Ask HN: Can I download Torrent of a movie legally if I own the DVD/Blueray? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can I download Torrent of a movie legally if I own the DVD/Blueray?

16 pointspunnerud34 comments

I more and more often find that I pay for movies I already own, because it’s easier with streaming services. Can I legally download it as long as I already own it?

That way I could make it more accessible within the house for my kids and myself.

And could I take it one step further and make a service where user have to insert their DVD into external drive, then only use a couple of seconds for verification and then activate Torrent download of the same, without lengthy copy process.

If that is legal take it one more step and let the user hand in their DVD for external storage, for a “physical” key (Bitcoin, Ethereum etc) as proof of ownership.

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In the United States, there’s a service called Vudu Disc to Digital. It’s had a couple of various iterations over the years - I think it first started with needing to insert the DVD or Blu Ray into your drive, and now uses UPC codes as people don’t have optical drives. There are various checks to try and make sure you’re not just scanning UPC codes at the store (location needed to be on).

After confirming that you own the disc it is (was?) $2 for SD quality or for $5 you could take a DVD and get an HD version. The catch is that the movies were then added to your Vudu account - not as unencrypted DRM. But, if they were Movies Anywhere eligible, they showed up in your Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft accounts. From there, getting an archival copy is an exercise for the reader.

It didn’t have all the movies. And not every movie was eligible for Movies Anywhere. But, it did work for about 60% of my hundreds DVDs when I went all digital. Plus, this method was clearly legal in the United States, so long as you used your own discs and didn’t make archival copies.

The rights management must’ve been a nightmare.

Rights management is apparently still a nightmare; I recently realized that some of my movies were missing on the AppleTV, and it turns out that many titles have restrictions on which platforms you are able to watch them on. We needed to install the Vudu app, which sucks on Apple given they refuse to pay the App Store tax and so it’s only a player slash advertising platform for Fandango.

I am not sure Movies Anywhere has legs though; I doubt owners would be remunerated or retain access to content if the whole thing went belly-up, and I am not sure how they are paying to keep it running.

No. Someone tried that 20-25 years ago (with CDs / music streaming, but the principle’s the same) and got sued into oblivion.

The principle being, you don’t have the right to watch the movie as such: you have the right to watch _your copy_ of the movie.

If someone gives you an unauthorised copy of something you have a legit copy of… it’s still unauthorised.

Agreed, we don't own the media only the right to use it. Downloading the pirated version is still against the law and can get you sued.

What if the system is build so the copy and the downloaded version is identical down to the byte?

So both is your copy.

You have to follow the provenance.

If I own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, I can rip that, encode it to MP3/AAC/FLAC/whatever, copy it between my laptop/desktop/phone. That’s fine.

If you also own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, then… I cannot give you any of those files, because they have ultimately come from my CD, not from your CD. Even though the bits are identical. The provenance matters. You have the right to use the copies from your CD. You do not have the right to use the copies from my CD, even though the bits are the same.

Even that may not be legal, at least in the US, if there's any copy protection at all. Audio CDs probably aren't copy protected, but any commercial DVD would be. So the mere act of breaking the CSS protection is illegal, even for personal home use. The RIAA spent a lot of time and money enforcing that.

Outside of the US, saner jurisdictions may prevail.

I'm sure this isn't a valid legal interpretation, but when I see:

> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Then I say to myself, if I can bypass the technological measure, it doesn't effectively control access to the work, so it's fine. Especially when they later say

> Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

Time shifting, format shifting, and space shifting are all established as fair use in case law; so I don't feel bad about circumventing ineffective controls to a protected work to enable my fair use of the work.

IMHO, electronic distribution without authorization is a clear no, and obtaining a copy through unauthorized distribution is also a clear no. But I'm flexible if the original media is defective. And I'll pretend I didn't see it for things like the Despecialized Editions of Star Wars.

Ok, so as long as the user itself, or someone else on their behalf, makes 100% copy and store it locally at the user its ok as I read it?

Then next step is that the user can put all those GB on their own Dropbox (not shared). But what Dropbox can do is to do hash-check of the files and only keep one file of all those hundres of compies. Synced to cloud.

Still only the users copy and they can access it at home, just at a fraction of the cost for storing the copy.

I don't know where the parent is located, but in the US at least none of this matters. It doesn't matter if it's a bit perfect copy. It matters that you don't have the copyright in the first place.

At some point you need to stop asking people on the internet and start asking a good copyright lawyer in your jurisdiction.

But then they need to prove that the mp3 are from your cd and not mine, right?

The same for the dvd, he could have created the copy from his own?

I’d say if you’re caught torrenting it, you’ve essentially demonstrated that it’s not a derivative of your physical copy. At least by the standard of a civil case.

Is it illegal to torrent files to /dev/null?

Because you guys found a different copy, not the one I torrented.

Depends on the jurisdiction where you live.

In many European countries it is legal what you describe. In other European countries you don't even have to own the DVD-Blu-ray, as long as you store the "backup" on a storage medium that you bought in that country (there are pirate-taxes added to storage medium prices that are distributed to copyright holders, kind of legalizing movie and music piracy). One thing though: uploading is considered criminal even in these countries (e.g. the downloading part of torrent is OK, seeding even a byte is a big no-no)

Seeding 11000111 is a no no?

It's even crazier than that: Some numbers are illegal to redistribute, because they represent a way to break some copyright, e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/birkmier-pri... (from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/index.html)

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Did not know that, interesting

On one hand it makes no sense because "it's just a number, like 12345, how can you copyright that". But because of digital encodings, any content can be represented as a string of numbers. If we really go down that reductionist route, if numbers can't be copyrighted, then nothing could be copyrighted...

I'm ok with that, personally, but the rightsholders aren't, lol.

It also (interestingly enough, I guess) means that an online random number generator will occasionally produce illegal output because some of those numbers will translate into DMCA circumvention devices. Crazy world we live in where the law can't even catch up to the issues of 3 decades ago, much less today's.

Not thinking about upload to make it available, just as a cheaper way of backup and access to what you already own.

As a private person, you can totally do that in many places (but not everywhere, of course). Building a business around it sounds sketchy - even a non-profit. In the moment any money is exchanged, no lawyer will be happy to take the case.

But as long as you do it as a private person for your own private use, you can get away with it at many places. (Maybe you noticed that these news about "billy torrented a spongebob episode, and has to pay now a quadrillion moneyz" always come from the same country. In Europe the distribution chain is being chased - torrent site admins, cinema-camera teams, content hosts... but usually not the end-users.)

Of course IANAL. Do your research too - especially because this is really dependent on the country where you are.

In the US, downloading a copyrighted work is infringement. It doesn't matter whether you own any additional copies of the work already. Fair use doesn't care about that.

Additionally, if you're torrenting, you're probably also uploading (helping to seed) the file, which is redistribution.

Nothing legal about it under current law. That said, just use an overseas seedbox instead of your home IP and you'll be fine. A lot faster too, since they have fat pipes.

If I’ve already gone through the trouble to obtain a blu-ray drive and insert a disk into it, then I’m just going to use MakeMKV

The act of distribution is what is illegal.

You could feel morally good about it, but it would still be illegal.

While probably also not legal, what might be easier is to rip the bluray locally instead of downloading it.

> While probably also not legal, what might be easier is to rip the bluray locally instead of downloading it.

It's not legal. DMCA restrictions override fair use. The moment you disable the copy protection on a disc (in order to rip it), you've broken the law. Doesn't matter why you're doing it. Doesn't matter if you're only doing it for personal use and you bought it and won't share it with anyone. It's still illegal. It's stupid, but that's what you get with corporate capture of the government.

From the EFF:

> Sound confusing? It is. Thanks to fair use, you have a legal right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment. But thanks to Section 1201, you do not have the right to break any digital locks that might prevent you from engaging in that fair use. And this, in turn, has had a host of unintended consequences, such as impeding the right to repair.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/what-really-does-and-d...

Edit: There ARE some exemptions to this broad rule, but I don't think any of them apply to "I just want to make a rip of my DVD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

It honestly seems like you’re way more interested in your “one more step” than you are about making a backup copy for your kids, otherwise why not use one of the many available ripping tools?

You’re not going to create a “clever hack” that allows you to build a for-profit piracy service. Disney is going to own you if you try. Just like they own the politicians that write IP laws.

Just think of a new idea.

(Edit) Pro-tip: Judges don’t care about “it’s different because it’s on the internet/with crypto!”

If you've already paid for the product or service, why should that make a difference?

Because that's not how copyright law works in the US and some other jurisdictions. It's not based on common sense but what the rightsholders were able to enshrine into law in societies that favor corporate rights over personal rights.

Things can be ethical but still illegal, like in this case. Realistically they're not going to do much more than send you a notice via your ISP (if you don't use a foreign seedbox), but it's still illegal.

downloading a blu ray is faster than ripping it? where is that list of latency numbers for developers again, i found somebody that needs it

Don’t need to download fast as long as it’s your copy and you downloading a bit faster than your watching speed.

300Mbit/s downloads 50GB (dual-layer Blueray) in 22 Minutes

Sure, it can be, if you have a fast enough connection and a slow enough drive and/or computer or GPU that can't transcode it fast enough.

If you just remove the copy protection and copy over the original compression, that should be faster, but then you're left with a huge file that's often bigger than it really needs to be.

Just remember laws <> morality.

True, maybe I think to much based on the morality. I often think "this does not feel right, so there must be a law against/for it"

There is occasionally overlap, but as far as I can tell, that is just coincidence.

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