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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

The only reason it existed for the last year was they didn't want to negotiate to move licenses to Crunchyroll, so I suspect the remaining Funimation-but-not-Crunchyroll content is going to just have its licenses left expire rather than move over if they haven't moved it already.

_However_, they're also not bothering to migrate purchased digital copies over, so people are losing access to things they've paid to "own".

> What is going to happen to my digital copies?

> We understand that you may have concerns about your digital copies from Funimation. These Digital copies available on Funimation were a digital access to the content available on the DVDs or Blu-rays purchased.

> Please note that Crunchyroll does not currently support Funimation Digital copies, which means that access to previously available digital copies will not be supported. However, we are continuously working to enhance our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience. We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll.

Remember that when e.g. Ubisoft wants you to be comfortable not owning things...

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I think Cory Doctorow nailed the formulation here:

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.

Otherwise, if there are no negative consequences for a company deleting everyone's purchases, what will stop them from doing it every year just to boost profits?

It's pithy, and I certainly wish more things were sold instead of licensed, but by this logic anything in a museum is also free for the taking.

No. Copyright infringement is not legally theft.

Correct, penalties for copyright infringement are far more draconian than theft.

But a museum doesn’t ask you to “buy” an exhibit… The misleading aspect of digital “ownership “ is in the use of the word buy.

A museum isn't offering a purchase.

Also, this is the same old false equivalence - taking a copy of something is NOT the same as taking the original, where only one instance of an item can exist and taking it deprives the original owner of their possessional.

If the Museum originally got it from someone who stole it from somewhere else, there's a reasonable argument to be made.

James Acaster's comedy bit on the british museum comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY&pp=ygUcamFtZXMgY...

You do not own anything someone or something (companies) else has the legal ownership and rights to. This is something way different that distribution rights as well.

They 'may' grant you a license. Depending on the terms and conditions that license may bind you to all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo and stuff. This applies to games, music, movies, books, other forms of media, etcetera.

Why this is such a complex thing? Because companies made it as complex as possible to avoid easy legal battles, taxes and other things related to money. The more complexity, the more time it will cost before someone else finds out there is something wrong. And by that time, the company or the responsible people may be long gone. Hurray for money.

Piracy is not stealing. You do not steal anything. You bypass legal ownership, dsitribution rights and licenses by pirating. Which is illegal and punishable in most location on this happy planet. If they find out. And want to do something about it. Or can do something about it. Complexity is not a patented idea. Many people can play that game.

I do hope in the Star Trek universe they had no licensed copyright system on their transporters. Your freshly beamed you may not be your property anymore. That would make a fun SNL sketch where Picard has to fight the lawyers after beaming to some planet.

If the license is not tied to a physical object that you can safekeep, then it has none of the traditional benefits of ownership as you can only exercise your license through a stack that others make available. That's the real issue here.

I know. Unless the company has made a perpetual accessible portal/download thing where you can obtain your licensed product forever, it's doomed to fail sometime.

Mediums like discs (cd, dvd, blu-ray, etc) are usually defined as a assistance to make it easy for the consumer to actually use the licensed content (play the movie, install the game). However, these disc deteriorate over time and you may end up with a license, but no data.

The issue for me is: The button you click in the online store says: "Buy". So you bought it.

The industry can make up whenever bullshit "license agreement" they want and they can even corruptly get the government to take their side in disputes, but the small print can't totally negate the big print. And you can't steal something you already bought.

That said: I personally buy everything I can on disc because I'm never going to win this, haha

Ok, but you don't own the actual thing. If I buy a copy of Star Wars on DVD I obviously don't own the movie itself. I only own a copy and the right to use that copy in certain ways; typically personal & fair use.

Historically, producing the copies themselves was generally so expensive that it made whatever licensing access essentially inconsequential. The media itself was inherently a perpetual license.

As we have moved towards the availability of cheaper and cheaper copies, this is no longer the case. Copies of a work can now be so cheap and easy to create/distribute that simple possession of a copy of the work being equivalent to possession of a license no longer makes sense.

The objectively correct way to handle this is to establish a shared cooperative system of identification and proof-of-purchase.

For example: I should be able to buy a regular perpetual personal use license for a certain work in a certain format (ie: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope—1997 Special Edition) from the owner of that work (currently Disney) then present that license or proof-of-purchase to any provider (ie: Netflix) to receive a copy of that work in that format.

> Your freshly beamed you may not be your property anymore

It always seemed creepy how transporters annihilate your original copy only to construct a remote clone who inherits all aspects of your life.

I was always amazed they have this machine that can deconstruct and reconstruct any form of matter into data, even actually living and moving matter, to great distances at will and they have these weird problems in the episodes.

Construction problems? Population problems? Food and water shortage? Need more dilithium crystlals? Need more transporter machines? Copy/paste the data and just beam the stuff to where you want it.

https://help.funimation.com/hc/en-us/articles/23103586580244...

> We understand that you may have concerns about your digital copies from Funimation.

https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Announcer_voice_lines#Chamber...

> The Enrichment Center respects your right to have questions or concerns about this policy.

> Remember that when e.g. Ubisoft wants you to be comfortable not owning things...

Ubisoft took that profitable tactic from media companies (who have been wildly successful at using it. Who even questions the fact that music is licensed?) who ironically got it from software. I can’t remember who got the idea first, but Microsoft used the licensing model almost exclusively and that model hit the market hard to take away individual rights and give those rights to the companies. I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone on HN that those long “Click to Agree” documents are almost all licenses but there are people out there that don’t know that there was a time those didn’t exist and tangibly owning things was a core value of western culture.

Music is the perfect counterexample to what you're saying. It's the only remaining digital platform where it's still possible to buy legal, DRM-free copies of digital files, which you can download to your own machine and thus ensure you retain access.

Ebooks, audiobooks, movies, games all work like you say. (Less so with games, at least there are alternatives like GOG. But mainstream games are by and large not available without DRM.) Even podcasts are going that direction. But music, somehow, inexplicably, remains DRM-free even with all the mainstream labels.

The explanation is that CDs came along before DRM was a thing. The industry could not break compatibility with over a 15 years' worth of CD players, especially since people had them in their cars, etc. The home playing software always had the ability to rip CDs; you could do that long before iTunes was a thing. It was only a matter of time before record labels gave up on DRM.

Now, since CSS was cracked, DVDs are, in practice, no harder to rip. But a company like Apple can't ship a DVD ripper in iTunes.

> The industry could not break compatibility with over a 15 years' worth of CD players, especially since people had them in their cars, etc.

Sure, not at first. But how long has it been since most people interacted with a CD player now? Most teenagers haven't, ever.

Yet here we are, music is still being sold on CDs.

Not that I want to put the music industry on some kind of pedestal as a paragon of virtue in the digital age, but it's certainly odd and noteworthy.

> Now, since CSS was cracked, DVDs are, in practice, no harder to rip. But a company like Apple can't ship a DVD ripper in iTunes.

DVD quality is not really of sufficient quality for most consumers today, though. Meanwhile, CD quality continues to match or exceed modern streaming services.

> Sure, not at first. But how long has it been since most people interacted with a CD player now? Most teenagers haven't, ever.

Yeah, but it's a lot harder to switch from a DRM-less digital download format to a DRMed one. Who in their right mind would choose the DRM store, then?

Oh, but this is also sort of what they did, because Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot have DRM. Not that it's unbreakable or anything. But they have it — for streaming.

> DVD quality is not really of sufficient quality for most consumers today, though. Meanwhile, CD quality continues to match or exceed modern streaming services.

Yes, but I was talking about 20 years ago. DeCSS had come out in 1999, but libdvdcss was released in 2004. It has been pretty easy to rip a DVD for someone in the know since then.

Much like CDs, Blu-rays (especially 4K Blu-rays) are of better quality than you'll find on most streaming platforms. Blu-rays are pretty much rippable, too, but far fewer people have a Blu-ray drive, and most people don't care.

There has been plenty of attempts at copy protection on CDs. Some more successful than others.

Digital-only downloads of music was also one of the early adopters of DRM. But one of the problems is that music needed to be portable in a way that games and movies weren’t (yet). Then as smart phones, WiFi and mobile internet took off, digital downloads got replaced with services like Spotify. These days most music consumption is done via streaming services.

What helps with music, though, is the core group of audiophiles who keep CD and vinyl. They aren’t going to be around forever though. I used to be one and even I’ve given into the convenience of Spotify in recent years. I can count on 1 hand the number of times I’ve played vinyl in the last 5 years. And I threw out almost all of my CDs when I last moved house.

> There has been plenty of attempts at copy protection on CDs. Some more successful than others.

Yes, but they're fundamentally incompatible with the CD standard.

I'm not denying that digital downloads for music were the first big use of DRM. But in that case, it was perhaps even more futile than in other applications.

> Yes, but they're fundamentally incompatible with the CD standard.

Not really “incompatible”. More like hacks around the standard.

If they were incompatible then CD players wouldn’t have been able to play those CDs.

> I'm not denying that digital downloads for music were the first big use of DRM. But in that case, it was perhaps even more futile than in other applications.

It’s easy to say that in hindsight but there was a point in time where it felt like DRM in music would eventually win out.

Ironically it was the subscription model that saved us here. Because those that wanted convenience went with services like Spotify. And those that wanted to persistent copies stuck with CDs and vinyl.

> I used to be one and even I’ve given into the convenience of Spotify in recent years.

What convenience? Unless you're constantly going out to listen to new music, which most people aren't, Spotify is a raw deal indeed. You can easily stream the music you own through various means, and you don't have to pay a monthly sub to do it.

Technically you don’t have to pay for a monthly sub for Spotify either ;-)

Also, it’s not a raw deal. In 1995 a single CD cost about $30 in today’s money (look up old Best Buy ads and you’ll find $16-18 CDs). Buying a Spotify subscription is equivalent cost to buying only 4 albums per year in 1995. It would be very easy to listen to more new music than that every year.

If you want proof, look at revenue charts for the music industry. Streaming music still hasn’t reached the previous level of revenue generated in the pre-Internet era when you adjust for inflation, despite the global population increasing significantly since then.

You're asking about Spotify, but the situation is the same with Apple Music (the streaming service, not the purchase-digital-files thing).

I have an enormous ripped collection of digital music from my similarly enormous collection of CDs. Just managing that is a hassle, especially when it comes to curating the subset of things on my phone -- and on my wife's phone.

I initially signed up for Apple Music MOSTLY to give my wife easy access to whatever she wanted on her phone without requiring her to go to the office, plug her phone into the media computer, etc. And honestly, for $12-15 a month, I'll make that deal. It's a good deal for ME, too.

The other fun thing about at least the Apple offering here is that they have a "matching" service built in, so if you have some random local bands in your iTunes library, YOU CAN STILL ACCESS THOSE VIA APPLE MUSIC because AM will upload them into their cloud and allow you to access them because you have them in your local library. This is super cool; I don't think anyone else does this.

And yes, finally, the new music discovery thing is pretty great, too. I credit access to an all-you-can-eat music service with helping me stay curious and interested in discovering new music in my 50s. If I read an article about some random band, and think "gee, I wonder what they sound like?", well, I can play it right now. That's powerful.

> so if you have some random local bands in your iTunes library, YOU CAN STILL ACCESS THOSE VIA APPLE MUSIC because AM will upload them into their cloud and allow you to access them because you have them in your local library. This is super cool; I don't think anyone else does this.

YouTube Music has this feature too - my library still has stuff I uploaded over 10 years ago that I can stream on my phone.

Spotify has a local files mode that used to be pretty good and allowed for syncing devices, but they've crippled it, made it harder to use, and hidden all references to it deep in submenus (at least this was the state of things the last time I used Spotify, it's been a couple years since I subscribed, I wouldn't be shocked if they've killed it entirely by now).

You’re talking about cost, not convenience.

I have hundreds of CD's that I bought that have games on them. If it had starforce it was a good chance it was an UbiSoft game. That company has always been very hostile to copying of its products. Especially to its paying customers.

Good 'ol Ubisoft CEO calling his customers thieves.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/75408/ubisoft-says-piracy-...

There's an interim here between CDs and streaming that you partially mentioned, and the one that fit between them chronologically. Digital jukeboxes, like MP3 players and harddrive home media systems. Although the modern equivalent would be a micro SD card and a phone. Buy two micro SD cards for redundancy, update your library as you get new songs. If you get direct downloads you get thousands of songs, many of which aren't available from streaming services, and nothing can take them away from you aside from time, physical media theft, or data corruption. It's a tradeoff of frontloading the effort versus dealing with it on the fly.

Steve Jobs' Apple fought for it. They leveraged iPod dominance to force the industry to swallow lawful ripping through iTunes, then 128kbps Internet download with infinite re-download rights and weak FairPlay DRM, then 256kbps without DRM few years later. The industry resisted with everything and lost, in the process road-killing Sony Walkman brand as well. The music world wasn't a paradise from the beginning and by itself.

It may be DRM-free, but it is very much locked down from a legal perspective.

- Cannot have licensed music in any public video without re-licensing it for that specific use. (This is almost transparent now but we had a time where a viral video would get huge legal problems for having even a song in the background. Not to mention Hollywood productions)

- Cannot sample music and release new music from it without navigating dense legal relationships. Same with releasing mixes

- Cannot play background music in your business without licensing it

- Cannot legally do a performance where you lip-sync to someone else’s song (yes it happens esp at drag bars, but this is a “don’t get too famous and we’ll look the other way” situation)

- Cannot even legally play popular music for a party if it’s considered a “public event” (two common “or” criteria are 1. Charging for admission 2. The party is out in the open.). This is extended to places like yoga studios, aerobic classes, dance classes, conferences, presentations, fundraisers, and wedding receptions.

> But music, somehow, inexplicably, remains DRM-free even with all the mainstream labels

Music cannot be as profitable without exposure, and exposure was not possible with DRM (people hated the experience of it)

I thought the intent was, "We should make the service trustworthy enough that customers are comfortable not owning things"

e.g. Lots of gamers trust Steam. I don't hear of high-profile games going missing from Steam. And unlike a console or streamed game, at least you can back it up and try to crack the DRM in the future. Can't say that about basically any video platform.

In this case you actually did get a physical copy, the digital one was just a bonus. Nothing stopped you from selling the physical copy and keeping the digital one either.

Generally when a game goes missing from Steam you can still play it, they just stop selling new copies due to licensing agreements on things like music expiring.

But The Crew is making news recently for planning to pull the plug on their servers. This will also kill its single-player components because Ubisoft are dicks who made the single-player still require servers.

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-crew-delisted-from-all-digi...

My household has simple rules: no Ubisoft, no Sony, no Blizz/Activision.

It helps that all three have been getting progressively worse over the years.

Just out of curiosity, why Sony? Only negative thing I can recall hearing about them is blocking cross play to protect their console lead, which didn't seem too unreasonable to me.

The Funimation shutdown is Sony

Going back further, installing a rootkit on to customer computers to prevent ripping audio CDs

I think there was a Discovery snafu as well? Like if you bought titles from the Discovery Channel on PSN, you don’t have access to those anymore. But I do think Sony should get a pass here. Or you have to blanket ban all digital goods but that seems detrimental. I understand the feeling though, as I too don’t buy anything digital outside of Steam.

>Like if you bought titles from the Discovery Channel on PSN, you don’t have access to those anymore.

That was cancelled.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011168/sony-playstatio...

I know somebody who has been boycotting them since the rootkit scandal

That was such a terrible move. For people who don’t know: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

Well, there was the rootkits, the carpet-pull with regards to the PS3 and OS compatibility promises, the lawsuits against geohot, the SWAT raids and lawsuits against graf_chokolo, and now the digital library shit that's going on with Funi just adds to the history.

The games regularly get pulled from Steam by the publishers, usually when a license for some ingame music expires, but the customers who already own the game typically retain the access to it.

The latest high profile case was the removal of Spec Ops: The Line just last week. Which is especially troubling, because it’s an important part of the gaming history, and it happened with no warning.

Wow, wtf. The music industry really is a disease.

How can a license to use a song in a game lead to the game not being sold any more.

Why would you ever use such a song in a game…

Especially for a AAA release, licensing music seems like little to be gained.

Music games (eg Rockband), I can understand. People want to play music they know. There are very few musical tie-ins in a video game that seemingly make the difference.

GTA Vice City is one where I can think of where the 80s soundtrack makes the game!

I always found it odd how VC and SA had much more recognizable licensed music, while 4/5 went with less known stuff.

Or maybe I'm getting old :)

I think it's also why games with licensed vehicles are way stricter on how they're presented now (no damage models, etc.). As the big brands became more away of video games as a big thing, they held closer control and pricing compared to it being "ehhh, whatever" remnant income

All of the music used in that game is used so perfectly. The game opens to its title screen with an American flag being flown upside down, with Jimi Hendrix shredding out a scratchy, distorted, echo-y, far-off rendition of The Star Spangled Banner on his electric guitar.

Honestly, they should've licensed more music. Could've used Free Bird too.

Here's a list I found of the non-original songs used in Spec Ops: The Line:

01. Jimi Hendrix - Star Spangled Banner

02. Mogwai - R U Still in 2 It

07. Deep Purple - Hush

09. The Black Angels - Bad Vibrations

10. The Black Angels - The First Vietnamese War

14. Giuseppe Verdi - Dies irae

24. Mogwai - Glasgow Mega-Snake

25. Inner Circle - Bad Boys

26. Black Mountain - Stormy High

27. Martha And The Vandellas - Nowhere to Run

30. Björk - Storm

36. Jimi Hendrix - 1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)

37. Groove Addicts - Shellshock

38. Methodic Doubt Music - Half The Man

39. Alice In Chains - Rooster

It is much, much, much cheaper to license something for a set time as opposed to perpetual.

The game with Penny Arcade characters and whatnot playing poker is no longer available to be sold because the licenses expired.

It's far from perfect though as some games to able to be sold again are modified to remove certain licensed content like music. This is in detriment of who ever owned the game before that as the game gets a forced update which caused the previous owners to lose access to the original version.

I think Ubisoft’s intent was more to make customers comfortable with the idea of paying for short-term or ongoing access to content. Their shutdown of online services and DLC for some of their Steam games a few years ago did not exactly inspire confidence.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-titles-pulled-from-ste...

When you think of 90%+ of your (PC) customers as thieves then it's easy to be scummy?

Nope. It simply meant "We like owning things and renting them out indefinitely." It has nothing to do with trust.

I think a large part of steams success is that they have not messed up... Yet. The other online game marketplaces look at steams success and want their piece of the pie yet forget this critical fact. It takes a long time to trust a company to guard the keys of the digital items you "own". sarcastiquotes because ownership is very weak with these services.

Anecdotal evidence.. myself, It took me 5 years of steam behaving itself before I bought anything on it. I am perhaps not a reference customer. I am a bit paranoid, I really dislike this "half" ownership that online purchases grant you, drm makes me nervous. yet still because steam has remained a stalwart reliable service, it has faded into the background, unobtrusive, and most of my games are on it. I still get a bit sick to my stomach when I think what I will lose when, not if, steam management starts "messing up"

This is one of those issues that I really see both sides of. I think it's unreasonable to expect a company to be able to provide the ability to download content you bought once in perpetuity. Because it costs money, and companies shut down etc...

Where it gets dicey is if the removal of availability of an item means you can no longer consume it even if you already have it downloaded. That's where regulation should come in.

I just don't think it's tenable to have a regulation that says "If you're a company that sells digital goods with copy protection, you must always keep those goods available for download in perpetuity"

Is it a straightforward download? I've never used any of these "digital copy" codes but I always assumed they let you stream it on a closed platform rather than just giving you a DRM-free file you can do whatever with. Seems like this would be way less problematic if they offered a full download for a limited time.

The real digital copy is on the disk itself, for those with an optical drive and a few minutes to search the web for appropriate software...

All things are possible in software. It’s just that rich guys say what we’re not allowed to do.

I think that's the problem is that it's different on a case by case basis.

For example, a book I bought for Kindle on Amazon was recently taken off the store. But I am still able to download and access the book. It sounds like in this case, it was a locked down streaming situation that's going away because the company is simply merging into Crunchyroll and this is kind of a dangling thing they don't feel like bringing over with them.

I'm not sure what the solution is - you could argue that the people who bought the physical media did so with the expectation of being able to also stream it digitally. But it's not like Funimation has the ability to just be like "Here's the video file, go ahead and download it" - even if they had the will to do so they likely don't have the legal ability. But they do retain access to a physical copy and of course, could just rip it. I think there is copy protection for DVDs and Blurays but that's long since been cracked. Not ideal from a legal/consumer rights perspective, but from a pragrmatic perspective it's the easiest solution (actually easiest would just be pirating an existing rip online likely.)

> But it's not like Funimation has the ability to just be like "Here's the video file, go ahead and download it" - even if they had the will to do so they likely don't have the legal ability

Potentially true, but probably only due to themselves being under a licensing constrain. The point here is that the folks who ultimately do have total licensing control, the folks who licensed to Funimation to license to users, those folks should have foreseen that in the event of end customers losing access they should've allowed for giving them offline files (at least that's what I as a customer who "bought" a thing would expect).

Instead, as usual the customer is getting screwed after a big "eh, that would be inconvenient/we might merely make a lot of money instead of a shitton of money."

It would actually be pretty rad if the rule was "if your thing fails, you need to make DRM free copies available for your users for __ period." Give the soft landing that Google gave for its Stadia controllers.

Hard to enforce though if the company that fails also ceases to exist (and ceases to have servers, etc.).

I wonder how a rule like that would impact contract negotiations.

> I just don't think it's tenable to have a regulation that says "If you're a company that sells digital goods with copy protection, you must always keep those goods available for download in perpetuity"

Why not ? Companies can remove that copy protection at any point and stop being subjected to that regulation.

It would still need a minimum period to let the user download their contents, but the rule feels straightforward to me.

Wow. Ditching digital copies is just a garbage move. Generally Ultraviolet and now Movies Anywhere at least offer some robust persistence between services, but even movies not covered by those have been transferred to another service when someone shuts their streaming service down.

I believe Vudu sells a lot of this content too, so if they really even cared about consumers they likely could've transferred the digital copies there.

They should refund all “purchases” that will no longer exist. I bet it’s going to be cheaper than the eventual class action lawsuit.

There would only be a lawsuit if the at-purchase license agreement for some reason didn’t cover revoking.

In any country with a decent government there would be a lawsuit. When you write "Buy" in big letters on the button, you have an obligation to treat that as a sale, whatever crap you wrote in the hundred-page small print.

Yeah, which means in the US you can probably get away with it. And fleecing the US market will bring in more profits than you lose to EU lawsuits.

>so people are losing access to things they've paid to "own".

They would still own the physical copy of it. Having the bonus goods that come with the thing you buy not be available forever is nothing new.

> Having the bonus goods that come with the thing you buy not be available forever is nothing new.

That doesn't make it OK, that just makes it a long-standing bad thing.

Nothing is a 'bonus' when you buy something. You paid for it, you should get it. I have never pirated a single thing in my life, but I am seriously thinking about doing it now. I have been forced to pay for the same thing many times over because the copy I 'own' doesn't transfer and it stops working. Why is it a crime if I rip a DVD I paid for but not theft if they stop providing a service that was paid for?

Where is it a crime to rip a DVD you own?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Legality

Looks like the UK, probably Canada, and maybe the US.

When it comes digital media if you don’t have it sitting on a hard disk in your physical possession free from DRM you don’t actually own it.

Wait until the MBA'S realize that constant spinning off streaming services and shutting them down can be a business strategy for infinite money reselling the same product access has been lost to

Maybe they already have? Probably would be most effective on 5+ year cycle to give people time to forget.

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