Apple is sued for telling you that you're “buying” movies
nofilmschool.com
nofilmschool.com
Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely
This strikes at the root of our society's definition of ownership. Clarification should not depend on Apple, or even a court. This should be enshrined by an explicit law. Using the word 'license' or 'rent' instead of 'buy' for something you can't own seems the minimum a consumer should demand.
1. If you download the movie, you will always have the ability to play the movie you downloaded.
2. As long as Apple has the rights to distribute the movie, you will be able to re-download it again
3. If Apple loses the rights, and you don't have your own backed up copy, it's lost.
It's the same for Audible books; which is why I always d/l and backup any movie or book I buy electronically.
Buying a physical DVD is only #1. If you buy a physical DVD at Walmart or whatever, and then lose it, you can't go back to Walmart and ask for a second DVD; that's a perk of buying an electronic copy.
Compare this to buying a piece of software off a website for $30. You download the installer, install it, and use it. Six months later, the company goes out of business and the website does down. You can still use the software as long as you still have the installed version and/or the installer; but if you lose the installer, you lose access.
I guess the difference is that Apple is purposely blurring the line between "storing stuff in the cloud" and "redownloading" movies. What should really happen is that three months before Apple loses the distribution rights, they should send an email to everyone who's bought the move, telling them to either 1) Download it to their own local hard drive 2) Buy an iCloud subscription and click this button, and Apple will automatically "download" it from iTunes to your iCloud folder on your behalf. (EDIT: Which due to [1], will probably require actually shipping bits over some internal network for each individual user.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
Just look what happened to Microsoft's ironically named "PlaysForSure" DRM. They shut down the DRM servers in 2008 and made everyone's "purchased" content unplayable.
edit: I double-checked how Apple FairPlay DRM works to make sure I wasn't mistaken. But no, to play FairPlay DRMed content, you need to log in with iTunes which downloads your user decryption key. So if you got banned from Apple's services (credit card chargebacks, etc) then you can no longer log in to play your content, even if you have the media files. So you are only licensing it for as long as you agree to the terms of service, not buying it.
What is the legal position in this case?
I have a similar situation with Google. I've had a Google Apps for buisness account for a few years so I can can use email on my personal domain. I made the mistake of 'purchasing' some media on that account.
I've since switched my mail over to fastmail but can't quite bring myself to close the Google account because I paid for every episode of the American The Office and might want to watch it again ... one day.
Of course Google's customer service worse than useless. Can't transfer the 'purchases' to a free google account. Can't refund. Do I cut my losses or keep paying for the account subscription?
The answer is never buy anything from Google (or equivalent, such as Apple) but that's not a very mainstream solution.
I guess you could argue that the cost I paid may have been lower due to the limited nature of the format/platform, but eh...I'm already trying not to be a total mooch so it'll do.
Sometimes you gotta get off the train that speeds towards a cliff, even if it means going by foot for a while.
> Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely
If iTunes might pull content I purchased at any time, that does make me rethink the whole thing.
Having spent well into the 4 digits, maybe 5, I’m rethinking this too. I feel like I’m being held hostage.
If that doesn't happen that's down to the business interests of the seller and those are not something consumers typically have to account for when buying media.
It's essentially the "times have changed" argument; that the common nomenclature for "purchase a non-exclusive license with no fixed term" is "buy a copy", and "purchase a non-exclusive licence with a fixed term" is "rent a copy". And if that is true for the vast majority of consumers, the argument does hold weight.
on the other hand, apple is well educated how industry works and they are well aware that purchase is not full ownership of copy so you could interpret it as intentional attempt to mislead customers.
This is a really awe-inspiring, a complete rejection of the concept of ownership
Apple is admitting regardless of activity, studios can revoke their license to content, removing content from your active account
No... have you?
State unclaimed property index (find your state site at the top): https://unclaimed.org/search/#
From wikipedia: "Escheats are performed on a revocable basis. Thus, if property has escheated to a State but the original owner subsequently is found, escheatment is revoked and ownership of the property reverts to that original owner."
In Futurama's "A Fishful of Dollars"[1] Fry discovers that the $0.93 he had in his account when he was cryogenically frozen in the year 2,000 had grown at 2.25% a year to almost $4.3 billion when he was reawakened 1,000 years later.
Yes, the match checks out[2]: 0.93 * (1.0225 ^ 1000) ≈ 4,283,508,449.71
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fishful_of_Dollars
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.93+*+%281.0225+%5E+1...
A few months ago, I was browsing my iTunes cloud library and noticed that an album I had purchased years prior was missing a few songs. I contacted support, and the support agent explained to me that the rights holder had removed the songs from the store, and thus they were now removed from my library. (Inexplicably, the entire album is still available on iTunes, but apparently the version I bought was removed.)
The rep also helpfully recommended that I back up my downloads in the future. While I did in fact have all the songs downloaded on my Mac, I’m not sure what the official solution would be for someone whose primary device is an iPad or an iPhone.
It's the (supposed, it's very confusing) difference between Match as a standalone service and the Apple Music streaming service when it comes to your own library--Match will serve back your own music files to you if not already on the service. OTOH, I have no idea what it does if it thinks it matched on the service when first scanned, but the track isn't there anymore.
However I agree with you. We should have a different word. Maybe even ‘license’ instead of buy.
On Steam, even content who's publisher has been banned off of the platform entirely is still accessible to customers who bought it before, and can be redownloaded at any time.
By this definition, any online locked down device (not just the software on it) can only be licensed or rented. Why should any online platform be treated differently from iTunes?
The suit alleged that the marketing of the drink as a "healthful alternative" to soda is deceptive and in violation of Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
(33 grams of sugar, etc)...
Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
Perhaps it's time we stopped allowing lawyers, the planet's most unreasonable people, to argue what a reasonable person would think. Would it be simpler if we resolved these cases by just asking a hundred people?
That’ll quickly end in mob rule.
The average HN user can spot the difference and say "of course you don't own it, and in case of streaming, you only have access for as long as the service is around", but that's not what the average consumer sees. "Buy" and "own" have very strong meanings and repurposing those for marketing purposes to mean "limited lease" is bending the truth to the point of breaking.
But of course, "lease it for a limited time, to watch on a limited set of devices, in a geographically limited region" doesn't sound so valuable as "buy and own it".
That's technically correct, but revoking the license for a specific DVD is effectively impossible. If you have the plastic disc you will be able to play it until the disc wears out. The same should be true for digital purchases, or the limitations should be made clearer.
That's why I'm a happy streaming subscriber. No lies there.
Region coding does not prevent me from buying and playing a disc from any region, in any region.
It's just a technical hurdle which works well enough for the publishers business model, in that the inconvenience has the desired effect on 99.9% of consumers.
But once I own the disc, I own the disc. Same for the player.
It's entirely and fundamentally different from anything delivered only as a service or worse as services masquerading as products, like software and devices that don't actually function without a service to allow it.
And the encryption is so pointless I forgot it even existed until just now.
Licensing, and specifically the EULA, was popularized by Microsoft, to make sure you didn't get the rights on their software you have on a book. Would you tolerate a book with any of these: Disclaimer of warranty or fitness for purpose; Automatic revocation; Forbidding critique; Monitoring. Presumably you could license books instead of sell them, and add all anti-rights.
The protection that a book has against being copied is that the format makes it more difficult to copy it quickly/cost-effectively for most people. You can do what you are saying with a DVD such as inherit it, though it's terrible for killing flies.
But the fact is that you are not allowed distribute a "copy you made" at all of a book without agreement from the copyright holders/owners or to the extent the law dictates.
A book on the other hand could be read by thousands of people in it’s lifetime.
While often assumed to be the case, that's probably not true. Copyright law generally allows for incidental copying necessary to use a product. And, in fact, (US at least) law has been amended over time to explicitly allow certain types of copying needed for functional purposes. So licensing is probably not, in fact, necessary. Rather licensing came in at a time when it wasn't clear that software could be copyrighted.
I suspect that if books would have allowed this sort of mecanism (on a technical level) it would have been used. From the publisher point-of-view, it just makes sense.
The generation growing up now does not see media as an asset that they want to own for the rest of their lives, and they are perfectly happy paying 10€ / month for unlimited access to media. Hell we're having a hard enough time to get people to care about the planet in 20 years, so getting them to care about this is going to be a hard sell.
I at least like to think that, if I were younger today and especially if I were living in a small and/or shared city apartment, I'd have a whole lot less "stuff" and would rely a whole lot more on digital content.
ADDED: To your other point. Anything covered by copyright law has some restrictions on your rights as an "owner." So you can't copy a book and give those copies away. (You can probably digitize and otherwise make copies for personal use--certainly you can as a practical matter.) You can't give public reading performances (Most obviously in the case of stage plays. You don't even have mechanical licenses as in the case of music.)
Without sounding like an old carmudgeon, but "Licensing" and "EULA"'s were around long before MS arrived on the block and were already "popularized" within the IT business. MS, Apple etc just picked up where the old minicomputer and mainframe hardware and software vendors left off.
you can even copy it for backup purposes. even if it requires you to break the encryption to do so.
I also sense there is an increasing acceptance by consumers, that it is normal to not be allowed anymore to own a legal copy of a digital work (e.g. picture, movie, music, software, etc.) for personal use. Most of these companies now treat their consumers defensively and as potential copyright infringers who will exploit the first occasion to get rich.
I don't accept that.
So I try to organize my digital consumption on an assumption that I will neither have internet access nor a "subscriber account" at time of consuming (e.g. software, video game, e-book, movie, etc.).
Products like "Spotify", "Netflix" or "Steam", and those "modern" video game consoles that treat you like a cheater if you try to log off and refuse to be constantly transmitting telemetry about you don't have a place in my wallet. I'd prefer
Sadly, I know I am losing the battle, all my friends gladly pay their monthly fees to not own anything anymore. I guess it's just a question of when I will get tired.
EDIT: forgot to mention, the thing I don't mind paying for a "limited access" is going to the cinema/theater and newspapers. Those two activities get quite a lot of attention from my wallet :)
I can resell the disc. I can rip and backup the disc and thus have endless copies for myself, preventing me from having to re-purchase that disc. (ripping DVD is much easier than Bluray, I'll admit).
IMHO, if i can control a piece of property (or a copy of it) for an indefinite amount of time, if i can copy/backup, watch it as i please, when i please, how i please, on what i please - no i don't "own" the movie per se, but the license granted to me by that physical purchase means the contents of that purchase are mine to do with what i feel like, short of showing it to 100 people in a theater or offering it up on a pirate network.
As a side note: I "own" my media. I have 500+ books, 400+ vinyl records, 1000+ CDs, hundreds of movies on DVD and bluray (80% ripped to a dual Plex/Jellyfin media server.)
Things don't "disappear" from Spotify for me. Amazon can't take my copy of 1984 off my Kindle. Microsoft can't shut off my access to e-books. Apple can't take back the movies I've purchased.
The reality is, i - the consumer - have control.
The future everyone is contributing to, IMHO sounds like the Great Reset conspiracy: "you'll own nothing and be happy". Happy paying rent in pepertuity to megacorps for access to things youd have, for cheaper, if you owned it outright.
Jellyfin isn't as nice as Plex and it's Roku app could use a UI rework, also having to put in IP/User/Pass on every client is a PITA. But overall i prefer it. It shows promise and i feel over the long haul it'll be the most consumer friendly option.
"Own it on BluRay" I think is very well understood by the vast majority of the commons and probably even those on HN. They own that BluRay and their 'rights' are confined but within expectation.
I don't think people have the expectation to "Start Broadcasting and Putting Ads in Brad Pitt's New Film".
They can however, spin up their BluRay in 30 years and watch the movie, which is fair.
I suggest the case against Apple has a kind of merit as well, if people 'own it' they should be able to watch it whenever they want, even 10 years from now, which is not a very long time.
Man Sues Apple For Terminating Apple ID With $24K Worth of Content
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/4QFg_7qSgss/...
By now, I know that this isn't the case. If I had known earlier, I wouldn't have paid full price for a limited digital copy. Instead, I would have purchased the Blu-Ray which - if you treat it well - will last far longer than my digital movies did, despite backups and stuff.
The lawsuit is about repeated downloads and streaming after the copyright owner has removed the movie for sale.
Downloaded movie files can be played using either iTunes or the QuickTime Player, copied to an iOS device, or streamed to an Apple TV box.
If I buy a license to play a video game on Steam, I only own that license on Steam with one account (with some exceptions and provisions for gifting etc).
If I buy a license to for a movie on iTunes, I only own that license on iTunes tied to one account.
Will consumers band together and demand that their media licenses be fungible?
In other words, how many things are 'accidental banks'
Presumably when Apple adds a film to iTunes for customers to buy they know how long they'll be keeping it on their servers for people to access it. It'll be part of the license. Unless Apple can guarantee that the film will be available after that time (eg Apple negotiated a non-revokable extension that they'll legally bound to take) then it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable that they should have to communicate the time limit to the user. Eg add some fine print that says "This film will be available in your Apple account until 2031, and may be available after that date" or something.
tl;dr: once downloaded to a device you have it until you delete it.
It’s not ideal and I do wish they would retain the right to keep an archived copy on their servers for all customers who have bought it so they could re-download or stream at any time without having to deal with backup and restore.
That’s due to technical limitations. The copyright holders would like to have this possibility very much :^)
- The catalog is enormous, you can almost always find what you want.
- There is robust software that can pull down the latest episode of the tv shows you want.
- There is similar software that can pull down movies based on public lists (e.g. IMDB top 100), so discovery is pretty great.
- All the above can be done on public trackers. Private trackers are even better.
- Many have a community of people who are into the content, and curate their own lists.
- There is software for a home media server so you can flip through all your content. Its also just one interface... no flipping through hulu/netflix/amazon/apple/google.
- That same home media server software can host all videos, so downloads from youtube, family videos, etc... all in one place as you see fit.
- I get to know that know one out there knows what I'm watching or when I'm watching it.
- Backup is easy, with offsite services running ~$0.005/gb/month, so pennies per movie per month. This way I know I'll always have it regardless of what happens with streaming services.
Getting it up and running takes some customization but it is _really_ great. I would gladly pay for such a service, even the typical ~$20/movie price.
Meanwhile DRM media we pay full price for, or if the content is only available via streaming we pay for it indefinitely. In neither case are we assured access a decade from now on different devices and we certainly don't get any privacy as studios track every second we consume. Worse, when big companies decide it is not profitable enough to keep "purchased" data around anymore, they just cut it loose.
Try opening a book from the Microsoft eBook store. It will fail because they closed down the DRM servers. The books stopped working. PlayStation 3 store? Wii store? Same story. You can no longer access your purchases.
Literally the only way to get the same freedoms with modern digital media we had with physical media, is piracy.
We got scammed.
Not really.
You can still play games purchased at the Wii Shop, you just can't re-download them.
[Edited to note: Apparently you can re-download or transfer to a Wii U]
That's not meaningfully different from having one physical copy: you can use the physical copy until the point that it's worn out.
I've got NES cartridges from the 80s or 90s still working.
And I've got Switch cartridges that are dependent on Nintendo's continued online support.
My point was that a physical Wii still works and is still a physical object, so it serves the same functional purpose here as individual NES cartridges.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
It happened recently so there is a grace period to download final copies of a game, but if your console dies and you want to transfer games to another unit you get off eBay in a few years, you are SOL.
Again, this is not functionally different than your cartridge dying. If your NES cartridge dies, you can replace it with a second-hand copy, or you're SOL. The same.
You're saying that there's a consumer benefit to a console-cartridge system being modular (such that either module can be replaced when desired, rather than needing to replace them as a package), but I don't think this has any bearing on ownership rights, nor any of the other points that you claimed. At least, not in the case of the Wii Shop.
Maybe I had 100 $40 games on my $100 console. Console breaks, I lose all games.
With physical media: One game breaks, I lose one game. One console breaks, I lose one console. Way less risk.
Also I can't sell or transfer the digital copies to friends or family.
Lock-in digitals are not at all equivalent rights of physical copies.
A lot of video game CDs barely lasted the life of their console without becoming basically useless.
[1] There are mask roms that are prone to failure, and some NES for eg. games are vulnerable to progressive failure of their battery backed RAM chips, which were not just for save backup but were also often used as extra RAM with a lot of write cycles (and to be clear, I don't mean the battery dying - I mean stuck or flipped bits on the ram itself).
This is analogous to right to repair, DRM "breaking" your property should be banned.
But if you think about online games, it becomes abandonware if you can no longer log into the game servers?
Or if your product is dependent on DRM, then is becomes abandonware when the DRM servers shut down.
I think different classes of media will require different definitions of when they become abandonware, but I think we'll mostly know it when we see it.
I think GP's scheme isn't awful honestly; it would have the effect of drastically lowering the practical length of copyright for most works while providing artists with a way to maintain copyright over works that are actually highly successful. (A per-year doubling might be a bit much but I think it's on the right track.)
If the practical effect was that we mostly got back to the original copyright term we had in the US (14 years with the possibility to extend that once), I'd be pretty happy. Maybe start the fees after the 14th year.
Sure, boost that to 10 or even 20 years if needed[0]. But from then on extension costs should grow exponential - otherwise we risk locking down work for duration longer than a human lifetime. Like it already happens with Disney.
--
[0] - 20 years may have been appropriate in mid-20th century, but I'd argue it isn't now. Cultural creation accelerates exponentially, but long copyrights prevent the ability to improve on prior art to accelerate in lock step.
I strongly dispute this statement, unless your definition of reasonable income does not include at least making back the money you spent on producing the content in the first place. You're ignoring all the small creators who produce new material for niche markets, possibly as a side income rather than their main jobs, and rely on the long tail of sales of that original work to make it financially worthwhile. Not every copyright holder is a Hollywood movie studio, big name record label or international book publisher you've heard of.
Your longer periods might be more realistic in those cases, and even 10 years might not be enough to break even.
I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it?
As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens.
I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well.
In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.
Corporations can start paying that escalating price right away.
(Edit: misread GP and removed a paragraph)
Non-transferable copyright/patents?
1. Different industries have different paces; it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place, whereas if you haven't made back your money on your singleplayer videogame after 10 years, you probably won't ever make it back. Point is, there is no flat duration that is fair to every work out there. 2. almost by definition, the stuff we care about is more profitable and will therefore be kept under copyright longer. 3. I wonder whether copyright expiration is actually helpful for software, when it doesn't provide you with source code. I'd like to see some mechanism that incentivizes the IP owner to publish source code after their copyright expires - perhaps by offering a conditional extension to the copyright duration in exchange for putting the source code in escrow?
Really, I don't think software's IP type should be "copyright" in the first place. It doesn't make sense to cut and paste a binary like you would with a book's text.
NASA is a government agency, the work should be in the public domain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...
You can go get almost any Super Nintendo ROM on archive.org right now, legally.
I hope to see this foothold extended.
There is an explicit exemption for:
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."
AKA old console roms. https://archive.org has piles now unchallenged for years as a result.
Copyright enforcement seems often "use it or lose it"
SPAM didn't act fast enough to protect their brand, and once it became commonplace as a term for internet garbage it was considered too late to enforce.
Unless someone like Nintendo makes a new Super Nintendo that can play original cartridges, I don't expect they would do well in court trying to enforce given the exemption and after doing nothing for so long at this point.
I study IP law academically but IANAL. With that said, I think we are honestly at a free for all at this point, and the more people that host ROMs openly, the worse the case against them gets.
DMCA is the only tool people that wish to stop distribution of media have, so it might as well be a blanket statement of legal distribution IMO, and archive.org certainly interprets it this way.
I like ebooks but I'm not comfortable with all the layers of DRM involved in it.
Eventually I gave up realizing it is an extraordinary effort to personally rip books just to have drm-free digital copies.
Instead I built a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and filled it.
I read ink on slices of dead trees now, like a barbarian.
Pretty much all e-paper readers are proprietary and track all reading too which is a second order problem.
Really all creators should just have anonymous donation options for people that want to support -them- without supporting the toxic labels and DRM situation.
Do you know of services that can do this without damage?
Edit: Ask and ye shall receive: https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-SV600-Overhead-Scann... - had no idea this existed. Very tempting - Fujitsu makes solid scanners .
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QGM36KB/
"At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."
There are in fact more of such stores, but this is the one that I use and remember.
Only for certain books.
Book DRM has been a nightmare. Tying a book to certain readers is an automatic showstopper for a lot of folks (like me). I recently bounced a tech book I purchased, because I had to download their crappy hybrid app to read the book. The same people that sold it to me, used to sell unlocked reflowable EPUBs (my preferred format), or watermarked PDFs (I have no problem with simple margin watermarks). I'll lay odds that the app they make you use phones home. I didn't bother downloading it, or reviewing their privacy policy.
I'm not so concerned with privacy, as I am, with perpetual access to the books I want to read, on whatever reader I want to use.
I often go back and re-read books, years after the the last time I read them. I want to have that book available, then.
Also, this goes for all types of media, region locks are garbage.
There are quite a few places especially technical ones. However, many major pulishers don't offer them, so you then have the choice of DRM stripping, searching for illegitimate copies or giving up/in and using a DRM copy somehow.
https://www.ebooks.com/en-nl/drm-free/
https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/
Note places like ebooks.com don't sell exclusively DRM free, so you will need to check per book. I returned one to them and got a refund because of my mistake in buying a DRMd copy.
> Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost.
(Not affiliated, just think they do great work!
Discussed before:
They somehow watermark your books though, but they don't contain any DRM.
O'Reilly was very good. Now they only rent their books via Safari. I feel betrayed.
One could argue it is ethical, if not legal, to obtain a drm-free digital backup from a pirate site if one has a physical copy on their shelf.
Also, see e.g. Steam, you cannot charge for these digital goods the way you used to. It's shifting towards (searchable) collections, not just individual books. It's ridiculous, when digital edition cost almost as much as print. They are emotionally and functionally different things.
A hardcover will cost around $3-$4 in printing costs. Even still, ebooks can be a good deal. To use a recent example that wouldn't yet have any digital discounts, there's the John Boehner book [0]. As of this comment, it has an MSRP of $29.99. The Kindle version is $14.99. At actual retail, Barnes & Noble charges $23.99. At Amazon it's $17.99, which makes the savings on print costs a wash.
Mid-size paper backs are usually a fair bit cheaper too. Mass-market editions are the bad deals: In print they retail around $8 to $10, which is usually the ebook cost too. However, many books never make it to mass market editions theses days.
The bulk of the costs involved in bringing a book to market are the people: Time to review the "slush pile", pay the author, editor, copy editor, typesetting, marketing. And many books either lose money for the publisher or barely earn out the author's advance. Mid-list authors who can consistently earn out their advance with a healthy margin are the ones that keep the lights on long enough for the publisher to (hopefully) catch lightning in a bottle with a block buster, or at least an outsized success.
Of course all of the costs above assume you're buying a new copy. Used books are often a very good deal.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/House-John-Boehner/dp/1250238447/ref=...
Still I think ebooks are a different product. At least in my head. I have a different emotional relationship with a physical book. The information within isn't in competition with the endless a "wealth" of information available legally or not.
For text books piracy is a victimless "crime" in my case, as having a digital copy or not, is independent from financial loss above a certain price tag. That is, I can't afford most text books, so I won't buy them; piracy does not influence the income of the publisher. On the other hand, if I really need/want to buy a book, I am likely gonna get much more intimate with it. Let's face it, digital copies are much more likely not to be read. Maybe only indexed and searched as part of a collection. Digital has a different value. (Although, I ofc understand the superficial dilemma here.)
This is the situation we got IMO.
Side note: You, as someone from the industry, I assume we can both agree that at the very least, a free digital copy should be included with every physical one, right? That just silly and artificial to separate, if you make an argument for the value of content and presentation.
What I've doing is buying physical books and then downloading DRM free ebook versions from pirate bay. I know not everyone will agree with those ethics, but I'm ok with it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593274
Consider Librem 5 USA instead: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa. It is produced in USA.
As for planned obsolescence, FP2 has 5+ years of support as we speak. Without help from Qualcomm, as they EOLed SD800/801 long ago. That's the same SOC as in the Mars helicopter, btw.
The point I made still stands: Librem 5 is made from slave labour (gold, cobalt). Especially sour with the 2000 USD price tag.
No DRM is a marketing gimmick for them, they don't actually care about the privacy of their customers.
Just because the EULA requires your firstborn son, doesn't mean they have any claim whatsoever.
The most important aspect is that as long as you have a compatible system and a good backup policy, you will never lose access to what you bought.
No DRM can help with privacy but they are mostly independent. There is DRM that doesn't violate your privacy, like hardware keys typical of arcade machines, oldschool copy protection and game cartridges. And I think Nintendo has privacy-preserving DRM for digital games too, the problem is that if you lose the console, you lose the game.
And as you have shown, you don't need DRM for privacy violations.
Though, I have made the transition to GOG where possible. but with so many games requiring online activation, I've accepted modern games might not have a long shelf life.
I am so excited for my great-great-great-great ... grandchildren to find a layer of plastic DVDs in the earth’s crust 25 generations from now /s.
Seriously, Blu ray discs and DVDs are such a waste of resources.
One of your many rights if you -actually- own a copy of media.
Many sites offer DRM-Free music and books without needing to have a redundant physical copy laying around, but in video media this is extremely rare, and that is a problem.
Depends on your jurisdiction. Ripping a dvd or bluray in the first place would be illegal in the states. Any type of format shifting (including say CD to mp3) is illegal in the UK - even if you did buy a drm free WAV, unless the copyright holder explicitly gives you permission to copy it to your phone, or another computer, you're stuck.
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-...
Some like to claim DMCA could be used to prosecute someone for bypassing the encryption on a DVD for personal backups but this has, to my knowledge, never been tested in court when an individual defendant was purely using it for personal backups.
There has been a case in favor of DMCA seeking to restrict the release of selling products that allow users to to this: https://www.eff.org/cases/realnetworks-v-dvd-cca-realdvd-cas...
That was an insane call, and it is a pity they didn't appeal as AFAICT.
A similar issue to this was challenged recently with DMCA being used to stop the distribution of the open source youtube-dl tool making the same anti-circumvention claims but in the end this fizzled out as having no merit.
If anyone from Hollywood really wants to test this in court I will happily publish a video of myself ripping one of their DVDs that I purchased for personal use. It would not be a good look for them to to anything about it, and would bet a -lot- that they lose. Still, I would like to see this chilling effect gray zone be put to rest so people are not scared to use their rights.
The answer is not obvious. According to [1], mailing a DVD and streaming a film use about the same amount of energy. This doesn't include the energy cost of manufacturing the DVD, but stamping out plastic disks is cheap, so it can't be too high. On the other hand, other studies show that DVD players, being older, tend to use more energy than streaming boxes. For repeated watching, ripping a DVD and streaming it locally seems likely to be better.
Or best of all, stream the movie and store it locally for future viewings. But that's not allowed. DRM is killing the planet.
[1]: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/energy-cost-stre...
How much of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch will my Netflix stream take up?
Plastic is killing the planet.
Every plastic bag, every CD, is sequestered CO2.
Of course, plastic is a problem on its own. I don't like it, its usage.
Yet I am a realist, and in as such, believe that (sadly), every drop of oil will eventually be pumped. Thus, by this logic, any use which locks that carbon up may be a net benefit.
How much electricity and infrastructure does it take to deliver the same movie over and over again via the internet I wonder?
Both are silly solutions that could be avoided if we were allowed to buy and download a DRM-free copy of a movie once.
No, it isn't. Plastic is only showing up in large quantities in areas where it shouldn't, and occasionally hurting some animals. Microplastics in particular may become a problem at some point, but then again, maybe they won't. We aren't sure. And either way, it's not causing problems just yet.
Greenhouse emissions are what's killing the planet. Manufacturing plastics is a part of that, but so is power generation, and thus all "purely digital" activity.
It's a point that people often confuse. Microplastics are bad, and emissions are bad, but they're bad for completely different reasons. Climate is what's an existential threat to civilization, and what we need to focus on right now. We can deal with microplastics later, if we survive that long.
We do not have an alternative to petrol based plastic for our current economy. Yes, we can make plastic from non-fossil biomass, but it's energetically feasible to replace petrol based plastics. We don't have the landmass, fertilizer, ... to switch completely. (Especially, if you consider the big picture: Biofuel, carbon sinks, food security, ...)
In a way petrol chemistry bought the planet some time before being destroyed by us. It saved the whales and prevented ecological exploitation in the colonies.
Since plastics are used amass not just for stupid junk, but also critical for e.g. medical single use items, sanitation and so on, we shouldn't just think about pollution. Although the thought of eating up to 7g of plastics a day doesn't sit right with me. (Little known side fact: It's not just obvious "plastics", silicone and paint does contribute to microplastic accumulation too.)
Our survival very much also depends on preserving oil reserves for essential use cases of petrol chemistry. Carbon neutral alternatives for many things usually come with an increase in another factor (energy, land use, non renewable resources) which makes them in concert unable to replace fossil energy/chemistry.
Resist.
REDUCE.
Reuse.
Recycle.
Rebury.
> ... but it's energetically infeasible to replace petrol based plastics
(2nd paragraph)
I am using this throw-awayish account with a lacking mobile app and cannot edit. So by all means, everyone, consider selimthegrim's comment a shame-edit to mine.
Agreed. Thanks for the link. I think I could've stated my point clearer. I am against DRMed streaming/video, and I'm against DVDs. I still want people to be able to make movies and get paid, yet the above two options are unsustainable e.g. when considering the use of plastic for DVD's, and the high energy costs of streaming movies from a data center.
Physical media also includes A LOT of DRM as well. You called digital streams "DRM media", which is a weird phrase considering all physical media uses DRM as well.
I think you're remembering some rose-tinted view of physical medias past, not discussing the reality of physical media in 2021.
It's weird that you're so inaccurate with these terms and concepts, it's almost like you have an agenda
>Literally the only way to get the same freedoms with modern digital media we had with physical media, is piracy.
And there it is: The Pirates Rationale™
You see it a lot. An excuse in need of rationalizations, so the details get mixed up because it's not about the details, it's about the end point.
Stealing media you didn't buy is literally stealing from artist and developers and no amount of crying about how the DRM on Blu-Ray is more OK than the DRM on Netflix will change that. This community should not be as immoral as Reddit and proudly and openly support stealing software and content that you did not, in some form, pay the artist/creator to access. If you're "pirating" things you own, consider ripping and cracking them instead, less chance of malicious code that way. But if you're using your loose understanding of these concepts to justify stealing from developers and artists, then shame on you.
I even wrote a python library to automate the process since I had so much music I wanted to obtain legally that I needed bulk access.
I spent thousands of dollars and many hours trying to play by the rules on this project.
A: The artist got nothing. CDs were mostly used, and the artists are often no longer alive.
B: Murfie went out of business and can't even afford to sort and return my discs to me. I can't prove I own my own music if challenged. It is all unsorted in a warehouse in the midwest somewhere.
Am I a criminal now anyway after all that work?
How many others would go that far to get a legal DRM-free music collection?
In the end I still got screwed.
If I could just download DRM-free music/movies/games directly, take my money.
Since that is usually not a thing, what other options do people that want freedom and privacy have?
You legally purchased the music and legally made backup copies of it. You are not a criminal.
> I can't prove I own my own music if challenged
I don't think that matters. Someone would need to prove you stole it, which they can't do since you didn't.
Welcome to the civil law world, where they don't need to prove that at all, they just need to ask "on the balance of probabilities, is it more likely than not that a violation happened here?". Unfortunately, for many, juries, and even judges, the mere assertion thereof by a corporation, even if backed by scant or contradictory evidence, is enough for them to say, "that's reasonable".
The rightsholder does not want to fight you in court because the amount of money you can pay (most likely) is less than what they have to pay in legal fees to hire these guys to come after you.
The era of mass lawsuits ended like 10+ years ago. It was a hallmark of the 2000's. These days, rightsholders do the settlement fishing where they get enough data to subpoena your identity from your ISP, then send you settlement offers. They don't want you to show up in court, they want to spook you and get you to give them $1000 or something to make it go away.
It's unreasonable to lump all people who pirate media into some cesspool of common criminality -- each use-case is different. Sure, there are people who aggressively collect more pirated content than they could ever hope to personally consume and refuse to pay for any media; but there are also people who want a secondary copy of something they've already purchased, or who can't even legally buy the media that they'd want access to in the first place.
Easier to just vilify a strawman (for what reason, even?), I guess.
>If I could just download DRM-free music/movies/games directly, take my money. Since that is usually not a thing, what other options do people that want freedom and privacy have?
When you pirate copyrighted content, you're sending a strong signal - that there is demand for that content. Rather, you may want to consider rewarding creators who release their works under a license you agree with. An aggregate effect could potentially trigger an industry shift away from DRM. As it stands, it may be that your favorite creators are not in that list, but that is just the reality of the current situation.
>In the end I still got screwed.
When people point out that the creator got screwed when people download Avengers or Game of Thrones, others are quick to point out that they would never have paid for the content. Its all about context and perspective! :)
A realization that your desire to access music and content with freedom and privacy DOES NOT SUPERSEDE the creators right to profit from their work. Look at where you are -- do the people in this community deserve to be paid for their code? Or can you take it from them if their feelings about privacy and freedom do not match yours perfectly?
I could say, I want bread but I don't want to contribute to capitalism, what option do I have? I'll just take. This isn't how we run our society. It's not how good people behave.
If you cannot abide by the authors/owners wishes, then you must set aside the entitlement you feel towards their work and simply move on without it.
Personally, I had movies I had purchased years ago automatically upgraded to 4K HDR versions.
That's certainly one advantage over physical disks.
I also don't have to physically store the discs, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like. I really don't want shelves and shelves of books and movies in my house. I have a few bookcases of our favorites, and that's it.
Even better is monthly streaming services, though. Then I don't pay nearly as much and get almost all the convenience, but with the risk that any particular movie might no longer be streaming.
I for one only pull dvds out of the box once ever.
It is easy enough to rip DVDs or Blu-rays to a NAS and use Kodi.
Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives.
Accept the monthly fees, tracking, and proprietary devices/apps or no entertainment for you.
The problem here is when you buy a movie, show, book, album ect. that you suddenly do not have access to. That is problematic.
In the last few years I've spent more than ever on cds through discogs.com.
"Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives."
Certain websites say otherwise. Luckily my main focus is music, where nearly everything I want is already in the used market, so the original artist won't see any money.
I had a decent blu ray collection, DVD collection before that, I'm not that old and now they are all essentially outdated tech when I could upgrade to 4k.
I love the idea of saving the space that any decent film/tv collection would take up, especially living in a 1BR place. Then again usually when you watch "4k" on Netflix or whatever it's still not up to the same quality of an ACTUAL 4k disk would be played through a PS5 or whatever. That is unless you have crazy fast broadband. And even then I'd bet it's a degraded quality compared to a lossless 4k source.
That's it for me. If I buy something now I'm looking for a DRM free version (even though are Blu Rays even DRM fee? I'm sure there's a day when the certs or licenses will expire), otherwise it's streaming services. If I never buy something from a digital store I'm not sad when it disappears.
Wait until they get downgraded to error screens because the company you bought them from went out of business, got bought by another company, pivoted to something else, forgot to renew a domain, or a thousand other things.
Don't some blu ray players try to connect to the internet whenever you watch a disc? I think my PS3 used to do that.
Not sure about other blu ray players but I imagine those are the most common ones.
There are several more cases of books being remotely disabled and I see this being used for censorship before long.
...Noted
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/presenting-shoetool-happ...
It pains me because he's just so utterly correct on the things he writes and wrote about.
> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Shoutouts to the UEFI secure boot fiasco.
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I’ll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
- Ubik, Philip K Dick, 1969
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...
In fact [blank] is a fantastic writing prompt for a dystopian novel, seems like a fun little game to play with friends.
Weird to think a book burning could happen right under our noses (literally!) without us even realizing.
Oh and it is already happening with adverts in some streaming movies.
From [Libertarian Police Department](https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...)
Little did we know that they'd just use the same game over and over for years. Look at GTA 5.
I haven't been able to play those discs since 2008, when the license servers went offline.
Well, depends on how you look at it and how comfortable you are forgetting about how it looked before you could buy online.
I pay for convenience which is a service rather than tangible good.
If I need a book for my research, I would prefer to have access to it immediately rather than wait two weeks to get it from overseas. My time is valuable and the pause on the project or inconvenience of not having the book for a week or two cost me much more than price of the book.
If I want to watch a movie with my kids I am fine renting the movie for the price of the DVD even if I know I could be watching the DVD multiple times. Most times we do not re-watch movies anyway and it is worth to me to be able to do something with my kids on a whim rather than have to plan it.
If I pay for Spotify I understand I don't own all those titles. But, for a price of half a CD per month I get access to as many titles as I can listen to. This lets me discover new music on a whim. Something, that was not possible when I was buying physical CDs in a music store. Also I paid A LOT more for CDs than I pay currently for access to much more music.
But I agree things should be called properly without creating false impression that you own something rather than pay for a time-limited service.
But if we look at the popularity of streaming services today versus owning even DRM-free music, that would seem to support the convenience theory. (It hasn't taken off for books to the same degree but I'd guess that's in part because the vast majority of people just don't consume enough to make an all you can eat offering work.)
As perhaps both cause and effect, there's probably also something of a generational shift in which ownership of stuff you can put your hands on may just not be as appealing to many younger people, especially if they're urban dwellers without a lot of space.
Really? I have tons of music ripped from CDs on my iPhone and I can trivially play that in my car. I have CD players in my car (which I never use) and attached to my stereo (which I rarely use). It's not that the ability to play CDs (or rip them and play them) has been diminished but a lot of people prefer to just use a streaming service.
I'll grant that many people don't have a CD player even on their computer any longer but you can buy one for not much money online and have it in a couple days if you want one.
Are you suggesting that it's a simple and convenient thing to do for the public?
Automakers didn’t remove CD players despite people wanting them. They did it because enough customers were not willing to pay a premium to have the CD player. I would rather have a larger screen for CarPlay, and I’m betting most people who use streaming apps/MP3s would too.
CarPlay and touch screens generally are one of the worst 'innovations' that have happened in cars in recent decades, as far as road safety goes.
In the past, I would have a CD that had 5-10 albums on it, and could easily flip between them without taking my eyes off the road. I could glance up at the sleeve on my sun shade to find a different CD to switch to, and easily switch the CDs around and navigate the rest of the process by feel alone.
Now I have to pull over to change albums in a reliable (siri is unreliable and doesn't work with all apps) and safe manner.
It's an improvement as far as how much total music I have access to on any given journey. Does that convenience justify even one additional life lost as a result of a distracted driver? As a society, we have very loudly screamed ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY, which, like GP notes, is a real fucking shame.
Shoot, almost ten years ago I ripped my dad's CDs and put them all on a SanDisk mp3 player. He's almost certainly just using it as is.. I'd have to ask, but his music taste has been set for thirty years; he doesn't need to put anything new on it, ever.
All he needs to know how to do is unplug it from the stereo and plug it into the jack in the car.
What's hard here?
Hmmm...
looks at old laptop
Hmmm...
looks at ipad, iphone
Hmm...Oh, I know!
looks at gaming PC
Nope. I don't have a disk drive on a computer and haven't for several years now. Sure, I could get one, but optical drives have been optional equipment for a while now.
As another commenter said [0], you can buy and own media without ever touching a physical medium or waiting for the post service to deliver it.
I seem to remember at one point Apple was offering DRM-free music. This is pretty convenient for everybody. Yes, you have to buy it ahead of time and store it, as opposed to just streaming right away.
But it does seem quite easy to me. Go to the iTunes store, click buy, done. It may even sync automatically to your iPhone, so you can play it in your car, just as you would Spotify.
---
Amazon's MP3 download store is DRM-free, but also, Amazon has an "Auto-Rip" feature that means often when you buy the physical music CD, they immediately give you the ability to download the MP3s for free. You get the real purchase of physical media, and the convenience of instant access.
In that way, Amazon Video is one of the most convenient platforms as it has more content than many other platforms, though you may need to pay a rental fee.
When it comes to convenience, for me unified access to the most content trumps most other issues.
And I think this is an incredible example of value that can be added to television. During an event you can watch live video footage from the main feed, any of the 20 cars on the track, or the pit straights. You can listen to team radios, commentary, or just engine audio.
What do you do when the show you want to watch is not on there? What do you do when it's a Hulu Exclusive? Or a Netflix show?
You know what I do? Search for 'movie/show name' + 'torrent' and I pull down the rip at 10MB/sec, and have it in a few minutes. Faster than signing up for another service, installing the app on all of my devices, connecting that app up to my account, adding my credit card, then paying for it. Then having to discontinue that subscription later when I decide there's nothing else on that service I want to watch. Then you realize, you paid for 1 month of service, just to watch one show... ridiculous.
Streaming is only convenient when you are already subscribed to the service. Otherwise piracy is much easier. Plus I don't get my fucking videos downsampled to 720p because I choose to watch in a web browser on a Linux box.
I like to be able to use my laptop to locate content and then watch it on a television. So my habits mostly include YouTube or TPB. With youtube I can queue a number of items into a playlist. For TPB, I just press the magnet and it appears on my television a short while later.
I mean I intend to continue paying for these services since I like the offerings. I just don't like using them. They're all ugly and annoying, and they each have their quirks I need to learn. Discovery sucks and searching is always slow and painful. I just don't care to deal with it.
Plus, every time someone mentions a show you have to have this extra little conversation about what streaming service it's available on. It's annoying and I really don't want to care.
But if you start by opening a streaming service and browse from there I don’t really think there’s any contest between the high-quality exploration and experience of eg Netflix vs the glorified spreadsheet browsing that is TPB and all the gotchas that go along with downloading random torrents...
The topic here is DRM vs non-DRM'd media. It's orthogonal to the topic of physicality: you can have DRM'd physical media (think Google Nest) and you can have non-DRM'd digital media.
Switching back to the convenience of using digital instead of physical is a disservice to the discussion because it switches the focus on something that is totally unrelated and makes people believe that those who prefer non-DRM'd media are somehow reluctant to adopting streaming platform. I definitely see the convenience of it: I barely have any music files on my computer, I stream it all from Youtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp. And like you I have spent MUCH more money on artists now that I can stream them than when I bought CDs. But when I want to get the files for offline use I know I'm in good hands because those platforms allow me to do it and have files I can use forever without ever reconnecting to the mothership.
So, to come back the initial point: yes we got scammed, because we didn't read the fine print. We didn't understand that DRM'd media is never bought, it's always rented. We switched from buy-it-for-life to subscribe-until-the-platform-dies
If you include modern piracy in with "digital", sure. If you only include legal offerings, absolutely not.
Even DRM'd physical media that doesn't use the network in any way to authenticate is way better than DRM'd digital media, which you can never truly own, and which exists at the folly of the service operator.
You're back to conflating the two.
I have plenty of ebooks from Baen and Tor, and plenty of music I've bought from a variety of places, all in digital format, all without any DRM. It's not the "digital" part that's bad, it's the DRM part.
Alan may want convenience of streaming a large library for a low price.
Barbara may want the conveniece of having physical media she can bring on her travels and play without an internet connection, or the ability to play it 20 years from now and give to her kids.
That is all fine, they are two different things
The scam is selling the rental of transient streaming service rental as if it had the attributes of buying physical media.
Apple and others are exploiting the familiarity and positive connotations of "buying a movie/album" to sell something that clearly lacks the same attributes. It is a linguistic sleight-of-hand, and it is a scam.
Did you really need to reiterate yourself three times? Are you even really trying to participate in the conversation here are you trying to derail?
We have been seduced into selling our rights down the river because we will sacrifice anything to this most pathetic of gods, Convenience.
I have been fighting in this war (anti-DRM/copyleft/etc) for decades, and peoples' susceptibility to convenience has always effectively thwarted any kind of counter argument.
We are fucking lazy and we should be ashamed of it.
Yes I am bitter, we could have had a world of power, control, and ownership at our fingers... a cornucopia of content on our terms... computers that well and truly serve us and not some wanterpreneurial, rent-seeking master... but it wouldn't have been as convenient.
And now zoomers, seduced by corporate sponsorships and the cozy fiefdoms of communities like YouTube or TikTok, have almost no concept of files or their utility, of the value of owning something detached from a profiteering cloud. They have no problem enriching those who seek to exploit them.
It is all complete, utter horseshit. We fought for a better world that nobody wanted because it wasn't as convenient
You’re blaming gen z for the world they were raised in? The oldest “zoomers” are about 25. You think they ran these companies for the last 20 years and made the decisions that got us here?
They have no problem enriching those who seek to exploit them because there is no other choice. Nobody actually wants this.
I read it as complaining that the work done defending the concept of digital ownership and absolute control of one's own digital space was for nought. The people coming of age in today's digital landscape were basically raised as prisoners inside of the rent/data-extracting walled gardens we have today.
Now it's easy gained, easy lost and so people don't care.
You are not being lied to in the subscription model but it seems the digital buying isn't quite honest.
Pretty inconvenient.
If we live in a world without physical media, some things will simply disappear forever.
I would have convenience (more convenience than I have now, I argue). They could still have a cloud offering that only lasts as long as they feel like it.
That would be enough to make this lawsuit go away. So, no, it isn't that we are now buying convenience so we must bend our backs to their spying and control. We had both freedom and control in the digital music ecosystem for more than ten years.
Piracy is often more convenient than going through the hurdles of a legal purchase.
A fraudulent contract is not a contract.
About a year ago, Amazon changed the verbiage on the ui from "you own this movie" to "you purchased this movie". That was my clue and trigger to change.
There have been at various times scripts found on GitHub, BitBucket and the rest that will convert the files to MP3, effectively breaking out of the DRM, but this has been hit or miss in my experience.
My pipe dream for all of these services is still a buyout clause which would provide you with the unprotected files for a fee, but with the rise in popularity of streaming services, legally and financially, there doesn't seem to be much will to help a shrinking segment of the customer base with a niche concern.
How much to charge for this would be a terrible debate, as trying to do it "at cost" per purchase - presumably the company's preference - would be heinously expensive.
Not everyone got scammed. I've exclusively purchased physical media or 'acquired' it in DRM-free ways. Piracy is one option yes, but things like GOG are a legal and DRM-free way to get media, which is why I actually buy from them. I only buy digital if I don't care about losing the media, like a movie I just want to watch at a friends place that's not available on a streaming service.
Never understood why people didn't see this earlier. Thankfully many things are available digitally thanks to the work of digital archivists (aka data hoarders) who make an effort to keep media alive
For what little it is worth, Sony has postponed shutting down the PS3 and PS Vita stores after backlash. The PSP store will still be shutting down this summer. Your point still stands regardless
Until such time, I have enough other stuff going on in my life that I don't particularly have the time to search for DRM-free media in my purchasing, organize and curate the collection, and so on.
Imagine if every browser had UI->API connection to popular hostings (or a local pc) and could allow users (and businesses) to exchange files, documents, messages, media, etc, and also had established UIs for all of that. All these instagrams, facebooks, google services, dropboxes simply exploited OS shortcomings and stupid complexity of its operation. If a user could just tap to publish a photo, they wouldn’t need a platform/service and a separate app for that. If a user could bypass NAT, they wouldn’t need remote help services. IIRC, the top comment on Dropbox was along the lines of “will not fly, everyone can rsync/email their files for free”. Turned out nobody can. We still use corporate services to send files across the same room, because even simple file sharing still doesn’t fucking work, not to mention media-exchange/play and UIs for that. It’s not “Most users don’t have any clue ...”, it’s “All users don’t ...”.
They figured out how to care for records, cassettes, and videotapes. They just need an incentive to learn.
This is what happens when a technology enters the mainstream.
Average people don't care about the same things that tech-people care about.
See eternal September as another example.
Eventually the market always serves the "average" client best, and the more demanding people (which are usually the early adopters of a technology) aren't served so well.
Yes, but it matters less than we think, since it mostly affects entertainment consumption. In fact, I'd argue that the amount people get burned for using DRM content is precisely enough to keep physical media alive and well for along time; and insofar as DRM enables the production of more stuff, and the inevitability that the popular stuff will "escape" thanks to piracy, that's its not that big of a deal.
That said, the issues of DRM are far more vital for creator applications! When you've coupled your ability to write, communicate and earn a living to any privately controlled service that is hard to replace (and that is the very definition of the Google vs. Apple software ecosystem, to take the most important example) then you've lost something far more profound, and when things go sideways (losing your Google account, say) you won't be prepared. It is scary that so many public services require access to a smartphone, when "having a smartphone" is itself not a public service. (And no, library computers don't count. You can't install and use an app in the library computer browser.)
Quick note, smart TVs when using the smart features capture this information and send it to the manufacturer or their partner. The manufacturers often sell it. It subsidizes the cost of the TV.
Using physical media does not mean your viewing isn't being monitored.
Is there a digital book seller that doesn't use DRM?
If you mean books, then yes.
If you mean DVDs, then no - many TVs will report what you are watching back to the manufacturer.
Of course, those kinds of "we're keeping the servers up after the store is closed" situations are necessarily limited so it's just a matter of time. As you say, once the calculus of remaining users and the reputational damage of shutting down gets small enough then it'll happen.
On the other hand, Playstation has a worse set of problems going on: systems apparently need to phone home if their CMOS battery dies or is replaced, and if those servers aren't around anymore or you have no internet, even physical copies don't play. (As far as I know this is just about resetting the clock but it's still a network dependency.)
Correct, at least for now. You haven't actually been able to buy anything since 2019.
In my opinion, this was reason enough to find a complete archive of all the Wii Shop files and just go through the library to find the gems. It might be technically illegal, but the only legal process of obtaining any of these games is finding a Wii that happened to have a particular game already installed on it.
Instead of wasting money and acquiring dozens of otherwise-identical consoles, I opt for the preservation (formerly piracy) route.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2021/04/20/sony-isnt-c...
I agree that there's been some highly questionable shutdowns of DRM and content servers by a few major companies, later disabling things that they claimed customers were buying.
It seems we're lacking sufficient regulatory/judicial disincentives for companies to hoover up much of the market for selling content products, then fly-by-night shutdown of the DRM and content servers that they'd intentionally made part of the products.
If that means they are protected from legal recourse for obtaining a single pirated copy, that works.
Else, they have to do the work to distribute DRM free copies until every user has one, since they changed the terms of ownership.
Much of it was due to improper storage, but that's where the very real value of not having something physical or on site comes from.
When I get a choice between cloud and physical, I now always buy cloud from the largest, stable, cloud distributors (Amazon or Apple, never Google or Microsoft). I will pay more if needed. It's a valuable service to me to not have to babysit a movie/book/photo. I've personally never lost anything to DRM, but I've lost dozens of physical media, over the years, for one reason or another.
Freedom is great, but the freedom of not having to lug things around with me is the freedom I would rather pay for. But I'm the type of person that gets terrified when I see someone's DVD /Blueray collection that covers a wall, "I hope you have homeowners insurance".
I encourage anyone with physical media to make digital backups right away in case the media becomes unreadable down the road.
Then the original media, readable or not, is just a physical license certificate that sits on a shelf.
In the case of blu-rays or DVDs be sure you rip them by simply doing analog MITM recording in a custom LCD controller just after the DRM decryption is done so you don't break DRM circumvention laws.
For sure avoid using any of the really good open source tools that can get you identical copies in a shorter period of time. That would be illegal.
The other day I saw a dusty copy of Tabula Rasa on the shelf at Walmart. That game shut down twelve years ago.
I would like to have a complete set of the FLAC files for the hundreds of CDs I have in your warehouse, and my original disks back.
At that point I would gladly start shipping new batches of disks to be ripped to continue building my legal FLAC collection.
Weasel-worded legal arguments like this is why I don't use Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube Premium or anything where the final product is not a DRM-free file sitting on my hard drive.
As much as Blockbuster is considered a dinosaur, you could buy and sell used games and movies there. If you bought something, it was yours. There was no retroactive disappearance because Blockbuster no longer had the rights for that movie or TV show.
So not really sure why you're conflating this story with those? Or why you think files for a subscription service shouldn't be DRM'ed? I mean, if you keep the files after your subscription ends, that's obviously not a subscription anymore.
So now there is a whole variety of movies/shows you just can't buy ( unless they have a physical release). This is especially problematic for older shows, which don't have physical copies at all. For example, I've recently been trying to purchase Yes Minister (a BBC show from the 80s) and it's only available in locked down online streaming places like Youtube and Apple TV
side-note: I'm so happy to have found a reason to talk about the series. So many scenes are stuck in my head and come to mind when reminded about world affairs constantly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4 this one for example with Russia and Crimea (just an example off the top of my head)
My perspective is really simple: If I buy something then its mine. If I lease something then its temporary. Buying a lease is actually just leasing.
Digital assets are more often just fancy lease agreements. At best you get to keep access to what you paid for when you stop paying. At worst its literally just a lease. The real kicker is you often can't simply format shift without consequences, because it was just a lease only on that platform and the terms are: Pay for access; Stop paying and you're out. Want it somewhere else? No can do.
I wonder if I could bequeath my Apple Music collection? Probably not. That's the big reveal right there. Its not actually ever yours. Never was.
Apple Music is somewhat better than a long term lease. Last time I looked you could write the MP3s to a CD. Not sure if that's still true.
Contrast this with Spotify: pure subscription. Good luck looking for a "Write to CD" option. That's completely out of scope. And no one is surprised. At least its clearly spelt out. But still a lease. You're only buying access.
I use it the way I used to use radio and record shops. I’m in my 40s so I grew up at a time where this was common. Record shops were on the high streets in most towns in the UK through the 80s and 90s. In my teens I started to dig deeper, into niche, side street record shops for off-mainstream music. These days, it seems all record shops are on side streets.
Format shifting isn't always legal. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-q...
There's probably a bunch of caveats why even this isn't allowed for whatever "reasons".
Buying a blu-ray is even more of a gray area with the key schemes being fundamentally more complex and internet-updatable. It's possible the blu-ray you bought and watched last year may not work on your player anymore.
I agree that it's wrong to say you're "buying" movies from iTunes/et al, but, I'm not sure what the correct term is. Renting is wrong as it implies a definite intentional time-limited period, license seems wrong as it's too legal/contractual. What's the better word?
Controversial take, but does "buying" explicitly mean owning? You never really "own" a movie you buy on blu-ray either—you own the atoms, but not the content which is merely licensed to you as it is with a legal download. The difference between downloads and physical media is actually less characterised by ownership and more by perpetuity of access.
The key benefit of blu-ray is that perpetual, legal access is limited only by your preparedness to maintain functioning equipment.
A legally downloaded, encrypted movie file also relies on your preparedness to maintain functioning equipment—but that equipment can also betray you.
On the contrary, you can buy a replacement bluray player.
> "Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely," writes [U.S. District Court Judge] Mendez. "But in common usage, the term 'buy' means to acquire possession over something. It seems plausible, at least at the motion to dismiss stage, that reasonable consumers would expect their access couldn’t be revoked."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/apple-must-face-la...
Even though you 'own' the DVD you still don't get to do what you want with it - you can't do public screenings in the UK for example without further permission.
And even though you 'own' the DVD might not even be able to copy the data to your own laptop for personal backup, again depending on jurisdiction.
I can’t imagine someone really sat down and decided the messaging made sense for free apps.
When it comes to Apple specifically, they really need to let iOS users know that they need to back up DRMed movies, shows, and books. I know some iOS-only users who are under the impression that they will forever be able to redownload these items. In reality, there is no of guarantee of that, as Apple may might not hold distribution rights at some point in the future.
Are you saying you haven't had any issues with HDCP?
The hardest part is wading through the comments to see if the device will bypass HDCP. This is also a very good way to watch HDCP content on older HDTV's that don't have HDCP implemented.
https://www.amazon.com/hdmi-splitter-hdcp-bypass/s?k=hdmi+sp...
There are even more on aliexpress.
I perfectly understand the implicit meaning of "buying" and what I get is a non-transferable license to access the movie from my account.
The same problem exists with video-games. It is much closer to a rental than ownership.
I believe that all these licenses should become transferable instead of locked to a specific account. I could somewhat agree to paying a small fee to achieve this, even though I believe it should be free. The technology to achieve this also exist (blockchain), so the only thing stopping big-media from doing this is greed.
The less tangible a good is, the more difficult it is to tell who owns it. People do like streaming services, but Apple has to keep the service running, right? There is a non-zero cost to Apple continuing to service relationships with studios and with customers, and they can't really say "this thing in your Apple account will, necessarily, live forever". I think Apple is the most likely company to make good on this sort of promise; in spite of the way they deprecate APIs (which I actually appreciate), they have an immaculate track record of supporting their services and devices.
If you buy a DRM-free movie or rip a physical copy, you're getting closer to owning the bits and bytes themselves, but still, really, you own the right to watch the movie in a non-commercial setting, and you now have to figure out how to make it available on your devices.
How long am I obligated to continue supporting software I've "let go" to the folks that contracted me? When will my car stop receiving kernel updates? To me, this is a more difficult issue than whether you have to re-purchase (or pirate) games and movies that you already bought.
I've been wondering about Google's practices too:
Google:
• sells movies
• do not allow transfer of movie ownership to a different email account
• expires accounts after 2 years of inactivity
https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1335262751992602630
You could also argue that if Apple/Google actually bought the right from the studio on your behalf, you should be able to stream movies you already own, because you bought the DVDs years ago, for a much smaller fee.
I have bought many movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. I did so knowing that it was not a true purchase in the sense of buying a DVD, or a videotape, or a book, or even in the sense of buying music from the iTunes store (which has been DRM-free since 2009). But I did it anyway, because the transaction still offered a net positive value for me:
- Very long term (but clearly not perpetual) rights to watch the thing; - Very high convenience (easily available on my Apple devices without dealing with files or sync); - Very much easier/simpler than resorting to, shall we say, nontraditional means of media procurement.
But, again, we knew what was happening. Apple could turn heel and invalidate these purchases on their whim, or the whim of the rightsholder. I still made the deal, and still feel fine about it, because I knew that going in. Normal humans tend not to understand this.
(We also have a very minimal cable package. We did the math and realized that it was cheaper to, say, buy season passes of the mid-tier cable shows we wanted to see than it was to pay for the channels in question. If you watch a LOT of those shows, this math doesn't work, but for us and things like Mad Men, it definitely did. Our cable bill is $50 a month lower than it would be if we had those channels, so we could absolutely justify "buying" the show on iTunes -- even if we had no plans to watch it more than once.)
I’m not sure that’s how I want to live. I mean, it’s convenient having access. But now that I have had access, it’s clear that I actually still have to shop around on the services, and so I might maybe just as well buy what I want instead of buying all of something for a period, and lose any trace of it after.
I think I prefer buying.
'Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely'
The world has definitely shifted from buying individual movies, songs/albums, video games and owning them in a more direct sense of having an actual physical object i.e. a disc. There are definitely still some limitations to this, its still a limited license, but compared to purchasing DRM-filled digital access, we've definitely gone even further into more restrictive access.
That is why I think that supporting DRM-free stores (e.g. GOG, Bandcamp) is important as well as buying physical media still (I still personally buy music CDs and Vinyl from time-to-time, however try to buy a game physically and all you will get is a plastic disc with a Steam code on it), and sometimes there is no way legitimate way to purchase some media, with piracy being essentially the only option.
Unfortunately Steam has become quite ubiqitous and like most have fallen into the licensing game rabbithole (One the games I bought many years ago required installing Steam to 'function'), but with video games there's not much else to pick from, apart from whatever GOG has or some other companies crappier version of Steam (e.g. Origin, Epic Games Store). I'd like this to change but I don't think it will anytime soon.
I would be fine purchasing digital copies of content knowing the limited-time aspect, given the pricing would be (significantly) cheaper. But it isn't, and that's a problem.
I never did get it resolved, just ended up eating the loss and moved to a cable/docsis type provider. All I can do now is just treat movie purchases as something less than that. Long-term rentals with some chance that it gets revoked.
Bandcamp handles this exceptionally well, you can download anything you buy (even as Flac!) and for anything else, it's back to buying/checking-out CDs and ripping them old-school style.
When you buy an iPhone through Apple, you don't actually own it. And that's a problem.
You can pretty much replace iPhone and Apple with any other modern tech with software though. Increasingly I am having an uneasy relationship with these modern tech. I want old tech that just shut up and work.
If you buy the DVD, you get a little code to enter in the Movies Anywhere site/app. Once you do that (and connect your account to Apple, Google, etc.) then you can access the movie you purchased anywhere.
I've done this a few times - I buy the DVD but never actually watch it. Instead I have it registered with Google Play and watch it that way because it's just more convenient with my TV.
KEY - NOT ALL CONTENT is available this way. But enough is to make it a pretty nice experience. (Movies Anywhere is owned by Disney)
If I do not "own" the digital goods are paid for, then make them change from "Buy" to "Rent for 10 years", and let's seem them then explain that to elderly parents.
That would be interesting to watch.
It's only a slightly shadier practice than Spotify, but with Spotify there's no implication of owning anything, just accessing it and caching it, but Spotify (and Netflix) are great examples of how your favourite movies can go missing on a weekly basis.
You'll still need to respond to their notice if they send it, and possibly defend yourself in court. Even if you succeed, it can be a big burden.
When it's digital, you're only buying the right to watch something, not to own your copy.
When it's physical, you're only buying your copy, not the right to watch it indefinitely.
The odds are always slanted to favor Hollywood: they get to make you pay to watch the same title every time the viewing technology changes (VHS -> DVD -> digital), but also use the specter of piracy to curtail your rights with what you did buy.
And this is why piracy is, and will, always continue. I legally buy movies and then have to deal with DRM and other nasty, annoying things that only affect paying customers! People who pirate have no such limitations to deal with.
Result is quite different from a 'license' to 'stream' since 1984. Solar flare, no worries. House fire, HD backup. Big Tech dies, network gone, meh. Got my tunes.
This is news to me. I thought the main advantage of iTunes compared to other services was that purchases would last as long as the iTunes service is operational and that iTunes has outlived “purchase with DRM” services so far. Are there concrete examples?
As a consumer of content, I like purchasing books that are (sometimes watermarked) PDFs or ePub. When that is not possible, I do buy DRM books, but split my purchases between Apple, Amazon, and Google.
My wife and I have no network TV but we are happy to support content creation by paying subscriptions to Netflix, HBO, Prime, and Hulu. I could care less about owning “forever copies” of entertainment. I do want to support the industry financially.
For music, streaming services like YouTube Music and Apple Music are great for discovery, but when I find a song that I really love, I don’t mind spending $1 per song if I can get it DRM free on Amazon.
Seems a rather safe bet Apple will be here after I die.
I was fooled to buy drm media, but I don’t see the harm, yet.