The deception of “buying” digital movies
worldofmatthew.com
worldofmatthew.com
It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very rich and powerful organizations and megacorps.
I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have value.
However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, broken, dismembered, and sown back together in a Frankensteinian abomination and now serves only to line up pockets of people in the publishing industry. And the US has, through its trade deals, exported this thing worldwide.
Disney lobbies for life of author + 70 years copyright duration not out of goodwill towards authors (in fact, it's been trying to wriggle out of paying royalties to some of them!). Amazon uses copyright as an excuse to push DRM, locking out competition and limiting users' rights (Kindle, Audible DRM). DMCA is constantly abused to take down fair-use content.
Meanwhile, book authors are struggling to find a reason to write books, since many barely recoup the costs. Musicians decry royalties paid out by Spotify (that aren't actually so small, but the majority of the cut is taken by the music industry). Photographers try in vain to stop people just copy/pasting their photos online (what are they going to do, sue everyone?), including in some cases big companies that didn't even bother to check the copyright.
They aren't being protected. They are being milked.
Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth.
Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents.
It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists taking one of two paths: 1) working in secret, trying desperately to thread the needle between making a living creating and losing it all by being discovered. 2) Forgoing the idea of true creative expression altogether, and limiting themselves to samples that they can pay for up front.
So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.
As far as I'm aware, even laws for the small business play into the favor of larger corporations either directly or via auxiliary laws.
One needs only to taste legit French cheese, compared with, say, Austrian manufactured French cheese, to know food quality laws have little to do with actual food quality, and Austria has one of the strictest food legal systems in the World.
For example milk started to be regulated more only after someone in Al Capone's family got poisoned and he bribed the right people to make it a thing. You're kidding yourself if you think any of that was to benefit the poor in the first place lmao, just happens to be a side effect.
Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't exist, or that the wealthy don't have advantages in getting laws passed that favor their interests, but there's a great deal of stuff that gets done that is specifically for the poor or the average citizen.
These benefit the wealthy. They are used the quell the thirst for wealthy blood that would otherwise be prevalent. They are crumbs thrown to the masses to keep them from revolting during uncertain times.
> The vast majority of regulatory apparatus
I'd argue most regulatory bodies are captured agenies in the US. The delineation between state and industry has been fading for decades. They either look the other way, or overregulate to choke out any competition that would unseat existing players. Regulation in the US is almost entirely in service to capital.
> weather forecasting, GPS
Again, these are likely more in service to the economy (capital) than normal citizens.
> state/federal parks
Fair enough. I'd add libraries to this list as well. These institutions are actually kind of an odd exception to America's complete obsession with privatization, consumerism, and capital.
> laws like the CRA, VRA or ADA which help those disadvantaged by racism, disability, etc.
Again, fair enough.
> federally funded research
Yes, often funded by the citizens such that private industry can sell the result without recompense.
> Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't exist
It's the the rule, not the exception.
What muddles the picture is people do benefit from economies of scale. So, if you make the law actually hostile for large companies both the general public and corporations are worse off.
What an overly broad thing to say!
I mean, no coincidence that they are always on the top of the list to threaten and scheme to cut by the right wing.
As your chart shows ever since the first Copyright Act in the US, there has been a major revision every 40-70 years, typically to update for things that have changed since the previous Act such as new technology.
As far as I've been able to tell Disney has nothing to do with creating the 1976 Act, which was the first time their copyright term was extended. The 1976 was created largely to address the massive changes in technology and international trade since 1909.
As part of that there was wide consensus that the US needed to make its copyright law more like the rest of the world, to pave the way for the US joining the Berne Convention. The change in terms came as part of that, making US copyright terms match what nearly everyone else had.
>The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or (derisively) the Mickey Mouse Protection Act[1] – extended copyright terms in the United States in 1998. It is one of several acts extending the terms of copyrights.[2]
The people who grew up in the culture permeated with such stories are stunted expressively. Because they're denied the use of an ever-growing share of the tropes and characters of the common culture. Many Disney films themselves are retellings of classic stories in the public domain. If you want to reference the original Cindarella, or Greek mythology, or Oliver Twist, you're free to do so.
You cannot do that with Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn. Now, maybe you shouldn't be able to within the author's life. But how many centuries should we keep this privilege? Would you or I (or Disney) be able to tell a new story about Hercules if copyright had been around 2000 years ago? Imagine Shakespeare still under copyright! No Hamlet or Macbeth characters in any other works without permission. We can strike several important 20th century books right there. In the future, the equivalent of Shakespeare will still be under copyright long, long after they are dead. Derivation and reuse are normal in art. Disney can borrow from the public domain to make Cindarella, but it in turn will never become public domain.
That's always my go-to example for copyright because:
1. Disney has benefited both from extending copyright and from the previous shorter duration of copyright
2. The fact that a work from the 19th century would still be under copyright in 1959 is astonishing to many people
3. Disney's Sleeping Beauty, despite opening to mixed reviews, is generally well received today and is a great example of what we are missing out on; this work (judged "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the LoC) could not have been made if today's rules existed in 1959.
If someone wanted to do "The New Stories of Mickey Mouse" they should be free to do so.
If someone wanted to act as Disney using Micky Mouse, then they should be sued into oblivion for acting as another company.
Corporations barely need to do any propaganda because so many artists advocate for exploitative system without any prompting.
Patent law would, ideally, be abolished altogether as I'm not convinced that other types of patents are any more legitimate than software patents. Trademarks should not expire, of course, but there should be restrictions on what you can trademark to protect the public domain (for example, the mouse corporation shouldn't be able to evade the copyright term limits by trademarking its characters).
Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage creation and innovation.
But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating. There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of most books drastically drops after 10 years.
This benefits society at large, since it creates more competition, both from the original author of a work, but also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the original work.
That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to give one company the "right" to make money off an invention for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon that original idea afterward.
But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget that no idea is 100% original.
In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just rehashing of old works - so that also means that if enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas anyway.
I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series to get a new perspective on this based on the history of copyrighted works:
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.
That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there from the movie industry, just not the capability until recently.
To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
I think you're really stretching this one. These were dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they HAD to make them in the format that would work in that region.
DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that point.
when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing to an enrire industry with no pushback.
This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi light does not pair with the app because its was meant for chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not hia problem either.
The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define digital ownership.
If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...
Was region locking really that big of a deal?
It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side effect that if a particular online release is pulled from distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process, especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable second hand market offering available.
With digital media on the other hand you more or less immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if that happens…
Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account to a different geo after it's created but with multiple accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the only point they made.
There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
Potential buyers still have to consider the original point however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it currently, there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre buying on another platform.
Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for example?
Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.
Piracy returns?
It never gone. 4Tb USB HD + Good Torrent Tracker = All problems solved.
In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.
If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.
Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.
Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.
A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.
>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes
Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
Second hand items are often
* Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer protections
The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.
The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.
It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.
I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the book publishing business unprofitable?
What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.
Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something. Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.
In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.
It's no different to the rest of them. If Stadia hasn't already taught anyone that it is a scam then I don't know what will.
Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix
Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from home or something.
Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the digital version! I can even go to my local used bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices. And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.
I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.
other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.
If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.
The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal.
It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.
Film grain from pre-digital era movies is a divisive issue. All older movies originally had some amount of film grain from the analog film. Some people like it and want it there on purpose. Some people prefer the movie run through a de-noise filter. The pro-grain people claim this removes fine detail. The anti-grain people say why the hell would you want it there on purpose. Some modern movies even add film grain on purpose. See Disney's Luca as an example. I personally don't care for it but it usually doesn't bother me as long as it's not extreme.
AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years. (I work in advertising).
Exactly like you said - grain is a common first victim of video compression.
The other curious thing - modern movies that are shot on film / have grain actually get it removed during VFX stages. You have to do it so you can integrate CGI - grain is usually “sampled” first by the compositing software (The Foundry’s Nuke in 99% of occasions) and removed since the CGI image won’t have any grain from the CG renderer so you have to integrate it onto a denoised image. You then re add it at the end!
Using the same software you then re-add the sampled noise back onto the image, and since you’ve now integrated the CGI, the noise goes on top of everything helping it all get integrated.
Just saying this because you are right - using noise reduction to remove film grain for release is considered a sin (I myself would agree with the sentiment). Yet actually most films today will go through some denoise stage in VFX. Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
For example, compare the WebP and AVIF (VP8/AV1) compression artefacts with JPEG (and MPEG).
With WebP and AVIF all textures and low contrast details tend to be erased or smoothed out, preserving only high contrast parts of the image.
The JPEG image may have some visible ringing and block edge artefacts, but at least the textures and fine details are preserved!
Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.
Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences have made multiple people this upset.
https://www.google.com/search?q=review+picture+quality+blura...
Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)
I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.
I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all.
I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered.
You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".)
Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention.
Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous.
Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc).
1. Aka the "do not" sign <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol>
I had a whole paragraph in that post (but that I ended up deleting) about how Blu-Ray would be great if "Blu-Ray" were as simple as a single-file filesystem with an open media container format at the root, burned/pressed onto a BD physical disc (or some other high-density optical media). Like the digital equivalent of a reel (or set of reels) of 35mm film. But that's not what it is.
Even for movies I rent or stream, I often download the remux to watch it, then delete it after watching. It's the only way to avoid bullshit like streaming apps (all of them except Criterion, no matter your settings), not letting me watch to the end of the credits in peace. Or subtitles which are shown below the frame for movies which are wider than 1.78:1. Or, let's say you want to watch RRR in its original language with English subtitles. Netflix only has the rights to the Hindi dub.
I want my money to go to the filmmakers and actors and production crew, but these fucking studios and streaming companies, man. Please, let me pay you to watch the movie in high quality and in peace. Why is it easier for me to pirate content? Like, it takes me 30 seconds to go to https://radarr.home.mydomain.org/, type in the name of the movie I want to watch, click search, click download, wait 5-10 minutes, and now it's there for me to watch.
Contrast that with going to Just Watch, maybe the movie is on a service I pay for, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's on Blu-ray, maybe only on DVD. Want to watch Happiness (1998)? Too bad, not available anywhere except maybe you can find a used DVD on Amazon for $50. How about The Heartbreak Kid (1972)? (Oh, hey, how do you like that, someone put up a copy of it on YouTube last year.) But time and again, movies just aren't available. I really don't understand why they get locked away. What's the incremental cost of taking a movie which has already been digitized for DVD or Blu-ray and making it available on a streaming service or for digital rental or purchase?
Come on Hollywood. Get your shit together.
They have optimized for user hostility and money.
They've created a system where consumers have bought their products many times over yet still don't own them.
As an aside, games and software is 100x worse. Often times there is just no way to get old software or games running at all.
Why, when emulation of old computers is mostly a solved problem?
Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in a country where it's de facto legal.
Which one?
If a retailer dared attempt such seizure of people’s Property, there would mass outrage. The media would shout about the retailer being thief’s, questions would be raised in parliament and the business would most likely face legal problems.
On the other hand, if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage, even though the end result were the same.
My suspicion is the level of public outrage is less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights and more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar. Which is a problem, really.
I don't see what leads you to that conclusion. I've also never heard about that happening, and I don't suspect this would happen unless something actually illegal was happening (illegal copies and such). The justification for actually blocking you from watching that movie for which you own a digital copy would be pretty hard to find. And the work around is relatively easy - dont connect your blueray player to the internet. With streaming services, you're at the mercy of the service provider to just lose a contract with a studio and stop providing their content.
> less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights
At this stage fairness is proven to be deeply ingrained, even in animals. There is something deeply unfair with losing access to something you were supposed to own, just because they can, and some corporate bean counter decided to not renew some licensing contract on their catalog because the competition offered a percent more.
> more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar
9/11 was a one-off, I didn't get familiar with this type of terrorist event. On the other hand, school shootings happen so often that I'm not surprised by them. Both still trigger outrage.
It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had guaranteed with physical media.
Hard to get companies to change when people don't even realize the problem.
While streaming media has some notable conveniences in certain cases, the downsides to the consumer seem to outweigh those benefits. It's as if there is a coordinated assault on ownership rights across many industries which is being led by the ubiquity of actually-broadband internet connectivity, the streaming technology that exists across many industries (gaming, movies, music and even general software) paired with corporation's insatiable desire for growth at all legal (even some not) costs. Because they now can, they will.
As one who prefers freedom of use to maximum convenience I think it wise to purchase physical media when possible and back it up in a manner which is suitable to your long-term accessibility needs. Maybe I'm just a crabby old guy...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18607418/andino-v-apple...
There are other definitions of buy a movie, e.g. buy the IP so you're allowed to make sequels.
There will always at least 2 (N) groups of people who agree/prefer Nth direction
It’s strange that this much effort practically gets about 10-15 years of protection(or less depending on prosecution time with the patent office), while a drawing of a mouse or “moving-pictures” is protected for a century.
FTFY
Or more accurately, someone's already done it and you get to be one of those friends.
Also, for fiction, it's an advantage too because many times there's only a hardback + ebook release. Since hardbacks are the more expensive and less convenient/easy version to read - heavier, get's damaged more easily - you can just get the ebook for maybe half the price of paperback
Good luck winning this with Amazon, Apple and Disney on the other side.
No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance.
Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?
We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license to watch a film - we called it "renting".
It's still copyright infringement if, for example, you buy a Blu-Ray disc and then open a movie theatre and start playing that disc publicly. The license you bought with the disc doesn't extend that far.
Whether you "buy" a movie via a disc or a streaming service, you're really just buying a limited license to display the movie along with either physical or digital delivery.
This is a bad analogy. A better one would be, your bought a car from me, and three years from now, I tow your car away and do not compensate you for taking the car. Because buyer beware, caveat emptor, etc...
The people intent on pirating would still pirate and the people who wanted to pay a reasonable cost would get as good if not better experience than the pirates. $10+ to "own" a movie on a streaming service with DRM and lock in is far too much.
In the past, redownloading movies wasn't even permitted. You download it and save it somewhere yourself. You can still do that to avoid any issues in the future, but I suspect the few incidents that have affected the iTunes Store are unlikely to re-occur. Why? For exactly the reason I mentioned at the beginning, originally you couldn't even re-download movies so it stands to reason the initial transition might've had some licensing loopholes.
You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.
I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed.
During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't very often).
Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.
So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's not perfect ;)
:)
Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Goodwill work pretty well for me.
A little known service in the US is “Movies Anywhere”. Four of the major studios participate in as well as does Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and other platforms. You link all of your accounts and a movie bought on one, automatically is credited to the other accounts as a purchase.
https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768...
I don't think any of the other Movies Anywhere apps support sharing/playing the exact same downloaded file, but cross-app downloads are supported (buy on iTunes and download on Xbox Movies or Vudu or whatever).
In both scenarios the playback support is that the file just gives the credentials for the device with the Apple TV app or Airplay 2 to go and stream it from Apple's servers. No transfer of the video from a local download occurs.
Vudu's current owner, Fandango Media, I have a lot less trust in because they have burnt a few bridges with previous digital movies sites (including one of their same brand; they briefly ran a Fandango branded digital movies app that closed without much notice or refunds, to be rebooted as FandangoNOW months later, in part because they bet on UltraViolet and didn't want to just convert UltraViolet purchases to Movies Anywhere like Vudu and iTunes did during that same time). So far Vudu has still seemed to be doing well under the new ownership, but that distrust in the new owner still sews seeds of doubt.
Speaking of Movies Anywhere, that is still an assurance that I trust when making purchase decisions. Even after UltraViolet died, possibly especially because UltraViolet died (and the way at least iTunes and Vudu handled that transition). Movies Anywhere seems to have won out because it is technologically simpler. Plus the Disney backing seems to work in its favor as Disney has some reason to make sure Movies Anywhere does right by families and doesn't tarnish their brand by association. I'm a little less particular which store I buy from if it supports Movies Anywhere. For movies that still aren't yet Movies Anywhere I'm much more cautious. (This was why I avoided Steam's brief foray into movies, for example. They worked with non-Movies Anywhere studios and it didn't feel all that shocking when the experiment failed and Steam stopped selling movies.)
At the penultimate scene, with the bell ringing on the tree when George is back home with his family, the blu-ray just stopped, glitched out, and I could not get it to play properly. Something to do with firmware and others were experiencing similar issues.
I tried! It's incredible that even when you follow all the rules, you still get the shaft.
Never again.
I suspect that would quickly create a much more robust market in services offering upgraded worldwide licenses, and so on, and the market would clear at some price for those upgrades.
A class action legal solution with a lawyer would mean that even if we won, each user would be award one free movie while the legal team got millions.
At the very least every single person in the US who ever clicked "buy" can take Amazon to small claims court. Maybe you lose, but Amazon will get the message.
In New Hampshire a small business took Instagram to small claims court for terminating their account without reason. Instagram sent lawyers, but the case was appealed to the NH Supreme Court for review. (They sent it back!) Imagine if every person who had an account terminated for no reason or lost access to a movie they "bought" then took the case to small claims court.
The problem is that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook can buy laws. I'm not saying these are the only ones, just big internet ones. And the courts enforce these laws. Sounds anti-democratic to me.
Movie Studio offers (what is effectively) a lease of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer is then allowed to sublease copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's lease ends, so does End Consumer's sublease.
How it seems like it OUGHT to work:
Movie Studio offers resale rights of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer then sells copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's right to resell ends, End Consumer is allowed to procure/store their copy of Digital Media.
What's the legality that stops this from working?
happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the pricing structures
Right now, I'm dealing with unrelated problems with my warehouse so the service is only partly functional. In my opinion the basic model, with true ownership, should be completely legal under copyright law.
Generally speaking neither of these parts are legal in most territories without rightsholder permission.
Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. You enjoy the facilities -- pool, spa, restaurants etc., during your stay. At the end of your stay, you lose the privileges of staying at the resort/using the facilities.
Even if you bought a timeshare in the resort, you still do not own it. Heck, the property developer also doesn't own it (remember, they just hold the 99 yr lease)!
Electronic-sell-through/Download-to-own is pretty much that esp. if the player is controlled by the platform. You may download the artefact (or the player software may do it for you), but playability is dependent on the platform still holding rights. This is implementation dependent and you have to look through the Terms of Service to really be sure.
All streamers who license third-party content do it for a limited period (from a few months to several months or a year). I wouldn't be surprised if many of the platforms have licensed the "Download to own/Electronic-sell-through" titles only for a finite period. Those titles will go away / become unplayable at some point in the future (unless you downloaded them from a DRM-free platform). When the eventual consumer backlash occurs, the platforms will point to their ToS.
And to add to this complexity, copyright rules are quite different across jurisdictions.
Data is different, it is infinite. You can copy it infinitely at nearly zero cost. You can transmit it to anyone anywhere in the world at nearly zero cost. Any attempt to own bits fails because of the inherently infinite nature of data. Any notion of property is imaginary, an illusion. Intellectual property degenerates into number ownership, it's that ridiculous.
If you follow this logic to its conclusion:
> the player is controlled by the platform
Then intellectual property will lead to the end of free computing as we know it today. We cannot have computers that do what we want while simultaneously preventing us from copying data some rightsholder "owns". The copyright industry will lobby the government until free computing is illegal and all computers come pwned from the factory so that we can only execute "legal" code. This also goes hand in hand with government desire to control cryptography, paving the way for total surveillance and oppression.
Taking your point about "free computing", I wonder why we haven't had the equivalent of open source software and the success we have seen over the last few decades hasn't spawned open content movement where we could get great movies, music, books etc., Sure, there are pockets of availability that is an exception, but not the kind of mainstream success that we have seen with open source software.
>Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service
mean that you can download a copy of the content you bought? As far as I'm concerned, that's about as close to "owning" as it gets, when it comes to digital media.
If you buy, say, a pair of pliers from a hardware store, and then instead of taking them home you leave them at the store and come back to use them every time you have something that needs plying, and then eventually the store needs to make room for other products and so throws your pliers away, you have no one to blame but yourself for not taking them home for safekeeping when you had the chance.
This analogy could break down if the content has DRM. I don't know if it does, or if it does when it stops working, but that's a different discussion from "Amazon deleted my movie".
Oh, and if the hardware store goes out of business you can never access the pliers again because it turns out they were leased from the plier manufacturer.
Frequently when streaming content providers say "download" it is more accurately described as downloading a pre-cached version of the stream that only works on proprietary software which is reliant on a semi-regular internet connection. For example, you can "download" netflix/amazon/youtube content, but it can only be viewed on the app, and the app must be periodically reconnected to the internet.
Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
As to why people who buy prefer to buy physical? Because there's actual ownership. I haven't even as much as investigated my options for buying 4K content, because I am 100% sure it doesn't exist in a form that's not hooked into some DRM system (AKA worse than useless). With physical content, at least you retain the control.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
I buy digital films occasionally, only the ones that I know I’ll want to re-watch every year or two. It’s a much nicer experience to call one up on a whim than it is to find out which (if any) streaming service currently has them, sign up, then cancel. That’s worth the $10 or $15 I paid, especially considering that the wine consumed during each viewing matches or exceeds the same cost, depending on how many folks I’m watching them with.
Same reason that when I go to rent from RedBox and they offer the rental for $1 and let me keep the DVD for $2 or whatever I'll just buy.
It's much more likely that my entire Amazon/Apple/Whatever account gets banned for something than they revoke access to more than a small subset of the movies, so for me the risk is worth the reward.
It's also cheaper if you have a family and don't intend to watch it together at once, or even in a single day. It's also more flexible regarding which device can play the movie (iTunes rentals were bound to the device clicking the play button lady time I tried)
It's way more niche than a few decades ago, but there's a bunch of cases where buying is a better choice.
At the very least, I know it'll be a good movie instead of taking a gamble with an unknown quantity.
I had expected it to work like Apple's App Store, where as far as I can tell you can generally still download apps you've purchased (although older apps often do not work with newer devices and/or iOS versions.)
Since then I've moved to PDFs or Kindle. If Amazon pulls the same trick I may have to rethink my strategy.
It's a solved problem - torrent your damn entertainment. Movies are just basic files sitting in a directory. Files that can be rewatched whenever you'd like. If you are traveling, copy to your laptop. If you move and haven't quite set up your entertainment center or Internet connection, watch it on a computer. If your friend is interested in something, copy it to their USB drive. No fucking nonsense of some third party capriciously disrupting your life precisely when you're trying to relax.
Any business trying to sell me some productized solution needs to beat torrenting for ease of use. So far none of them have even attempted, because they all end up warping the user experience to appease Hollywood's delusion of control. Just say no.
Also, I'll just note that we never got the 21st century we were promised, which was this - any movie ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The fundamental problem is that the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil.
I’ve been hard‐pressed to find any other way to purchase DRM‐free movies.
Awesome. Digital downloads are my favorite kind of download.
GOG tried to introduce that, but legacy film industry is too obsessed with DRM for all its usual wrong reasons so that didn't work out.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
And it's not just movies, it's also books and music. Many people "bought" MP3s or "buy" Kindle eBooks. Amazon has already shown that it is willing to delete Kindle content remotely [1]. And come on, this is Amazon. They are happy to censor on their own [2] and in collaboration with other companies [3].
Copyright is not just a "scam" anymore. It's a tool that is being used to shape what information is available to us. It's an enforcement mechanism for the "Overton Window".
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-amazon-is-within-its-right... [2] https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-harry-became-sally [3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8523526/amazon-stop-selling-to...
Yes, you get less than a DVD/Blu-Ray in that the media could potentially disappear.
But you also get more. It works on your computer, your phone, your iPad, and instantly on every TV in your house that has a streaming device. It works when you travel. You can download every movie you "own" to every device you have, almost instantly, as many times as you want. You don't have to worry about storing, losing, or damaging the disc. You can start a movie on your laptop, pause, and automatically pick right up where you left off on your phone or iPad or TV. You don't have to go to a store, or order a disc online and wait. You don't have to pay for shipping. With Apple, and least, you don't even have to buy new media when new technologies appear - every video I've ever purchased has been upgraded to HD, and then to 4K and HDR when they became available, all for free. And with Apple at least, "Family Sharing" lets all of your family members stream or download the movie to their devices as well.
Yes, it's possible that Apple or Amazon could take away movies that you own. But the public outcry would be massive. And I've been "owning" videos from Apple for 10+ years without issue, so I feel pretty comfortable with it at this point.
I do happen to still own a few DVD box sets from 15-20 years ago, and I haven't watched a single one in over a decade. I have no clue if they still work. I didn't even have a player for a long time, though my wife finally bought one a few years ago to be able to watch a Twin Peaks boxed set with deleted scenes that were not available in any other medium. As it stands, when I click the option to buy from a streaming service, I understand it doesn't mean it's forever, but I don't care. It just means I'm guessing I'll want to watch it more than once outside of the 48 hour rental window and it's worth the extra five bucks or so to do that. It doesn't mean I'm likely going to want to watch it again decades from now. Maybe it's just that I moved so much when I was younger, but the sheer number of DVDs and CDs I lost or accidentally destroyed over a decades greatly outweights what I have ever lost because a streaming service lost its license. And I'm glad to no longer need the external storage space.
It's already happening and nope there isn't a massive outcry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912
At least that would be honest.
No, it's the wrong word regardless, and in any event I seriously doubt that the average consumer actually understands that they're being lied to.
Anyway, the article makes good points.
That being said, I've never chosen the "buy" option on a digital streaming movie.
In practice this usually happens, but I'm not surprised nobody commits to it in writing.
I know in the two instances of video services I can think of shutting down in the UK, Sainsburys gave customers Ultraviolet/Google Play codes and refunds, and the BBC Store gave Amazon credit rounding up to the nearest £10, so I actually got more than I'd spent back.
I wonder how it works on the backend. When you "buy" a digital movie, does the publisher get a royalty? Then for the credit the provider could just eat that extra cost since it likely to be very rare. It still kind of sucks that the publisher can reap the royalty payments for all the "sales" and then turn around and pull the license.
I know it is acceptable to use the grocers' apostrophe with foreign words but with thief the forms thiefs and thieves are both arguably correct (see pre Tolkien elfs) but auto-correct does not agree.
The moment the rights are sold or transferred to another party, the rights should be dissolved and no protections afforded; whatsoever.
I think that some form of persistent medium might be useful, but the comparisons between, say, CDs, and digital music files, isn't really a "fair" one.
One of the biggest things about any physical media; whether it be vinyl record, CD, or even an SD card, is that the media has a finite lifetime. It may be a long lifetime, but the clock is ticking.
When we buy a CD, we aren't buying the music. We're buying the physical media on which the music has been placed. Tick-tick-tick... Eventually, the CD will die. At that point, we can't expect the music store to give us another CD for free. We have to buy it again.
I grew up in the age of vinyl. I brought the same album over, frequently, because the records wore out. I never even thought about it.
I could record the album on tape, and have a somewhat longer-lasting copy of the music, but that, too, would eventually die. I would often record the album, as soon as I got it, then play the tape, thereafter. It prolonged the life of the album.
If we buy digital art (music, photographs, movies, TV shows, etc.), we can do so in physical media (a locked DVD, for instance), or as direct digital, "virtual" media (streaming, downloading, etc.).
The first (DVD) can be copied, like I used to copy records, but the second (downloading, as opposed to streaming), could, in theory, save a full-quality copy of the art, in perpetuity. If you got it in a thumb drive, or SD card, then the media would have a finite lifetime, but the difference between that media, and, say, a CD, is that the copy would be direct digital-to-digital (I think most CD copies, these days, are also "pure digital"). That A/D conversion introduces some "lossiness," that makes the copy ever so slightly (or, in the case of cassette tapes, a lot more than "slightly") lesser in quality than the original.
It's not quite as black-and-white as people on either side like to make it.
For the record, I am not a fan of the ability to "take away" art that may be on physical media in the possession of a customer (as opposed to blocking access to art on some kind of external media, under the control of the publisher).
Things like Kindles and iPads are a sort of "grey area," where the device is the media, as opposed to a player for media that is introduced, externally.
I have no solution, but I'm not a fan of the extremist, over-simplified rhetoric that either side uses.
same goes with full-online games... you don't own the game, you just have the right to play on servers... when the server shuts down, you have nothing left
buying physical stuff may be the "old" way, but it's reliable stuff
We face incredible political oppression and extreme economic exploitation in the context of global capitalism melting down. There are more important things than whether your $10 Hercules purchase still works in 20 years.
By all means be angry about this, but try to connect it with things that have actual stakes in people's lives. This isn't even in the top 20 worst things Amazon does.
How you handle the small things is how you handle everything. I'm glad to see something breaking their trance. Let's hope they keep going!
I refuse to watch what could have been vanish...(e.g. napster, megaupload, what.cd and those kinds of complete medial-cultural archives). Heck, we're going the opposite direction, libraries are starting to get mud slung. There are too many incentives to shift that public perception, into libraries being bad; just a couple more generations.
sure, people whose job is to make this expensive productions involving lots of people need to earn a living somehow... it's an open problem but we need to look beyond capitalism to find an answer acceptable to all people, both those who come up with the ideas (who when coming up with them are greatly benefited by open access to all culture) and those living off the rent of the produced cultural artifact.
I eventually convinced my parents to upgrade to a 1.5Mbps cable connection when I was a senior in high school. That was when Oink's Pink Palace was a thing. I downloaded tons and tons of music and basically filled up the what was at the time absolutely massive 500gb hard drive with music. If something had a lot of people leeching I'd download it just to get my seed:leech ratio up. If I liked a single song from an artist I'd go and download their entire discography.
Unfortunately that all came crashing down when that hard drive failed and I had no backup (maybe smarter/richer kids had backup drives, but I did not). I realized then that the whole thing was silly. I hadn't listened to half the music I downloaded. It was more an addiction to collecting music rather than listening to it.
Eventually Spotify came around and that basically killed my desire to hoard music. I currently use Apple Music for the majority of my music listening needs. If there is something that I cannot find on there I might still download it. I've even added some songs with Apple's service to host your files on the cloud so I can listen to it on all my devices. I feel much freer to explore music rather than spend my time figuring out how to download and store it which is wonderful.
I know that movies are not the same as music and the services are frankly much worse. It doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to stream high quality music than it does to stream movies, especially with all the various technologies like Dolby and what not. Still, I do think that it is unnecessary to maintain massive collections of them in formats that are degrading sitting on your shelf or as digital versions taking up a ton of space and care to ensure data integrity. I know there are people that download movies and shows onto their home servers just to have them or just in case someone who has access to their plex wants to watch it.
DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life. If you take care of them they may last long enough for you to pass them on to your children, but you're just placing a burden of leaving behind a ton of things that aren't really important to you or them. Having recently gone through trying to clear my grandparents' house full of junk, I would not want to place that burden on my future children. If they are really meaningful to you then by all means, keep them. But I don't think most of them are. Maintain a small collection of the genuinely important ones. Make sure to get copies that aren't beholden to the whims of licensors/distributors... but maybe don't stress too much about the rest.
> than buying the movie
it's "then". probably. :)
VHS, DVD, BluRay. If you have the media and a compatible player, you can watch them. You can lend or sell them. That's not very different to a physical book.
Even video-games are a bit like that. It's true that you may lose access to updates the game received after the physical launch but as long as you have the media (BluRays, cartridges, whatever) you can still play them on a compatible console, lend or sell them.
With digital "purchases", you can only do what the platform allows you, for as long as they allow it, for as long as they exist.