Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible "forever"
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But on the other hand, there need to be protections here. Just because a company merges or gets bought, doesn't mean they should be able to end their guarantees.
What about if, to be legally allowed to license streaming content, companies were required by law to:
1) Specify a minimum duration available as part of the buy button and all other text using the term "buy" or "license"? E.g. "Buy for 5 years" or "License now (min. 10 years guaranteed)"
2) Require some kind of insurance/escrow/backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded)
In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I've even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.
https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-bus...
But the difference with physical media and streaming access is that it's actually legal to make a backup of physical media. It might be annoying or enthusiast-behavior to do so, but on the flip side, if a company finds out I'm making rips of streams, they'll at the least shut off my account (which includes access to the rest of the media) and quite possible throw a lawyer at me. Companies have done everything they can to nuke the idea of perpetuity.
Vanishingly few people are themselves ripping streams thanks to Widevine. They are just torrenting stuff.
BTW only the first "level" of widevine has been cracked as far as I can find, which is limited to lower quality streams.
Just about everyone archiving or "archiving" is torrenting.
As an aside, HDCP is broken in practice but frowned upon for archival, since it requires a re-encode, introducing generation loss.
HDCP 1.4 uses export-grade (broken) cryptography, the master keys are available on the public web. But you don't need to bother understanding the specifics, since just about any HDMI 1.4 sink you buy from China (whether it's a capture card or splitter) will strip HDCP 1.4 as a matter of course.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/4k-content-protection-stripper-beat...
If you don't believe me but also don't want to buy any hardware to test for yourself, search for "HDCP 2.2 splitter" on amazon and read the reviews (but beware of confused customers who aren't aware of the difference between HDCP 2.2 and 1.4).
Compliant converters can exists, but the upstream can tell that there is a downstream device using HDCP 1.x
Well, sort of. It's legal to have one, but the steps necessary to actually make it aren't always legal.
They should not be permitted to use both, because DRM amounts in practice to theft from the (eventual) public domain.
The way things are currently, the legal protections are stronger than the technical protections. I think it's much more realistic for legislation to be updated to allow copying for personal use, than it is for DRM to be banned outright.
This is not even interesting because in practice all of the DRM is broken. The actual problem is that we have tools that prohibit circumventing DRM even when the copy is not an infringement of copyright (e.g. fair use) and that prohibit distribution of circumvention tools even if they're not used for copyright infringement, e.g. because the same DRM system is being maliciously applied to works already in the public domain.
Or -- and this is the real reason this garbage is on the books -- the DRM is being used for anti-competitive purposes rather than to prevent copying. Because it doesn't prevent copying (evidence: all the content being on all the piracy sites), but it does prevent a legitimate competitor who actually cares about complying with the law from doing interoperability things that are not an infringement of copyright but are a violation of the DMCA.
The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.
I'm not even allowed to tell you how to do it.
That's why DRM protection for its own sake needs to get tossed. It's a massive overreach.
I'm just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it's degraded, they're upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with all of it, but probably most of it. So there's already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you're doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.
All you’re saying is that physical things aren’t eternal. Yes everybody knows that. Digital things aren’t generally eternal either. I accept that. But look at the timeframes.
If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
Remember to re-rip as lossless (e.g. flac) while you still have those CDs.
And I've certainly lost all the MP3's I had from 25 years ago to 15 years ago. God only knows what old hard drive they were on that got tossed. I hadn't listened to them in years, of course, once Spotify's library grew large enough.
I do still listen to those records from 20 years ago.
We are also not talking about you renting music. That's OK if you decide you'd rather rent your music and are OK to loose access to it at any point in time at which Spotify or a rights owner may pull it from rental access.
We are talking about music that someone bought to own, albeit with DRM because copying. That's OK too but then Sony can't pull something like this without valid outrage being directed at them. The expectation was that I can listen to this in 75 years if I so choose.
Books, comics, magazines and similar commonly last at least decades if not mistreated or stored badly.
Books that are hundreds of years old are a thing too, but I'm not personally sure if that's pretty standard for their lifespan.
It's trivial with backups to retain digital data forever. Even going just a bit further back in time books and vinyl can last a lifetime. What you are hanging your argument on is the lack of durability of optical disks a factor for ~40 years vs the inherent infinite durability of files forever after.
We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
The interests of rights holders is rarely aligned with the public. Its a multitude of barren fields that have never yielded anything because they are capable of buying art but not capable of making it. Even creatives have largely been compensated for their work many times over and are largely offering society bondage in return for nothing. More manure than fertile field. I suppose this is an overly long way to say fuck em.
Instead of quite frankly over complicated nonsense just don't legally let people use the term buy if the company can by any means whatsoever reclaim their rights EVER. They should have to use the word rent and give a duration and that duration should be enforced. The simplest way to enforce this is if you use the word buy you cannot encumber the PURCHASE with DRM whatsoever.
Current rights holders should have to provide a means to remove existing DRM. Failure to do so should imply forfeiting the entire purchase price. Rights holders that offer rentals and don't meet the duration should have to offer a prorated refund for the time stolen from users.
The sky wouldn't fall. People would still make movies, music, and write books.
Not only that, it's copyrights which are supposed to expire. The idea that physical media should be expected to degrade through the passage of time sooner than works will enter into the public domain is absurd.
The real problem is that circumvention tools are prohibited regardless of what you use them for, so then they use the same DRM system on works that are still under copyright and you nominally can't provide someone with tools to break the DRM on the ones in the public domain. (In practice people just ignore the law or distribute circumvention tools from servers in other countries.)
It's not completely obvious that it actually works this way. For example, if someone's "DRM system" is that the box it comes in is screwed shut and you're intended to use some I/O pins provided on the outside, does that mean a screw driver is a circumvention tool and therefore screw drivers are illegal? Obviously problematic if so, but in the reverse case where anyone else using the same system for something other than protecting a copyrighted work means anyone can distribute tools to circumvent it, third parties would just put public domain works behind the same DRM system as copyrighted ones so that anyone could distribute circumvention tools. The prohibition on circumvention tools is batshit crazy.
Sony took from the customer what they sold. That they legally "allowed" themselves to do this in fine print while telling their customers otherwise makes it even more scummy, not less.
The problem here is not physical things that are the medium for information, it's the information itself that somehow people want to control.
Copying it is illegal in some countries, even if it is purely for private use - the UK and some EU countries, probably others around the world. The UK tried to introduce a private use exception but it was only legal under EU law (this was pre-Brexit) if the copyright holders were compensated for it (which was not part of the UK law).
Why not ? People aren't forever either.
Unless a non-human entity can agree to one / it can be sold / it can be transferred to heirs ?
(I guess it would be better to call it "until your death", but I would guess marketing finds that phrasing too negative ?)
That sounds reasonable to me. :)
Demanding for ensuring another way for accessing the work in the same or similar way is fair enough. You lose nothing, they gain nothing, fairly balanced.
This is about ensuring it stays available from the streaming distributor, and how much time remains on the copyright doesn't really have anything to do with them. And even if the copyright expires next year, I still want to make sure I can keep streaming it for the next 10 or 15 years or whatever, if I buy it today.
What I expect as a part of deal was, to have access to that content without worrying about backups or storage spaces.
If they can't provide that, it have to be communicated upfront.
Just because a copyright expires doesn't mean somebody has given you free access.
Plenty of copyrighted works have simply been lost to the ages.
And they'll choose the crappiest provider they possibly can whose website (no app, presumably) only works in some ancient browser and is "down for maintenance" 50% of the time because that provider has the lowest costs and is thus willing to charge the least for it...
Not if you change the law to say so :)
When the company go bankrupt, somebody should represent the customer and get a fair share in what's left..
I like that restrictions abe decisions (such as law making) also come with consequences and responsibilities.
On one hand, that's kinda fair. Forever is pretty rough. On the other hand, companies probably shouldn't use the word forever when promising things then.
I don't like your solution, because there's legitimately movies I really only want to watch once (actually that's the majority of them), and I'm pretty sure companies are gonna use the need to provide it for X time as a reason to jack up the price. I think there's a legitimate place for limited time things, but the deal should be up front and you shouldn't be using the word "forever".
Also, kinda limits the notion of "buying" far beyond the standard english definition. "Buying" a ticket to a movie in a theater is perfectly legitimate, but doesn't really correspond to anything you're talking about. We all know we have to leave the movie theater afterwards and can't watch the movie again. This is fine, generally, because we know the deal going into it.
It seems like the solution here is to have companies be up front with the deal. I feel like the easiest way to do that is to hold a couple companies accountable for the language they use when promising something, and the rest of them will be very up front, very quickly.
And I don't mean bury it in a EULA, but the actual deal that gets filtered down to the human beings, just make it so that only provisions of the EULA that most customers know about are actually enforceable or something.
It’s not as though funimation advertised these leases as leases, they called them forever purchases lol. It’s outrageous these companies don’t advertise a period of time your purchase is good for and purchase insurance to ensure availability. They trick their customers with the fraudulent lie that they’re buying something and then screw them because they paid a lump sum up front and made themselves easy marks.
I’ve paid for Crunchyroll before but fuck doing that ever again when anime piracy sites like aniwave provide in many ways a better experience.
I just recently noticed that new Sony TVs come with a dedicated Crunchyroll button and wondered whether this streaming service is worth it? It seems like you don't think it is, correct?
Sony’s Crunchyroll is advertised as “supporting anime creators”, when you are trying to persuade people to pay for anime on moral grounds, and often do so successfully, it seems like a stupendously bad idea to put people in the position where supporting Crunchyroll means financially benefiting a company that just defrauded their customers. The PR win of making sure people didn’t lose access to their content would have been well worth it.
If you want to support anime creators AND consumers, buy merch, don’t give Sony your money. Don’t be a sucker getting guilt tripped by an evil corporation. At least with merch you actually own something.
Cancelled the trial after several minutes.
If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage in practice.
The only freedom that customers (=citizens) have is to engage into a cartel (=state) to impose their collective interests (=democratic choice) on companies by force (=law).
Companies are then free to refuse to engage with states which have such customer-protective clauses in their laws.
Yes, and you can found more of them, too.
> If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are?
Yes.
GoG (good old games) sells you games without DRM. There are others like that, too. Some companies, like id, open source many of their works.
You can buy DRM free music and videos.
You can still buy movies on DVDs, which still can't be disabled remotely. DVDs are very digital.
Yes, you can complain that there's no 'significant' movie marketplace without DRM. But you have to complain to and about your fellow consumers: their patronage ultimately decides which suppliers become 'significant'.
in this case using the term "buy" and in their ToS use the terms license / termination, might find the front and center "buy" term causes the license / termination terms to be nulled out, as the concept of "buy" doesn't fit with the concept of "license" and "termination".
There are hundreds-of-years-old annuities that are still paying interest.
"A living artifact from the Dutch Golden Age: Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest"
https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-dutch-golde...
They won't be and that's your problem.
Though in a sense this problem is already solved. If a company promises "forever" but doesn't back it up with a surety bond or endowment guarantee of some sort, then you should treat it with great skepticism.
In the meantime, consumers are free to litigate under breach of contract, false advertising or other appropriate doctrine.
In this case, it was never really "forever" at all, as the Terms stated:
Funimation can “without advance notice… immediately suspend or terminate the availability of the Service and/or content (and any elements and features of them), in whole or in part, for any reason."
They might already have that kind of fineprint in there somewhere?
> 2) Require some kind of insurance/escrow/backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded)
That's a nice idea, but I think customers should also be allowed to opt out of that requirement. Why should I be forced to pay for that insurance, when I don't need it? (And, of course, that's the situation we have today: companies can legally license you content with our without that kind of insurance.)
This is kind of ridiculous in this context. The content is not really at risk of being lost. Did the service go away even though you were supposed to have permanent access? Okay, now it should be legal for you to download it from The Pirate Bay.
Why not till the end of life of the customer plus 95 years?
Seems reasonable.
With inflation that is not enough - the minimum acceptable refund should be the price to buy the same product at the time of the refund.
> In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I've even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.
That's why copyright law in many countries allows you to make backups for personal use. This isn't possible with streaming services so the service must provide the equivalent.
Words have power.
“Lease this content for 10 years” is a deal that makes perfect sense, even if the sellers might hate it
What Sony is doing here is shitty, but it's a long way from removing access to digital content which people have paid for, which is what the title suggests.
Fire, theft, misplaced/lost, water damage, tiny kid damages the disc, so on and so forth. Keeping something sometimes is out of our control.
>... but it's a long way from removing access to digital content which people have paid for, which is what the title suggests.
They're literally pulling content they paid for. They bought this knowing they would get a physical copy and streaming access. They paid for both, and now part of that "both" is being taken away.
/s
In the same way, going to an half empty theater to watch the show without paying would not be stealing according to your definition (you’re not taking the place of a paying customer anyway), yet it is a form of stealing too.
No you're not. A pirated copy is not a lost sale. Many people wouldn't interact with some media/software at all if they hadn't pirated it. Linux on the desktop would probably be more popular too.
Further, none of the physical resources 'of the owner' are being consumed past whomever first liberated the data. Hopefully obtained as an otherwise legitimate purchase / rental / access. A copy of a copy...
Copyright infringement on the other hand...
Web browser userscript/extension to change the terminology on purchase pages of major vendors?
They should be forced to commit to a specific time period that the rental is available and failing to do so is considered fraud. Failing to list the time period is considered equivalent to perpetuity and they should be forced to provide the content in perpetuity, regardless of their circumstances.
Oh, and if it seems unfair to do so and they don't like it, they're perfectly free to not sell that content at all. It's a free country right?
Transparency is the only way to make sure there’s no bullshit for the customer. Also maybe they would need to adjust prices, as they’re no way I’m gonna pay full price for a 1 year license (which is effectively what I’m paying for).
Maybe it’s hard to sell, but it’s the truth
This is a large part of my gripe with the way things are now. I cannot make an informed purchase decision if I do not know what exactly it is I am purchasing; And when the goods that I 'purchased' can be arbitrarily taken away, it is impossible for me to have ever made an informed decision about the purchase.
For example, say that in this case, you bought one of these Blu-Rays with the digital code for Christmas last year, just two months ago, because your friend who bought it five years ago recommended it. They got to use their digital copy for five years, you only got two months, despite having agreed to purchase the _same exact product_. If the package said "free digital copy until March 2024" then there's not that much problem, you got exactly what you paid for, and you were fully aware of what it was that you were buying. But if the package said "free digital copy" then you might rightfully assume that you'll get the same amount of use from the digital copy that your friend did.
As it stands right now though, you have no guarantee whatsoever for how long the digital copy will remain accessible, so you're in effect paying for some nebulous vision of a digital copy in the hope that it materializes for long enough to make use of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39308520
Take-Two shutting down servers for games when users still have unused “in game currencies”.
> "joyriding is not considered to be theft because the intent to "permanently deprive" the vehicle's owner of the vehicle cannot be proven"
Ex: When someone starts playing a pirated copy at home, it doesn't cause their neighbors' copy of the same movie to become unusable for the duration.
That's rather different from the definition you're using, where "losing out" is much more expansive, including hypothetical decreases in potential future sales of new copies that haven't yet been manufactured.
If I trespass into someone's house, it's invading their personal space. If they're in the house, it's invasive to them and alarming and would probably make them afraid that I intend violence. While in the house, I may damage things or cause disruption.
However, if I use a device to create an alternate universe with a perfect copy of their house, without them inside (since it's my own private universe), and then I enter the house and do whatever in it, I'm not disrupting them at all. I'm not inside their house, I'm in my own copy of it in my own universe, and they don't even know. It doesn't affect them at all.
The disruption the trespass causes is of their sole right to license that copyright.
archaic•literary commit an offense against (a person or a set of rules).
But the word doesn't matter so much as the intent. If enough people just copy your product you cannot sell it. Or worse, others will sell it for pennies because they didn't spend any revenue so any money is profit. That's what's trying to be prevented.
If you disagree, then tell me who owns the number 2.
Piracy is more like retelling someone a book you've read than joyriding.
Or you can be like my friend who was moving to chicago, and we were at the bar the night before saying good by. Look up at the tv and lo and behold there is his car in a police chase. Could have been any car but nope his stuff was in the back window. Stolen from outside the bar. In a high speed chase. Then we watched as they took aim at and t-boned a cop car. So the car was now totaled and a crime scene. Took him several weeks to get his stuff back and actually be able to move and start his job up in chicago.
Do you know what piracy doesn't give you? It lacks the torrential downpour of ads and other garbage that are relentlessly jammed in your face. I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. For example, I don't need a rotating billboard of ads on my homescreen when the hardware is barely powerful enough to keep things running. I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years.
I'm going to hack it and if I lose access to legitimate content, so be it.
In Canada, we have SportsNet for NHL broadcasts. It's terrible. Pirate streams are better (video) quality. If it comes to it, I'll pay more than SportsNet costs if I can get and ESPN stream out of the US. Think about that for a second. I'm willing to pay more than what they're charging, but the current product is so bad I refuse to give them a dollar.
I got one of these too. It's fantastic: I love it! Well, compared to the competition anyway. The reason is simple: GoogleTV is Android, so you can install Android apps on it. Specifically, you can install SmartTubeNext, a FOSS YouTube viewer that blocks ads and includes SponsorBlock. You can also install Jellyfin to have streaming access to any media on your PC or other server.
That's a big thing to ignore. Of course every company wants to be able to serve all media for a low price (and for zero labor costs). If you need to pay for every license you own, for people to maintain your website, to maintain customer support, to translate media, for the servers to transmit media from etc. Then costs are going to add up immensely.
Pirates don't have to worry about any of that. The only catch here is that pirates are enough of a minority that they still eat their cake. If it gets too rampant, everyone loses. Tragedy of the "commons" (despite this being the exact opposite of a commons).
I've bought a Philips tv some 11 years ago that come with some custom-tied linux distro and bunch of smart apps - the usual stuff: weather, yt, netflix, facebook, some games and of course none of these work nowadays. Luckily there were no ads anywhere in the UI - yet, because that was just about to happen in 2-3 years.
And no, money is not stolen because they never had my money to begin with
My family was impacted, hundreds of dollars of legitimately purchased music files were mostly useless. Fortunately, there was a way to replace those music files (cough BitTorrent cough). Seriously, DRM just compels people into copyright infringement. I won't touch anything DRM with a barge-pole anymore. BandCamp has a good DRM-free model but it's only really used by a few small-time artists and bands.
There are so many anime streaming sites out there, and word goes out pretty quickly when one gets killed and two others get up.
Copyrights holders are losing the whack-a-mole game, they know it and are doubling down. Quite funny to observe how short-sighted and denying-reality [supposed] adult people can be.
I guess if people are fine reverting back to the 90's where they can barely share new shows with potential new friends, it's a better future. Sounds like a good way to ruin a lot of the respect slowly gained over the decades though.
Obviously no business wants to roll over and just die, but if they fight super dirty and when their word is obviously not worth a dime then the consumers' reaction is predictable, no?
Will it happen here? Probably not. Anime isn't that respected. But there's also a lot of rich and very invested anime fans so I wouldn't be completely surprised if someone was bored and angry enough to sue on their own.
I personally don't care about anime, but I've spent a lot of money on other digital products through Sony, and would like to continue to do so, with confidence.
We need to be clear about this now, that a company can't just weasel out of digital purchases with the fine print.
Craftsman owes me a torque wrench; they promised a lifetime warranty.
Except Craftsman is now dead. The lifetime of the company has expired.
Expecting otherwise is delusional. Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?
While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.
It's the stuff of horror stories when your ex takes "but you said you'd never leave me and you'd always love me forever" to its most literal extreme. The expectation is irrational and unreasonable.
A bit more brutal one that happens quite a lot in more traditional countries: "I really want my relatives to leave me alone about marrying and having kids so here, I am marrying you as a ticket to another life that I'll abandon once I am reassured I won't be deprived of inheritance".
It can honor the agreement, or it can die. We can and should make sure the latter happens if they choose not to do the former.
Learned helplessness does not need your advocacy.
I think some European court denied their request to weasel out of it.
Letting people download the content DRM-free for a period of time while sunsetting the service wouldn't bleed them dry either.
It's not even a mistake Sony made (unlike Allianz or whichever firm it was), it was a deal that they decided to renege on after taking money simply because they can.
Can you actually shed contractual obligations through mergers/sales of a business?
Or do you need to do trickery like selectively buying assets, and hope a judge lets you get away with that?
Also, bankruptcy causes anyone with such an obligation to stand in line with other creditors.
We'd probably need a good regulatory body to investigate M&As though, to make sure some company doesn't split itself in half, with the good parts in one half and the bad parts in another, and then sell off the good part while letting the bad one fold.
If the sale was at an honest, market price, what would be the problem? The seller is fairly compensated and can use the money received to service any obligation.
Bankruptcy has something called "clawback" where sales or payments by debtors within some time window before the declaration can potentially be "clawed back". There are defense against this, included the mentioned time limits. So one approach in splitting up a company is not leaving the debt burdened part too burdened, so it doesn't immediately fail.
There have been a bunch of clawback cases filed in the FTX crypto exchange bankruptcy.
I wonder if there are other eponymous products which have similarly outlived the company that created them?
"Craftsman" was never a company. It was a trademark under which Sears sold tools which they hired various tool manufacturers to produce for them.
Black and Decker bought the trademark from Sears in 2017, but don't use the trademark themselves; instead, they licensed the name right back to Sears for 15 years for free (that license will expire in 2032), and Sears (now Sears/Kmart) is still using it the way they used to; getting tool manufacturers to produce tools for them and selling them to consumers under the Craftsman badge.
So it depends on how you want to look at it? Sears never actually made the tools themselves, and don't own the trademark any more, but they're still the ones using the trademark and they're still selling tools made in the same way as they did before. So.. nothing's really changed? Except that the ownership of the name has been transferred to a different company.
Letting companies discharge debts and obligations at will, instead of through bankruptcy, has bad consequences. It means contracts with them aren't worth the paper they're printed on, if they can shed obligations when they wish (but keep what you paid them).
You get good will for your brand, and a person who is very happy in your store at that moment.
Simply Brilliant.
You can make a claim against their estate.
> While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency.
Courts have generally seen things differently, except in cases of bankruptcy.
Did they? I have two Craftsman torque wrenches from the 1990s when they had lifetime warranties on tools, but as I remember, the torque wrenches were specifically exempted from this.
A better example would be a Craftsman socket wrench.
Letting companies drop contractual obligations through labelling shell games is not ideal.
The company that metaphoically changed its name but is still selling torque wrenches. Or the parent who bought two torque wrench companies and had the power to gracefully merge them together but instead cut them in half. They still inherit the contract after all
>It's the stuff of horror stories when your ex takes "but you said you'd never leave me and you'd always love me forever" to its most literal extreme.
sure but a SO isn't a company, who does indeed have a contractual agreement to "server you for X time". X time with many stipulations, but I guess lawyers will argue over that. They may be right in an absolute sense, but a judge definitely takes the power dynamic into account with cases like this.
With each iteration of video optical disc, industry got more ridiculous.
(Started with DVD, with CSS nonsense, unskippable parts, and threatening screens with police state overtones. Then someone said "How can we make this even more consumer-hostile, and be total jerks about it", and thus all the garbage of Blu-ray. That was pretty hard to top with Blu-ray 4K, but sounds like someone said "Hold my beer...")
The SGX security was recently cracked so I suspect this requirement is going away. The other platforms can easily play the underlying video format, its just the DRM that was preventing it.
[1]:https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12296-full_aacsess_exposing_and_...
With a monthly or yearly subscription, at least you can calculate how much you're spending per unit of time. For a 'lifetime' you have no idea how long that single purchase will be spread across.
Of course that’s not really relevant for digital assets like movies or anime, which I want to own, not rent.
Yes it is not the latest album and it is some work to rip and organize, but I think it makes me enjoy the music more.
If I buy a book, and later find it missing on the shelf because the bookstore owner took it back and burned it, it's not a matter of refund.
It's theft.
This kind of analogy and language has been used to punish those who break copyright laws (particularly, by Sony, which also influenced these laws).
That sword better cut both ways then.
The executives should get prison terms for the corresponding number of counts of theft, just like copyright infringers did, and their victims should be compensated for damages, not what they merely paid.
Unfortunately, we only have the law, and the courts regularly demonstrate that the law has little to do with truth or justice.
Another solution is to allow a drm free download if the service goes down. This likely won’t fly with rights holders but something has to change.
(d) Disclaimer. Crunchyroll does not guarantee that any content (including without limitation Crunchyroll Content or User Submissions) will be made available through the Site or Services, continuously or at all. WHILE CRUNCHYROLL IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO DO SO, CRUNCHYROLL RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REMOVE AND PERMANENTLY DELETE ANY CONTENT FROM THE SITE OR SERVICES WITHOUT NOTICE, AND FOR ANY REASON CRUNCHYROLL DEEMS SUFFICIENT.
And instead it went to server and loads of disks, for a Jellyfin server.
And you know what? I 'pierat' and I keep all my files. When the money grubbers can get that through their thick skull, I'll start buying.
But until that time, this scam 'purchase' is a shitty rental.
Usually, rescans happen at night 12a local time. But if you manually put new content on a library, you have to manually scan.
I also do that when I download mega-content packages. They're usually not adhering to Jellyfin's methodology of content index. So I fix it, and rescan. And once the scan indicates done, it's usually all good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/drmgraveyard/comments/1amdv5q/sony_...
Once you give up control, you never get it back.
Sony is deleting things you paid for fair and square and there is nothing you can do about it.
> 7.2 Removal or Unavailability of Content > For purchased content: (a) if the content becomes removed or unavailable during the first five years after your purchase, you will be entitled to a refund or a reasonable replacement; or (b) if the content becomes removed or unavailable following such five year period, and you are not able to download a copy of the affected content before it becomes unavailable (if applicable), then we may, at our option, offer you either a reasonable replacement of the content or a full or partial refund of the price of the content.
This reminds me the cloud is sold as convenience, which it delivers, but not permanence.
The cloud always costs someone, the internet always costs someone.
Whatever I want to keep a copy of I must maintain a physical copy of.
I haven’t bought many dvds lately but this is a reminder it might not be a bad idea.
Streaming is fine but people need to know it can change any moment and to have no faith in something being on that platform for all time, even if the company insists on “forever”.
There's no rational reason to respect property rights of people who don't respect yours.
‘Power to the people Coz’ - Martin Bishop
Yes, there are other avenues, but legally my options are starting to become limited.
Here in Germany it's basically impossible to legally access manga and anime, and you will actually receive multiple thousand euro fines if you torrent without a VPN (or sometimes even stream if it turns out the streaming service uses a p2p connection, which hit a fair few people)
People got excited because music was such a "success" story with cheap access to almost everything, and frankly gaming isn't too bad either (though we can still name a lot of horror stories in that case), but this has absolutely not materialised for visual media
Any data being held by an entity that isn't you has to be considered temporary.
Personally I’m digital only but I buy everything on sale at >65% off. There are enough sales and trackers to get everything on sale given time. If one day it goes away then all be upset but not surprised. But it will be the last dollar that mega corporation gets from me.
They need your money more than you need to give it to them.
I as a layman see this basically as the same thing so I assume we'll get a similar result (and I'm probably wrong about this)
Trade secrets and trademarks are supposed to be forever, and both copyrights and patents seem to last almost forever. The US Congress can legislate those to expire the instant a company has been found to not live by their "forever" and indefinite promises.
I would love to see the people who killed their Zune archive lose all their IP.
I don't know if people are actually building large libraries of funimation content, but if I were one of them I'd be pissed.
And money is not even the issue. My "unreasonable" request is that I get to keep what I buy.
Piracy offers me this. It also offers me a free product, but that's mostly irrelevant. I have a gigantic bandcamp library precisely because they let me download drm-free files (but even they pull up stuff; that's ok, I have my local files).
Pirate everything. Rip everything. Keep backups.
A digitally signed PDF with the license would be just fine.
Funimation End of Services (funimation.com)
This situation seems like it will further devolve as it is a fantastic business model and is making rich people a lot of money. I don’t see how we close Pandora’s box because fixing the problem of usury and the negative impact it has on free people is older than modern society.
Like... yes? I know. That's how DVDs work. It's what the first "D" stands for. The DVD version is a digital version.
Who came up with that phrasing? And why did whoever hired them get someone who apparently doesn't understand how DVDs work to do it?