Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

My Mormon neighbors tend to use VidAngel, which got in huge trouble with an absolutely hilarious payment model.

1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse

2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity

3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)

4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.

So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.

And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.

View on HN

Leaving aside the matter of Mormons and their weird puritan sensibilities, what this company essentially did was reinvent movie rental, but because they did it on the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop we're all expected to think it obvious and self evidence that what they did was horrible.

In other contexts on sites like this, "do [common thing] but on a computer" patents get mocked and derided because "but on a computer" is seen as a farce, not a fundamental difference from the [common thing].

Anyway, I guess the mormons could get around this and achieve their desired effect by instead selling DVD players with a subscription to a service that distributes EDL files; instructions to the DVD player about which parts of movies should be skipped.

Even during the video rental days you weren't allowed to just go out and purchase a bunch of videos at Walmart and start renting them out, you need to have purchased the rights to rent out the video.

Why would you say this? It is the opposite of the truth; the first-sale doctrine prevents the copyright owner from interfering with you while you rent out your cassettes.

You need to purchase rights to display the video in public. No one can stop you from renting out the tape. You already possess the right to rent out your own property.

As far as I'm aware, this is not true. The first-sale doctrine allowed the rental of VHS and video games bought normally at retail stores. The movie and video game industry went ballistic over this, a Nintendo executive called it "commercial rape". The movie industry took it to court and lost, and tried lobbying congress to no avail.

IIRC, they then hatched a scheme where the retail availability of new movies on VHS would be restricted at least for a time, forcing video rental shops to pay more for copies of popular new movies.

Yes, you absolutely could do that legally - it is part of the "right of first sale", however you would have to wait until the videos were available for sale at Walmart. If a video rental store wanted to have access to videos before they were available for home purchase (and most of them did) then they had to make deals with the rights holders and follow the contracts that went along with them.

You are completely wrong. There's no such thing as "right to rent video." You could 100% buy a bunch of videos and start renting them out today, and it would be completely legal. Netflix does this today for their DVD rental business. This is also why libraries are legal.

You can't buy a DVD and charge tickets to see the DVD played by you. You can't stream the DVD's contents over the Internet. But you can absolutely rent the DVD itself.

The problem isn't that you can't stream the contents to other people. The current legal situation also roughly states that a viewer is allowed to stream the contents of copies they own, but you can't help them. (See also Aereo, where all data was permanently owned by a single user, no resale shenanigans whatsoever.) The law shouldn't work like that. Users should be able to outsource without causing a violation of copyright law.

In the current age of gigabit FTTH connections, I wonder how the situation would be if the service provider would just allow you to rent a dvd drive in a datacenter that's connected via regular sata, just tunneled through the internet.

That'd avoid all the "breaking the DRM", "modifying the data", etc.

As provider you just offer a device that loads dvds from a user's in-datacenter storage cabinet into their in-datacenter dvd drives, and rent them a dvd drive.

That might be complicated enough to avoid the whole "performance" interpretation

Another comment [0] pointed out that a version of this was already tried, and it was found to still be a public performance. Not sure how much the details of the technologies used would affect the ruling, but probably not enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645286

> Not sure how much the details of the technologies used would affect the ruling, but probably not enough

Right. Aereo notwithstanding, one way around this might be to set it up like MP3Tunes[1] where you're a specialized digital locker service. The "fixed" "tangible medium" should originate with the customer, and a transfer from the customer-controlled copy to the business should be involved (rather than the other way around). With a large enough physical presence, you could get this down to pizza delivery time frames and/or Redbox levels of friction.

1. contrast with mp3.com

That's just Aereo again.

When publishing an ebook, you set a different price (usually a multiple) for libraries.

> There's no such thing as "right to rent video."

There is, strictly speaking—it's part of the exclusive rights that Title 17 lays out for copyright owners[1]. It's just that (a) it forces you to be in the business of doing the rentals yourself (you don't get to just point at someone with an interest doing rentals and dictate terms to them, sans contract), and (b) even if you're doing your own rentals, if you're also selling copies, then there's nothing stopping someone from doing an end-run around your rental business by just buying a copy from you and doing things their way with that copy.

(Granted, this doesn't make the person you were replying to any more correct about what they meant when they said you couldn't do this.)

1. "distribute copies [...] by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending"

That's exactly what companies like RedBox do/did. They would send buyers out to Walmarts and Best buys all over the country to buy up copies.

I think they eventually stopped doing it just to appease the production companies and avoid their frivolous lawsuits.

I was just going to mention RedBox!

If I remember correctly, they tried to buy from the company - Disney IIRC - but they were refused sale. Instead, they simply bought retail and rented those.

Taken to it's logical extreme though, such a service could easily render copyright effectively useless. Break the movie into 10 second clips, "rent out" each of those clips during the 10 seconds they're being viewed and automatically return them after. There, you can now "legally" stream 720 concurrent copies of a 2 hour movie at once in perpetuity for near zero marginal cost.

The only reason rentals worked was because of the physical constraints that limited the distribution of each copy. Take that away, what you're left with is just thinly veiled copyright abolishment.

So put a minimum rental time on things. Banning online rental is a bad solution.

No-one's saying that online rental should be banned.

Instead, the solution that the USA's current legal system is going with is "You _can_ run an online rental service, as long as you have the copyright owner's permission (e.g., you have a contract with them in which you give them money and they give you their permission)"

That's a ban on the normal mechanism via which rentals work. Sorry for shortening it. It's a bad solution.

It should require no cooperation to build an online version of DVD rental.

For better or worse, the US legal system and media publishers disagree, and they’ve established the rules that do require cooperation with the copyrights holders to build online streaming services. But as I’m sure you know, it’s at best problematic to call online streaming a “DVD rental”. It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.

I would say the law around first sale doctrine has not caught up yet more than it actively disagrees.

> It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.

I don't think transcoding should matter, at least if it's done on the fly, but also it's entirely doable to throw raw DVD bits over the wire. And neither one should count as a copy any more than shining light onto a book makes "copies".

I’m not arguing your opinion, I’m just pointing out the established precedent and law disagrees with your opinion, so it’s going to take some work if you want the outcome you’re describing. Saying it could work in theory if people just transcode on the fly and self-limit the rental rate isn’t particularly convincing, fwiw. The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places. Not that this matters, it’s splitting hairs that may not exist. The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.

> I’m not arguing your opinion, I’m just pointing out the established precedent and law disagrees with your opinion, so it’s going to take some work if you want the outcome you’re describing.

Except for all the pre-digital precedent that informs and agrees with my opinion.

> The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places.

I don't think it reaches hyperbole. The bits only need to exist in two places for milliseconds. It should not count as a copy. It's only a copy in a pedantic technical sense.

> The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.

Except they're supposed to lose a huge amount of control after the first sale. This feature of copyright is broken for digital items.

Well, shoot, maybe it’s time to write your congressperson and get copyright law changed to how you think it should be! Beware of Chesterton’s Fence though; you can claim that digital distribution is exactly the same as physical, you can claim a copy should not count as a copy and that anyone who disagrees with you is a pedant (including congress, media, and copyright law itself?), and that old laws are good enough, but there are reasons we are where we are, reasons that have been well covered, philosophized, argued about, and litigated in court. That doesn’t mean we’re done nor that everything’s right, but failure to understand those historical reasons might leave you in a position to not be able to make a compelling case. For example, copyrights holders do in fact lose a lot of control over the physical copy after first sale, the issue here is you’re trying to claim unconvincingly that a cross-over copy from physical distribution to digital distribution has no ramifications whatsoever and should be allowed without question, though you’ve made a whole series of assumptions about how it would work and what conditions it works under, arguing that it’s possible without addressing whether it’s realistic and without addressing the actual reasons we have separate standards for digital distribution today.

Ok.

I mean, Europe's already working on it. I think we'll get there eventually.

And I'm not claiming most of what you seem to think I am.

Sure, but that's an effect on tons of laws.

Sorry. Each 10 second clip is a derivative work of the whole. So you can't sub-license portions of the work without permission.

Just like you can't lend out individual chapters of a book....

> you can't lend out individual chapters of a book

You can't? If I buy a physical book, I can't rip a page out of it and sell that to you? That's certainly the first I've heard of any such law.

You can certainly rip a page out and sell it, by doctrine of first sale. Only one person can have the page at a time.

What you can’t (legally) do is copy a page of your book and sell it/give it away (though maybe one could argue that a mere page would be a small enough excerpt to fall under fair use).

VidAngel (and the hypothetical 10 second streamer) fall under the latter, since streaming inherently makes a copy. As you pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it would be perfectly legal (but completely impractical) to cut up a VHS tape into individual scenes and resell those pieces of tape, since no copy was made.

> since streaming inherently makes a copy

If we're being pedantic about a few stray electrons, you also make a copy when you stream it from the disc to your CPU, from your CPU back to a monitor, and so on. If VidAngel had a minimum "purchase" time of 1yr the case probably would have swung the other way. The issue isn't the streaming, but rather that the nature of the agreement was more akin to making a copy than not (with "sales" happening substantially faster than they would have in meat space).

You can't license out a copy of a movie in its entirety either. Renting a physical disc is different because you aren't making a copy

That's not really a "logical extreme", that's a straw man and an obvious ploy to do something you're not supposed to be able to do.

I think a reasonable person would see that what you describe is an attempt to make an end run around both the spirit and letter of the law. But what VidAngel was doing was "one copy = one view", which is IMO entirely reasonable. There is zero moral difference between mailing someone a Bluray disc (with instructions -- either automated or manual -- of what parts to skip) vs. keeping that disc in a warehouse and streaming the (censored) contents to exactly one person at a time.

Mailing the disk imposes a much longer delay between customers, so it massively reduces the amount of times it can be rented. There's the moral difference - copyright owner won't sell as many copies.

But I wonder what would happen if we had some super-fast rocket drone delivery service so it's just a video rental shop on steroids?

The difference is when mailing it, it gets worn out, so after a certain number of plays the renter needs to buy a new copy. If it's fine digitally it never gets worn out.

That doesn’t matter since you are allowed to copy your own digital media for the purpose of dealing with that exact situation. A rental shop would legally be allowed to make a backup copy of every disc they have in case it gets damaged.

Hmm, are they allowed to rent out the backup copy if the original breaks? I thought rental was based on first sale doctrine and backup copies are based on fair use. I'm not sure if you can combine the 2.

well I don't know either, but what purpose would a video rental shop have in making a backup copy in case the primary gets damaged if not to rent it out?

Well once the disk was worn out, and you had a backup, you could re-sell the backup

Of course this may be abuse of the fair use backup copy, but when talking digital, we are anyways inventing philosophies.

Other way could be the backup could be entitled to "one last rental" to recoup last 4 bucks or so. I think that would be fair use but others may not.

Hmm, actually researching this more, I don't think it's actually legal for a regular individual or corporation to make a copy of a DVD movie for backup purposes. I don't think it actually falls under fair use.

You can backup software[1][2] (allowed by law, not fair use) but not movies.

[1] https://www.southerncaliforniapatents.com/articles/2014/10/0...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Suppose the company threw out the disc and bought a new one after it was rented 50 or so times, would that be a meaningful change to the subjective moral fairness of their business model?

Also, how do you feel about libraries rebinding their books to fix/prevent the books from wearing out?

> There is zero moral difference between mailing someone a Bluray disc . . . and streaming the (censored) contents to exactly one person at a time.

Streaming is making a copy of the contents, which, if done without a license, usually violates the content owner’s copyright.

A 10 second clip of a movie that is designed to be stitched with 710 other 10 second clips isn't fair use, it's just copyright infringement.

"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:[8]

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "

We're talking about first sale doctrine here, not fair use. If I did the exact same thing with a VHS tape, cutting out 10 second strips of tape and renting them out to people, that'd be totally legal under first sale doctrine. Doing that with VHS would be totally impractical but legal. Doing it with a digital file would be totally practical but illegal, since currently first sale doctrine doesn't apply to digital distribution of copyrighted materials.

My point is just that if you think it's a good idea to extend first sale doctrine to digital files without any restrictions you may first want to consider the logical consequences of that.

> Doing it with a digital file ... digital distribution ... extend first sale doctrine to digital files

I fully understand, but there's got to be a better way to describe this line in the sand given that DVDs contain digital files. "Physical" doesn't work because networks have a physical layer. "Stream" is also problematic because bitstreams are present on any kind of media. Even "network" doesn't quite cut the mustard because a chain of video stores could be described as a trade network. "Tangible" comes damn close, but suppose the baud rate is slow enough and the voltage high enough that I can discern the download by touching the wire? What, then, is the unambiguous word for what we're talking about here?

If it really boils down to letting time elapse between views/customers, shouldn't that be what the law demands?

It boils down to how much $$$ the copyright owner makes per performance on average.

the usage being described is 1 physical copy = 1 streaming, thus if you cut it to 10 second clips only 1 particular 10 second clip could be streaming to any one customer at any time to match this model. Thus you still end up with 1 physical copy = 1 streaming. It is illegal but shouldn't be, because of first sale doctrine being a match for this use case. I can only show you the first 10 seconds of the film if nobody else is watching it.

I see that what you're saying is that User X could watch the first 10 seconds and then the second 10 seconds while you start you're first 10 seconds but that would be sort of a ridiculous use case for the following reasons:

1. your system would include a bunch of extra work for your solution to make this work, easier and cheaper to buy 10,000 copies of the movie and stream as needed.

2. people pause movies thus your solution becomes even more expensive because it would need to calculate out who has paused their ten seconds at the 5 second mark etc. etc.

Thus it seems likely that any solution being built on the model of we have physical copy we stream you copy will be built with showing complete movie and not any clever cutting up of movie to make the number of physical copies we have stretch further. The way the law works each different use case - cutting up movie, showing complete movie - would probably be challenged and there is no reason to suppose that they would all be allowed to pass, in fact since the showing complete movie was not allowed to pass in the real world it seems unlikely that the weird edge case cutting up movie would be allowed to pass even if law was changed to allow showing complete movie was changed.

This reminds me of how Aereo worked. They effectively built small little antennas that they could put in a data center. You’d then rent the antenna and stream data to your home instead of using your own antenna. This was found (Supreme Court) to be unauthorized as it was a “public performance”. This DVD streaming service would likely have fallen under the same category.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

While Aereo is certainly relevant, the 2011 "Warner Bros. Entertainment v. WTV Systems" is even more similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....

WTV ran service called "Zediva" that streamed video from physical DVD players to customers. The District Court of Central California (the same court that ruled against VidAngel) decided that this violated the performance rights of the copyright holders.

While some Mormons may have "weird puritan" values, simply wanting censorship options for some movies is something that many families would like to have, not just Mormons. And I don't think it's necessarily puritan to want to cut out that one or two scenes of a head exploding in an otherwise family friendly flick.

I'm still astounded that Enchanted (the 2007 film) prominently features a scene of the chipmunk sidekick pooping on screen.

Isn't pooping something we all do from birth? Hard to put it in the same category as fornication.

Because fornication is something we all want to do from puberty, therefore it’s a less neutral bodily function.

I actually agree, but I got the sense that the company being mormon was meant to bias the reader of that comment towards thinking that the company was in the wrong. I hoped to drive the conversation past that prejudice by conceding and dismissing it rather than pushing back against it, because I felt that on this forum pushback would likely prompt a religious flamewar rather than a discussion about digital rental.

Using EDL files to edit movies for my family is something I've actually done before. I think a superfluous sex scene is okay in most contexts, but when watching a movie with parents/grandparents it's generally too cringe for me and everybody else in the room. I used mpv's EDL functionality for this: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...

I like the reasoning given above — how you tried to short circuit the unwanted discussion.

A friend of mine used to make family friendly edits of films just for his own kids when they were little.

Sometimes I try to make family friendly versions of otherwise vulgar jokes. It’s an interesting art form. Very niche.

Your take on the setup for stereotypical situational humor about puritanical sensibilities and big expensive families invokes another stereotype about the puritanical sense of humor.

You've lost me. You'll have to tell me what you mean instead of beating around the bush.

I believe the only comment I've made about my take on humor is that anybody who laughs at TBBT must be under the influence of laughing gas. But you think this is because I have puritanical beliefs? Are you accusing me of that, or have I misread your comment? This earnestly is not clear to me.

I'm not beating around the bush.

The story is funnier because of stereotypes. That's the function mentioning the group serves. Taking a joke overly seriously and then having it explained to you is also a stereotype. It's just mildly humorous, and now it's slightly moreso.

Mormons have a well-documented refusal to assimilate while concurrently using devious and mono-social-mind power to cheat the systems they benefit from and complain about frequently. If there’s one home grown US group that embodies “have their cake and eat it too” it’s culturally ingrained in the definition of being a practicing Mormon.

Now if you object, replace the word Mormon with Skinhead regarding mentality of others not in the group, and maybe you’ll get the picture.

Source: non Mormon with about 10 years living in Zion (SLC)

I'm not a Mormon and I don't deny that I think the particulars of their belief system are often weird. But I don't think the nature of Mormons actually matters in this context, and speaking generally I don't think there is anything wrong with people choosing which media they and their families consume. If people want to fast forward over parts of a movie they don't like, I think that's understandable. And if their decision about which parts of a movie to skip is weird to me, so what?

Your just confusing the Mormons with Republicans. Both being the majority in Utah. You'll find little difference in other republican controlled states.

Skinhead? Holy. Sounds like someone is annoyed with the missionaries knocking on their door.

It all about ROI (Radio On Internet).

If you ran a movie rental shop using consumer copies of movies you bought from HMV or Target or whoever, you'd've been sued if the rights holders found out. Rental copies that came with a licence that permits renting cost several times what it cost to buy a consumer copy. And of course, when you sign a deal to get said rental copies, you probably have to agree to a bunch of conditions that probably include not doing exactly what they did.

It's pretty ridiculous that this isn't legal.

Sure, VidAngel could have built some custom software to play back a real Bluray disc, skipping certain scenes based on configuration file per title, and then would mail the disc to customers, who then have to mail it back, but that would be a worse experience for customers, and would be more wasteful (unnecessary physical shipping, as well as wear-and-tear on the discs). I guess the studios would actually see more money from this kind of scheme, since the discs would wear out and need to be replaced after a while.

But... the world we live in where this sort of thing isn't allowed... is stupid. Calling this a "performance" is just a legal gambit to unreasonably restrict what people (or companies, even) can do with things they've bought and own.

The $20 "purchase" and $19 "buy-back" is creative, but it should also be fine to just charge an all-you-can-watch subscription fee, as long as they don't allow concurrent viewing at greater than the number of Bluray discs they've purchased. "Performance", my ass. Fucking copyright cartels.

A lot of the law we take for granted about copyright is really just a complicated compromise that worked out alright given the limitations of older technology. It's not some moral ideal. What about recording a song off the radio for your personal use? Or downloading one off Youtube? Or inviting your friends round to watch a movie? Or doing that but asking them to bring food, or it's OK if they just bring money instead of food and you buy the food, or they just bring money and you don't buy food but you let them watch the movie in your house, or they can bring their own friends too, or you're a full-blown movie theatre? There are no clear-cut boundaries of "stupid" and "own", just a complicated balance to keep things working well, we hope.

It was a compromise back when we had 28-year copyright terms. It has been chipped away almost entirely from one side.

This reminds me of Aereo. They provided each user with their own individual TV antenna, DVR and streaming server. Their case went to the Supreme Court but they ultimately lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

Part of me still thinks Aereo wasn't honest with their technology. They showed off massive boards full of miniature UHF antennae, but a tuner/encoder is more than that. They never showed that part.

It doesn't matter. The Supreme Court's logic was "sure, every individual part of this is completely legal, but if you consider it as a black box, it feels like a different thing which is illegal, so we're going to treat it like it's illegal thing." That conclusion was pretty likely, but it's utterly baffling to someone who thinks about the law like a programmer.

To put it in the Supreme Court's exact words: "Given Aereo’s overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, this sole technological difference between Aereo and traditional cable companies does not make a critical difference here."

I always liked Antonin Scalia’s dissent in that case.

“We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries. The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than ‘the very existence of broadcast television as we know it’ is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own.… We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development. Hence, the proper course is not to bend and twist the Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but to apply the law as it stands…”

Oh totally. Scalia's copy shop analogy was spot on, and the majority's rebuttal was just "this is more like a video on demand service than a copy shop" was weak as heck and just goes back to their main "shut up about how it works we know what we're looking at" argument.

I think Scalia is right in this descent, but applying the same textualist logic to many other decisions he made doesn't make nearly as much sense. In other words, his textualism leads to a lot of "there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball" type decisions.

Does a specific example come to mind? I've generally been a big fan of the opinions he writes, but I'd be interested to see what some of his weaker opinions are.

Castle Rock v Gonzales is probably one of the worst. After a woman with a protective order against her abusive husband was ignored by the police after he abducted their children sued the police department, Scalia basically ruled that police have no duty to do anything to help anyone. Even in a case where you have a court protective order that says the police "shall arrest" someone who violates the order.

The woman reported her children kidnapped and showed the order to the police and they refused to do anything and said she should just wait and he would probably come back.

The man showed up at the police station a day later with her 3 children, dead.

So now we have the precedent that even in the most extreme and obvious cases, police have absolutely no duty to uphold their oath.

Thanks Scalia.

This case was decided 7-2, so clearly it wasn't just Scalia. Generally speaking, when decisions are supermajority, it's because that's what the law and precedent really say. And the precedent that law enforcement doesn't have a "duty to protect" long predates this case, so it's not really surprising.

In general, it's worth keeping in mind that the point of courts is not to decide whether the outcome of the case is ethically or socially desirable. They're there to look at the laws and precedent and figure out how it applies to a given case. If the result is undesirable, it's something for the legislature to fix.

> Hence, the proper course is not to bend and twist the Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but to apply the law as it stands…

Ah, the old "we're here to talk about laws, not justice" argument.

> it's utterly baffling to someone who thinks about the law like a programmer.

Programmers seem to think about the law like a program, like a set of rules governing system behaviour and so long as they are not directly violated, this one neat trick judges hate will let them do whatever it is without recourse. But that's not true, firstly because the law is fuzzy and deals with human behaviour, including taking wider views, intent and mitigating circumstances into account, and secondly taking decades or centuries of established case law into account too.

It's why things like "smart contracts" are not the end run around the judicial process that their creators would like...

I understand that point of view in general, but in this case the only thing making the service a violation in the first place was one dumb trick. I would argue that Aereo was doing their best to remove technicalities.

The ruling also managed to make the law even more inconsistent. If I rent an antenna and install it in a datacenter for TV, that's kosher. If I rent an antenna and pay someone else to install it in a datacenter for TV, that's a copyright violation.

I guess that's where intent comes in? It looks like a technical workaround with the same end result...

But also I won't deny the copyright owners have done a great job in making the law do exactly what they want it to, nothing more and nothing less.

It was exactly like Aereo. Their Supreme Court battle set the precedent that made the VidAngel battle a no-contest. Which makes me wonder how VidAngel ever thought they could get away with that business model.

>“ Which makes me wonder how VidAngel ever thought they could get away with that business model.”

Doing a thing, but with Jesus branding, can get you very far in America beyond all logic. See also: nonprofits participating in politics, nonprofits doing public performances without proper licensing, nonprofits advertising to children in public schools, etc.

If you read any of the responses by VidAngel's CEO (?), you'll find the answer: hubris.

The law is not a programming language. Believing so is a common misconception amongst engineers, but assuming as much is likely to lead to disappointment, frustration, anger, bickering, conflict, and vexatiously long and mostly unenforceable contracts.

In particular, you can't just write up your own legal fictions and expect them to be honored. It would seem the developers in the story above learned this lesson the hard way.

I don't think this is really relevant. This isn't about logic or about programming, it's about trying to conform to the spirit of what the law says, and the intent behind it. The idea of copyright is "when you reproduce something, the creator should get a cut". Sure, we can argue all day what counts as a "copy" when it comes to computers, but... c'mon. One Bluray disc is bought, and one person gets to watch it. When they're done with it, someone else gets to watch it. This is how a library works. This is how Netflix's DVD-by-mail service works. But just because a computer and a network are involved, it's somehow different? No, sorry, I don't buy it.

If the law really does say what VidAngel did is wrong, then the law is wrong and should be changed. I think it should be obvious to anyone who can read that the big media companies have (successfully) fought for decades to unfairly protect their bottom line, at the expense of everyone else. That's not ok; governments should not exist to protect crappy business models. Hell, there'd still be plenty of money to be made with much more lax copyright law.

This seems to be equating copying with performance. They're not the same thing, and for most artists in recorded media, it's performance royalties that generate their primary income.

If you wanna change that, find some other way to compensate artists first. They are the value creator. Attacking the bloated middlemen in the delivery chain doesn't remove the need for creators to eat. That is VidAngel's moral failure, as least going by the scenario as described: they weren't returning value to where it came from, instead tried to create a legal fiction to justify rent-seeking behaviour.

Confusing copying and performance doesn’t matter to this argument because whether or not you consider lending a book copying or performance lending a digital book should work by the same rules.

Vidangel is a pretty absurd company. I read recently that they are still around and trying to come up with their next strategy.

It does raise an interesting question for me though: is Hollywood losing out on profits by not offering censored versions of their content? Clearly there’s some demand. People like to make arguments about artistic integrity, but they have no problem censoring content to air on network tv.

I would absolutely pay for this service if it allowed me mute the audio during door knocks, door bells, dog barks, and squeaky toys. Have you ever seen a dog instantly wake up from a deep sleep because they’ve been summoned to play? You’re basically obligated to pause whatever you’re watching and play.

Exactly. There are already censored versions of most movies made by the production studios themselves. They will even have the actors record alternate lines for certain parts. These air on network tv as well as on airplanes. There are lots of families that would like censored movies. I don't understand why they don't want to offer it.

so, censoring a film is editing the intended form. this seems damaging to creators. also, if a movie has a bunch of sex and violence that gets censored out, what remains is still the intended context for the sex and violence, so why would a concerned person even watch it in the first place? absurd! like, for example, pulp fiction...how the fuck would a censored version make any sense, and who in gods fucking name would watch it!? i think selling edited material via censorship and providing censorship as a service is criminal. if you dont like porn, dont watch edited porn ;(

Like I said, they already do it themselves for TV airing, is it criminal then? And sure Pulp Fiction would be a mess. That’s quite an edge case though.

sorry, i was implying that when another company or group of people do their own version of censoring. the creators agree with brodcast tv laws and parameters to edit down their work because they want it to be available in that form. vidangel seemed to be doing whatever they wanted as a third party.

What if they rented the customer the server that read and encoded the customer's copy of the Blu-ray on the fly and streamed it to them using bandwidth that was leased to the customer? Would that violate the studio's "performance" rights? What if the customer is in the same room as the server and loads the disk themselves?

I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product. The free market depends on perfect information when making purchasing decisions, and this is an area that is vague as all heck. If the rights the sellers of these movies claim I have matched the minimum guaranteed by law (or were even a super-set) then it would be clear. But they continue to claim I would get fewer rights than they are legally obligated to provide (technically playing it is a copyright violation according to their terms, never mind format shifting). They actually have it so ambiguous that it even seems anti-capitalistic.

>I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product.

Step one would probably be actually purchasing something instead of licensing it.

VidAngel's model was that you are purchasing the disk.

No, see everything is licensed. You cannot purchase anything. So yeah, first we need to see about actually purchasing things, then we can talk. Try again.

VidAngel had a brilliant business model, it should not be illegal. They are essentially acting as a public library that’s actually convenient.

That sounds clever and feels obviously legal and fine. I’m shocked that it’s not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com