

Since it is only available in the US, I would suspect that it would be centered around US releases.

Even if Disney later shuts down Movies Anywhere, you’ve already “purchased” the movie according to Amazon/Apple/Google, etc. You can disconnect from Movies Anywhere once you sync the titles between services.

Technically we don’t own the content on DVDs and Blu-Rays either, we get a license. So long as those old players keep working....

Microsoft gave their customers a full refund, what's the problem?

As a purely practical matter: maybe your ebook reader only supports the format that was discontinued; maybe the ebook has gone out of print or has a change you don't like; or maybe you brought it when there was a big discount and to re-purchase elsewhere will cost you more.

As a broader matter of principle, it proves your property rights over a DRMed ebook are weak compared to a regular physical book; if you had a physical book, the seller couldn't barge into your home and remove it, refund or no.

> I want an "iTunes for movies".

You... know that iTunes sells movies, right?

This is probaby not what he meant, movies on iTunes, Google movies, etc all have DRM while music doesn't. He just wants to "do basically anything with the file other than redistribute it."

That's fair, although with the current state of things it's a tougher ask. Even so, the iTunes for movies is, arguably, iTunes -- or Amazon's equivalent. (I do wonder whether DRM-free videos would have followed in the same way DRM-free music did if that market had taken off and streaming hadn't; at this point there's probably little commercial motivation to studios to make that change, as they'll just say "instead of buying that, subscribe to [insert video service here].")

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