Amazon deleted my Final Space digital purchases of season 1 and 2
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The only way I see this changing anytime is through a massive cultural shift in our views toward intellectual property, and I think the only way we can make that happen is by bringing it to the forefront of people's minds.
I'm not sure, but I think making piracy easy and appealing is essential to taking the wind out of the sails of the enormous entrenched interests that seek to lock down IP. Ultimately copyright is a tool that serves those who can buy up copyrights a whole lot more than it serves artists, and that fact is very corrosive to our society. Artists and creatives still need protection and support, but Disney and Amazon can go fuck themselves.
Basing our economic system in the digital world on artificial scarcity doesn't make any sense and artificial scarcity itself is morally incorrect.
P.S. Since people may ask if I have any concrete solutions. No, not really other than I think everyone would be better off if copyright and patents were limited to something sane like 10 years with no option to extend that time.
I would think it has to be relatively easy to decrypt given that the Blu-Ray player has to either send a decryption key to the TV via the HDMI cable, or the TV has to already have a decryption key that could presumably be skimmed.
Playback Device (Roku etc)
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Splitter ------ Unauthorized Player (Recorder)
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Authorized Player (TV)
Since the TV obviously has the capability of decrypting the content it seems like there should be a way to split the signal somewhere between the main TV board and the display panel(s), which sounds like a big deal. Or maybe someone could make an incomplete splitter / recorder that just needs a legit Samsung board attached to it?
I think what you're saying is basically what's happening. The HDMI splitter pretends to be a display/TV, so the playback device sends encrypted data to the splitter, which decrypts it and forwards the decrypted part over the HDMI connections.
From what I could find, it's usually the cheap HDMI splitters that emit unencrypted data over the HDMI ports. That kind of makes sense; they implement HDCP inbound because they have to, but they leave HDCP off the output ports because it reduces their manufacturing cost.
I think you can't just "forward" the encrypted packets, because then both outputs on the splitter would try to communicate back to the player, causing issues. The splitter has to MITM the connection.
https://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/remove-hdcp-hdmi-s... has some cursory info, and links to HDMI splitters that strip HDCP (not an endorsement of whatever you do with them, just an interesting device).
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41...
So we're back to the state of you don't actually have property rights in any of the things you own or paid for.
so one has 2 options, a database of VUKs that others generate (don't need a device key then) or getting a device to give up its key so that one can generate VUKs onesself. The problem with this is, that that key (if made public) will then be revoked itself.
i.e. I don't consider this being cracked, this is the encryption working exactly as designed.
People are still willing to pay for things, they just want a copy of the thing that they paid for so that it cannot be stolen from them later. The only answer here IS piracy.
How many people here still have a functioning VCR? Hell, how many still have a functioning DVD player?
Continually adding on user hostile additional revenue streams, like adverts, on top of something i already paid for is one of the major drivers of piracy.
There's not always another choice.
How about i pay for things I’m buying but take a pirate copy as a backup?
It’s already clear that if you make digital content available at a reasonable price people will pay for it. The thing we’re arguing about is who is stealing from whom.
Here’s a genuine dichotomy. Assuming I’m interested in the media, then I’m either buying or I’m renting. If I’m renting call it renting. If I’m buying don’t steal it from me later by hiding the fact that it’s a rental in thousands of lines of legalese.
Don't even get me started on how bad patents are.
Blatantly false. The majority of these small creators are Twitch Streamers, Tik-tockers, Youtubers these days. All of them give their work away for free effectively.
In particular, the value in the Twitch-stream is from interacting with the chat realtime. Its effectively a live performance tied to a chatroom in some niche subject matter that the audience is interested in.
All of those can probably be released public-domain and free to copy, and they won't lose a single subscriber.
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Others are paid primarily through their Patreon account or other forms of merchandise (dolls, plushies, etc. etc.). Or direct advertisements inside of the content (see Oversimplified and VPN). You can't "skip" the ad because the Ad is part of the video itself and worked into the script.
Based on where people spend their money, your preferences are in the minority.
Juggernauts are able to put their movies in theaters or cable/streaming television, put trailers in front of other movies or tv shows, take out billboards, etc. Juggernauts are able to market the hell out of their products, while most little guys don't have that opportunity.
I imagine that this also has a lasting effect. For example, juggernauts are more likely to have a streaming service trying to pick up their media while also putting that media ahead of little guy's media in that streaming service's recommendations. I'd also guess that over time the probability of organically finding little guy's media drops at a significantly faster rate than juggernaut's media .
Blumhouse wouldn't be where they are without the juggernaut's purposefully propping them up.
How many paying subscribers does YouTube have compared to Netflix?
Imagine for example something like the Expanse being crowd funded. That's about $3.5 - $5 MM per episode - a huge amount. And then it takes a year or more to see the content. And the Expanse wasn't really that expensive in the scale of things.
Unfortunately, until a better model emerges, the media juggernauts do serve a function in the marketplace as financiers.
You're probably pushing more triangles in ten seconds of a modern video game at 4K than in the entire run of Babylon 5's groundbreaking CGI usage. So we've definitely got the resources available to deliver broadcast-quality CGI video to the masses, and the right tooling could make it accessible.
I could imagine franchises that started with modest visuals, and if they can find bigger backers (more subscribers, advertisers, merchandising, whatever), they can level up with more resources behind them.
I also imagined that studios and directors would love the idea of CGI actors-- you could do things that are still infeasible with practical effects, you can pull them back out 10 years later and they haven't aged, and you don't need to worry that they'll suddenly go on a binge that effects their ability to film.
It is not obvious to me than having copyright is better than not having it. It would be better for some people and worse for others.
To wit, intellectual property itself is likely a concept that keeps us locked in a local maximum.
And even those gains, which were won with overwhelming disobedience, because early internet people were at least technical enough to burn a cd are now being eroded again, but under different guise. Piracy stopped being a thing, because it got easier to get stuff you wanted when you wanted it without trolling the internet. Now with streaming wars coming to a close, content owners think they will get to impose rules not realizing that they are making the same mistake thinking kids will not learn how to bypass whatever restrictions they put in place all over again.
History. Rhymes. All that.
tying money to art cheapens it.
art is priceless, attaching a price therefore is a regression.
Not everything is about money, not everything needs to be done.
better that it is free: if you couldn't sell movies - the only ones that would exist are the ones people truly wanted to make - the quality of the artform would skyrocket, even if the quantity plummets.
The general narrative and has been if you copied it without written authorization, you are a pirate. Even if you are archiving a copy for future generations.
You can't even look up news articles from 10 years ago because of that.
Solutions like that or, "if everyone would just _", or "everybody needs to _" will never happen. Just my own rule of thumb.
Nah, you know what, forget it, give up, shits fucked and people are dumb. /s
Edit to add: unleaded fuel, catalytic converters, emmision standards, one third of owner-occupied homes in Australia have rooftop solar, the widespread acceptance of anthropogenic induced climate drivers.
Cristal mass is "if everyone would just".
Legislation largely works because those subject to it largely agree to abide.
If everyone would just agree to stop using the old thing / start doing the new thing.
I think it takes time.
Other stuff, like communism, really requires "if everybody would just". An arbitrarily small number of defectors will make the system tip towards collapse.
There are problems with such parties at the local level because it's hard to unite on other issues, but at the EU level, the Pirate Party representatives consistently have presented (in my view), the most technically correct interpretations of internet laws and regulations for example, all the topics around data privacy, etc. They are not "hurr durr I wanna get free stuff" at all, and most other representatives remind me of my grandpa that had no clue what a computer even was.
To me, donating and voting for people who are technically correct is a way better way to effect change than just trying to have some mass coordination around piracy / boicots, those never work.
Outside of Europe I have no idea what something effective would be. Unfortunately the patent / copyright apparatus is very very strong and the political pressure US groups put on the world is very hard to combat.
A good book about the subject of patents and this apparatus and how they basically muscled the world into abidding to US lobbies, including massively fucking poor countries with respect to pharmaceutical patents is "Information Feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy?" https://thenewpress.com/books/information-feudalism
They lobbied for laws to explicitly prevent this, and given the strict constructionalist nature of the current courts, its unlikely we'll regain or be able to enforce these rights in this capacity without significant intervention by policy makers.
[0] Not the real acronym, but this one allows me to call the media conglomerates the MAFIA for a bit of a giggle
> ...making piracy easy and appealing is essential
This sounds a little too naive to me. Every platform that has made significant progress towards these goals has run into massive legal opposition. And then it becomes an ever changing, moving target cat and mouse game between opposing sides. Not to mention the dangers of malware, etc lurking within sought after content - how can you guarantee safety?
I agree that copyright itself needs reform, but looking back over the last ~25 years and how big corporations have become more advanced at fighting online piracy, I don't see piracy as the central mechanism to create the big cultural shift you speak of.
You only have to buy a DVD once. There's no subscription fee. You can easily lend it, (or borrow one from the library). You don't have to download any untrusted software or learn how to configure it, and the creators still get paid.
This is IMO the most internet native way to produce content. Copyright on digital media is a legacy technology that we don't need in world where distribution is basically free and unstoppable.
Crazy that HN still misses that permissionless composability is the key benefit of blockchains.
Relevant bits:
Five years of my life.
Three seasons.
Blood, sweat, and tears...
....became a tax write-off for the network that owns Final Space.
Yup. That's it. That's why it's disappeared everywhere in the USA. Five years of work vanished.
When the license is up internationally, Netflix will take it down, and then it will be gone forever. There are no more physical copies of S1 and S2, and no physical copies of Season 3 were ever made. Your memory of Final Space will be the only proof it ever existed.Like yeah, the entity that sold the film reels to the cinemas made a billion dollars off those sales, but they had to pay a billion plus one dollar for the right to distribute from one of the other entities, who paid a billion plus 2 dollars to other entities invented for this purpose, and so on. You take gains exactly where it's most convenient for contracting to, and put losses everywhere that had a contract based on royalties or similar. The vast majority of the numbers can be whatever you want, within huge bounds, so you can optimize however you want.
This is how famous actors for large productions still end up getting screwed out of a paycheck.
https://untiedmagazine.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/10-years-meg...
> So here’s the ugly truth from what I understand, and I’m neither a lawyer or accountant so my understanding could be off – Megas was written off as a tax loss and as such can not be exploited, at least domestically, in any way, or the network will get into some sort of tax/legal trouble.
From looking at the wikipedia definition of "write-off":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-off#Accounting
> In business accounting, the term 'write-off' is used to refer to an investment (such as a purchase of sellable goods) for which a return on the investment is now impossible or unlikely. The item's potential return is thus canceled and removed from ('written off') the business's balance sheet.
So if a "write-off" is declaring it impossible to get any ROI on investment and you then get some return on it (after e.g. reviving the show, selling DVDs of it, etc), you've lied to the federal government to reduce your tax burden.
By eliminating the long term revenue, and effectively deleting the show, they’re basically destroying an asset. Which means they can claim the value of the show as a loss, and offset their profits. Thus reducing their tax burden.
Presumably the savings in tax are greater than expected long term income from licensing. So it makes sense to write off the asset and take the value of the asset as a loss.
I suspect that big part of why this makes sense, is because it often possible to claim the value of an intangible asset is at-least the cost of producing (in terms of salaries etc). So when writing off the asset, you get the ability to recoup some of the cost of production.
Perhaps a better question: If a particular show is written off, does anyone own the IP anymore? Do they still have the right to sue for copyright infringement if someone else broadcasts or distributes it?
And to those who know about bit torrent.
https://rarbg.to/torrents.php?search=final+space&category%5B...
That's theft. The theft pure and simple, ancient, which has been around forever. Nothing new.
If you SOLD something and somehow REMOVE it or the ability to use it, it's theft. Whether it's done using modern technology (software) or old technology (crowbar) is not important.
The TOS do not override the law.
Amazon and others use the technology to commit very old crimes.
'Buy' and 'Rent' are two very ironclad terms in terms of consumer purchases though and I reckon if a case made its way to court they would likely rule in favor of the consumer. There was the case someone else brought up earlier of Andino v Apple arguing just that.
If a company doesn't want to do this, then the button and all UI pieces MUST say "rent". Not just some minor line in the EULA.
[1] Maybe the service where I downloaded it wants to go down? Great, then let me download it in a non-DRMed format to use forever. [2] And not having available to use myself during that time. Sure.
Buy this revokable (at any time) license to view this content
Although I think that the laws should be strengthened so that it does work that way.
Amazon needs to be forced to give you a permanent license any time you "buy" a digital right. Those bits need to really be permanent. The structure of Amazon's contract with the producer needs to be changed so it is clear that the consumers rights to those copies are non-revokable. And that law needs to be made retroactive to all past contracts. The termination of any contract with Amazon should only lead to Amazon no longer being able to sell new digital copies.
Without the change, it is at the very least false advertising.
In the end, big companies can distort the words and etc, But theft is theft, it is very clear that it is theft.
Amazon isn't alone, Valve/Steam has a similar issue, all music services, eBook platforms, audio books, etc. I think the war has already been lost on that front... you do not own anything and that's not going to change unfortunately.
For me, describing this as a "lease", perhaps with an explicit renewal date (that may or may not be free maybe) would make a lot more sense.
For Example:
Lease "Final Space" for 10 years (Renewal Date: 9/28/2032): $29.99
Lease "Final Space" until 12/31/2022 (Non-Renewable): *Reduced Rate* $7.43
However at least in this instance the games are still in my library years after.
Of note Steam despite its reputation has done the same with LOTR War In The North and Hentai Loli vs Pedobear (don't ask, it was a gift by a deranged friend I swear ;))
This is how the avails are written for licensing to platforms. It even allows for different windows based on territory. This is how you can see content bounce from platform to platform.
I must be too old. I do not understand how can they take it away without refund.
If somebody could illuminate me, please?
This is why we need to educate people on how to pirate effectively and safely so big tech will have to listen to what the markets actually demands and what will be in the best interests of society
My aging father, who has gone from a math-major programmer to nearly computer illiterate in 40 years, won't even take a file from me directly, out of fear. I think of that fear as a bit hysterical, but he uses Windows and an iPhone, so who am I to say that his devices won't report that file to the proper authorities some day in the future, after a forced update? Who am I to say it's not somehow doing it now, and flipping a flag at the NSA or Amazon marking him for special attention?
I obviously believe something like that at some level, with my insistence on FOSS and control over my devices.
The avenues for pirating have narrowed in an extreme way over the past five or so years. There can be no one professionally interested in piracy who isn't aware of all of them.
The government could just choose a week where they decide to contact and charge everyone associated with piracy, and pull down every pirate site. They could show PR-style grace by giving 98% of people a symbolic fine in return for the destruction of all of their digital storage, and give the other 2% brutal prison sentences. Everyone would then be placed on a public blacklist to encourage ISPs to ban them.
Entirely possible, and entirely consistent with centrist values. So I'm no smarter than people who don't pirate.
I do the opposite -- I rent everything, and expect it to be a rental. I have never been disappointed.
Before contacting CFPB, I was on numerous phone calls and made multiple trips to the local branch to get the funds released and it appeared that I would never get it back because one part of the bank does not communicate with the other. I had submitted all the documentation the risk department asked for but claimed they never received, and the local branches assured me it was sent, but could not give me a tracking number or reference number. After contacting CFPB the issue was magically resolved without any additional documents, apparently the documents were never lost based on their response.
When I asked how this is legal, they said I agreed to it when I opened the account, which is basically what every bank does.
So in a nutshell, nothing is yours even the money you worked hard for.
I'm not going to feel bad about it, whoever own the rights got paid, and it's limited for my own personal use.
That's not true under piracy.
It may be written in the fine print, but it's not something that most rational consumers willingly agree to.
Regulation of these shrink-wrap agreements is the only non-insane solution to this problem. Lawsuits are too slow and too expensive, and by the time you get enough people behind one, may be an exercise in squeezing blood out of a rock.
That's not their only other choice. They could also let you download the content so you're not dependent on them forever to watch it.
No notice, no refund. I went to watch it one day and it was gone.
It's time for legislation to change the "Buy" or "Purchase" button on these pages to "License".
People need to be aware they are making an exchange of money for a long term license that can be lost/suspended/deleted at anytime.
If you want to own a copy you need to physically buy a version without DRM or at least with a DRM that has been defeated.
Not sure how that turned out, but I am pessimistic about his chances of prevailing.
YARR motherfuckers.
EDIT: found it! https://twitter.com/TedVillavicenc/status/157383312338041241...
That doesn't mean they have the license to continue to "sell" it in perpetuity, just that people who "purchased" it can continue to access it. Conversely, I shouldn't be able to license you the right to "sell" a digital good and then take away your ability to provide it to your customers who already purchased it.
If, I as the IP holder, don't want to provide that right, I shouldn't be able to license this "right of sale" and my "middle-man" licensee shouldn't be able to market it as a "purchase/sale".
They could have thrown in some re-negotiation clauses to make people happy, but the thing is that letting someone keep a digital copy of something costs the copyright holder nothing other than the opportunity to bilk the customer out of a second purchase (which should be as illegal as selling someone a car and then making them re-buy it at a later date).
Peacock had every right to put The Office on their own platform and had no need to take it down from Netflix other than knowing that without their own strong & exclusive content no one would have made the switch.
Steam, in your example, is still giving you access to the delisted content you bought, but, since Steam itself has lost the license to sell, they no longer let new purchases happen.
That seems fair. What doesn't seem fair is buying something and then it going away for me because of a licensing expiration between other parties.
And sadly, nobody is going to ever really care.
Citation on "Removed a few entirely". I'm not sure what the most recent example is, since this was a while back, but it has happened and could happen again.
While online only games are certainly a problem it doesn't appear Steam's actions made the problem any worse.
(Ideally in these situations all rights should also revert to the original creator).
Consider what that would do to a company's balance sheet.
Every revocable "purchase" would become a perpetual liability which will almost never be collected.
What happens when the company goes bankrupt? Do all the former customers line up for their refunds as creditors?
Or re-engineer their product delivery mechanisms such that the customer can retain the product. Which is the desired outcome.
This does not meet the plain English meaning of "equal protection under law." Your property, your data, access to your money, your health records, etc. is not controlled by you in what should be a symmetrical and equal way.
In some contexts, like game consoles that are heavily subsidized by content revenue, content protection is a fair element of that deal. But not on systems you paid full price to own outright. Acts like deleting purchases should be treated as unauthorized access, and punished accordingly, no matter the click-through "agreement."
I kind of read the fine print at some point and it turns out "buying" is just renting for some arbitrary time until Amazon decides you have to pony-up again.
Maybe DVDs will make a comeback?
I wonder if the situation is the same at other vendors or if Amazon's handling of taking something off the platform is uniquely bad. Surely there are people who own this through Apple or Google or Vudu or something (as I believe it's been equally pulled from all those platforms) who could weigh in.
And you can't play anything you bought until you obtain Apple's permission to link the device you want to play on to your Itunes account.
This isn't exactly a traditional definition of ownership.
If I say "If tomorrow everybody stopped producing new books, series, music or movies, I could just start catching up to what's already been produced and it'll last me a lifetime", it may be not true today (is it?). But, will it be true at some point? When? In centuries? Months?
I would definitely not like if my digital fully bought think would be unavailable for no reasons.
Independent of this I actually stoped caring to much owning all of the digital stuff I consumed over the years.
I love movies and tv shows but there is soon much and I seldom rewatch them, it's just not important to me anymore.
I'm still getting much more much better content for much less than 10 years ago.
And Im pretty sure there are still enough collectors out there who will make sure aaaal of this stuff will be kept for much longer as we all expect.