Stolen by Amazon. They have no incentive to get it back. Amazon hopes that you purchase it again.
Call the consumer protection services. Big tech companies are not the law, they cannot steal things from you. Even if you committed fraud in one transaction, they cannot take away your property. (Amazon will call it 'service', but accessing your property is not a service)
They are not the only company doing this in some ways. ISP's who provide a set top box for watching TV and downloading/streaming service to tv, do the same thing when you change you ISP. Its a form of lock in because whilst you can still get access to the purchased films, you have to jump through more hoops. Its all legal but I question the morality of it, when considering online piracy via torrent streams and then the "hacking" that companies have used to trace and prosecute the worst.
But I've learnt enough to know that everyone has their questionable practices to maximise profits/income, the lucky ones are the one's who would also be the expert witnesses in court or have been able to fly entirely the right side of the law.
At Comcast/Xfinity when you cancel all services your account still remains, and you can stream your purchased content the web or through their mobile streaming app when signed in on your account.
The only real answer is to minimize our footprints in these closed places.
My current phone runs Lineage without a hint of Google. I keep an old Samsung for gmail and other services, but the death of "don't be evil" has meant the death of Google on my phone. They will never be back.
I have seen several people who sold on Amazon lose their accounts. I am not sure what provoked it, but the exchange is certainly not in favor of the smaller party.
And we all know what Ebay did.
I can't really say that any one abusive company's behavior is any worse. They are all tyrants with their "star chambers" and sundry courts of inquiry, and the less authority that you give them over you, the better your position will be.
We left this legal thinking behind long ago, but Apple (among others) has brought it back.
There is some part of me that increasingly hate Silicon Valley.
To clarify for others: parent is not talking about subscriptions.
When you "buy" content on these platforms, they are not actually yours to take away for ever like a physical book. The software you consume them on e.g a Kindle or iTunes, is actually capable of remotely deleting "your" content at any time, and they are supposedly within their legal right to do so.
They have essentially hijacked the word "buy", it does not implicitly mean what it used to mean, you cannot really buy a copy of a piece of music or a book or a film from any of these large platforms today without removing the DRM and making a local copy (which is technically illegal).
Recently she tried to watch it and Amazon just had "you can't access this content." Maybe Amazon didn't renew the license with publisher, maybe not, but in any case, Amazon really proved to me that no, we do not own digital content.
So, I pirated it for her. If doing things the "right/legal way" is going to screw us over because of fine print, then why bother?
Amazon does not make laws. If a thieve steals your car that does not prove that you don't own the car. The car ownership is still yours, but it has been stolen.
Would you download a car? advertisement has gone all the way around and now big companies are just stealing our property.
I went ahead and torrented the episode the next day to rewatch it in all of its intended glory. Then a few days later, I got a letter from my ISP telling me that HBO was very upset with me and threatening to cut off my service. I felt compelled to send them a reply, explaining the situation and telling them to eat it.
Yes.
Part of me thinks that was the reason why Steve Jobs hated Music Subscription. He said "no" to Beats many times before his death. And why Apple ( at the time ) worked really hard to get rid of DRM in movies ( but failed ). And iTunes Music is DRM free. May be it is time to remind our self how we got DRM free music on iTunes, with Steve's "Thoughts on Music"
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
So if you buy stuff and it's going to get taken away from you for arbitrary reasons... you might as well pirate stuff.
Same with games, if possible i buy them from HumbleBundle or GOG. And i never buy something that is bound to a platform that i really care for.
And yes i hate drm too, but since stallman is a extremist that supports un-free licenses (unlike the BSD and MIT) i will not listen to his wannabe rants, and i will never forgive him to change the GCC license to GPL3 only.
If i care for something i remove the drm, if i cant, i will stop buying it.
GPL puts the user's freedom first. Every developer is mostly a user anyway, unless you're writing absolutely everything from scratch like they do in SerenityOS. So I like that stance very much. If you don't, nobody is forcing you to interact with GPLed software in any way.
I think that's much more noble and kind. But as long as it's free software, I'll still use it and be happy it is, regardless of the license. And tbh it'd be nice if the small, loud minority of BSD lovers, GPL despisers would shut up. They give the BSD crowd a terrible look.
BS, i use FreeBSD and no one ever forced me to use Windows, Linux on the Desktop does everything right?
>GPL puts the user's freedom first.
No it's free promotion for the FSF
>scratch like they do in SerenityOS
Yes and they chose a good license (BSD2)
They deserve the promotion, because they created useful software.
> BS, i use FreeBSD and no one ever forced me to use Windows
At some point, Windows was everywhere, you couldn't hide from it. Now, Linux provides a strong competition, forcing even Microsoft to include it into Windows. BSD, instead, served as free labor for Apple, who created a walled garden for users.
What exactly do you want to do with the code that GPL prevents you from?
Afaik, they could in Germany. One of the most BS laws.
Terms are not law, and are most terms are illegal in europe anyway.
The only exception is content I create.
With a couple of minor exceptions that works well for me.
Historically i hoarded content and ended up with 2TB of crap I was never going to watch again. So I deleted it and now don’t have to herd hard discs.
[0] Marie Kondo would disagree
By saving stuff, you future proof the high possiblity that it becomes completely unavailable anywhere online and you have the last copy. And you can easily find it by search, I have this happen all the time. In many cases the audio cassettes that accompany an old pedagogic text have been digitized by one person who shares a zip one time and then the link dies forever. Ten years later when I finally free up time to study the material, it will be too late.
The important skill: don't download or even browse crap you certainly won't use within your lifetime. It is a time sink. Develop a strong preference for only looking for things you'll immediately begin studying or have a concrete plan to study in the coming 6mos.
It isn't always like that. If your data is on somebody else's platform (as for the author's data) your data is gone, possibly for good.
And by the way... onljne communities (and websites in general) come and go. The data you're relying upon today might not be there tomorrow (or it could get altered someway).
For some things yes, for TV shows and movies eh. For roughly the price of a year of netflix you could get a 14TB hard drive, which would hold six continuous months of high quality 1080p video. It's also really easy to keep those things sorted with negligible clutter and wasted time.
As much as this is technically true, anything not currently on your hardware can, and probably will, get snatched away from you, usually without warning, regardless of it you paid for it.
I'm sorry, this is bullshit.
I spend _less_ time if I torrent stuff.
Example: I want to watch the last season of Expanse. Ok, go to iTunes (Apple TV). Nope, not there (Australia). Hmmm, may be Netflix? Nope. I remember it was by Amazon or smth? Oh yeah, it's in Prime.
How much time did I just spend? And I also must pay for all of those?
Torrents:
- go to my favourite tracker
- search, find bunch of options from SD to HD with bunch of audio tracks and subtitles that not a single commercial pos offers
- copy magnet link
- paste in transmission UI
- done, took less than 3 minutes.
Whenever I feel like watching it, open Infuse on iPhone and watch it from my Emby.
also, for everyone: i have been looking for an easy way to allow my parents to browse torrents (via an app on their phones or tv or something), then select what they want to watch, and the movies/whatever are then downloaded on a remote pc that also hosts a plex server. they could watch whatever on plex in minutes, ideally. is there something that sreamlines this kind of thing?
I have a little dashboard just providing quick links to sonarr/radarr that people can go to.
In radarr/sonarr they can search for movies and tv shows, add it to the application and it auto searches for the best download option through jackett and adds it to deluge
unpackrr will auto unpack it if it needs it
radarr/sonarr will automatically pick up the completed download and move it into the correct media directory
jellyfin/plex/whatever will pick it up and show it
everything is pretty easy to setup, i probably got it all running in 3 or 4 hours tops probably two years ago and honestly haven't touched it since.
Torrenting isn’t hard but these days neither is streaming.
Then you find something is only available in x265 so you have to transcode it yourself so it’ll play on the kids 5 year old Samsung TV. Oh and that only supports certain very fussy audio streams.
Just no. I’m on the mark. I’ve been doing this shit for a decade and I’m tired and fed up with it. I pay ~£35 a month for all my services and that’s a bargain. It’s literally fuck all money to make the problems go away.
And I bet that you can find anything you could ever want on nyaa. If an anime/manga exists, it almost certainly is on nyaa, unless it is highly obscure in which case it may not even be there on paid streams.
I want big corporations to abide to the law. To pirate is a patch that does not solve the problem. Let's fix that corporations do whatever they want with your digital property.
I want to buy digital movies, games, music, ... without being at the mercy of some algorithm that can automatically steal what is mine.
I suspect it will be similar with all other consumer oriented content distribution services.
It's roundabout, but at least for audiobooks there is a way to own what you want to listen to and still support the creators.
Digital content is not forever. If I can't purchase it and download it to my local hard drive, I'm not purchasing it.
Reminds me of those old anti piracy PSAs: "you wouldn't download a car." (note: yes, yes I would if I could).
But if the new car-buying process was "pay $20k for this Honda Civic, but just know that we are just allowing you to drive it, we can take it away from you at any time" you can be sure that either no one will ever buy cars again, or they'd just "steal" them.
If compliance is too hard or too inconvenient or just plain stupid or malicious, then people won't comply. Easy as that.
GOG for buying stuff DRM free, and Game Pass for renting it cheaply if you don't care to own it
On the other hand, many games (by number at least) on Steam do not have any DRM and you can back up the installed files as easily as you can back up a GOG installer. Many more games only need Steamworks which is easily bypassed.
Meanwhile Valve is actively working on making Linux gaming better (which I care about) while GOG/CDPR can't even be bothered to port their own games or their store client.
Generally this has only happened with games that are no longer developed, but if they got yanked for any other reason I believe Valve wouldn't distribute any new patches to me.