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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I mean yes. Like it or not, all parties involved agreed the terms.

That's not true under piracy.

The consumer did not actually agree to the terms of: "I, the consumer, will pay you $XX to download the film to my device, but you can delete it from my device at any time in the future without giving me a refund".

It may be written in the fine print, but it's not something that most rational consumers willingly agree to.

Exactly: take it to its logical conclusion. What if Amazon did this 5 minutes after they took your money for it, so you never got to watch it at all? Obviously that's not what anyone's agreeing to.

The flipside of it is that surely Amazon did not agree to continue serving the film from now and the heat death of the universe.

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.

> Amazon did not agree to continue serving the film from now and the heat death of the universe.

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.

Amazon cannot just let you download the content. It's not up to them.

It certainly is up to them. They negotiated a contract with the content producers that did not allow for that, and could have negotiated a different contract that did by offering more.

They could have, but they didn't. Unless you make negotiating such contracts illegal, they and their competitors & partners will keep doing it.

If they didn't want to continue serving the film until the heat death of the universe, then that's what they should have done differently, rather than just unilaterally screwing over all the buyers.

They could, but unless you get some legislature behind this, who is going to enforce it when they explicitly choose not to include it in the TOS?

I mean, they all click agree, because they DGAF about the terms, they just want to use the service. Consumers can absolutely refuse to accept these terms (and some do, like me), they just choose not to.

The terms of service here are too intricate and contain provisions contrary to the average "purchaser's" expectations. There was no agreement here.

Everyone by now is well aware this is the situation. This has happened so many times over the last 20 years that feigning ignorance is just silly.

People aren't "feigning" ignorance. The terms of service are long, in legal language, and not meant to be read. The ignorance is by design.

It's feigning ignorance when everyone already knows something though. "Oh I didn't read the terms" doesn't apply when it's common knowledge.

Generally, the people who are well aware of this situation are techies who have seen coverage of the issue in specialist media or who have been burnt by it personally.

Agreeing to terms without informed consent is not consent. A lay person can't honestly be expected to fully understand a novel's worth of legalese. From a moral standpoint, fuck the megacorps with a team of lawyers foisting such bullshit on people.

By releasing a product into the public does a business agree to some piracy in the social contract?

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