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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a way to just pay for a movie on a site and download it as an mp4 in 1080P or 4K. I hate streaming because I only want to watch 1-2 movies per month and they are very specific (like a specific martial arts movie or action movie). Streaming interfaces often have DRM and horrible interfaces and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something I'll rarely use. Don't understand the DRM because pirates get a better copy anyway.

Right now, there is no better and more convenient interface than piracy and I wish that weren't the case.

Edit: there is such an interface for classical music, e.g. Hyperion. DRM free and one-time payment, and I've used it a lot.

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There are places that still let you download movies like iTunes. They are of course riddled in DRM so it's not much help...

yeah...I just want to pay for a DRM-free copy so I can play it and own it forever. That's it. No streaming accoounts, no tracking, no plastic packaging, just the file in exchange for money. I paid for Sublime text that way and it's a great model.

Sounds great, how do you propose stopping people from sharing that mp4 with the world?

I used to borrow my friends' VHS tapes. Trying to stop people from sharing is barking up the wrong tree, just make it easy enough for people to do the right thing that sending a large file around and getting it to play on their TV seems like a pain in comparison.

Sharing a physical product is not even close to the same as sharing a digital file. If you share a book/VHS/DVD, that physical item is no longer usable by the original person until it is returned. A digital file shared means the both people now have a file for as long as they want it and now each can share as much as they want.

people could make copies of the physical object, right? you should always record a new album onto a cassette or etc.

The vast majority of people can't make copies of books. Just because you could make a copy of something doesn't mean you had the right to. In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it. If you bought a CD but only had a cassette player in your car, nobody cared that you made a tape for your own use. If you gave that cassette away, then that's in the no-go zone.

All you need to make a copy of a physical book these days is a scanner or camera. Even a smartphone is usable. The only thing stopping people from making copies of physical books these days is that it's time consuming. That's it.

And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.

ohmuhgawd becky, look at the pedantry on this one.

this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a

edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive scale that they were beyond the law, and archive.com didn't

It's not difficult and involves basically no skill set. There's a billion apps to help you scan documents and output a PDF. It's even built into mobile OSs at this point. It's just time consuming,that's it!

>In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it.

Prior to the DMCA this was only a civil matter. A question of whether you were vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Now it is a federal crime to circumvent any digital copy protection measures, no matter how feeble they are. Metaphorically, if the MPAA leaves a locked door standing in nothing but a bare doorframe in the middle of an open field on their digital distribution methods, the US federal government considers it a crime to walk around that locked door.

Analog copies had to deal with generation loss and were orders of magnitude slower than a digital copy, plus you subsequently had to physically transport/mail/… those copies around.

So what you're saying is that the internet sped up people's communications and improved our ability to transmit information with minimal entropy... and we as a society decided that this was a problem because people need to be allowed to own ideas as property under capitalist hegemony or else there's no reward for creativity (besides fame and influence, which also doesn't count for much under capitalism unless you can monetize it).

It really does feel like the capitalist system that we as a society locked in during the industrial revolution is just running on hotfixes and fumes at this point, I gotta say.

Same way that you stop them from sharing MP3 files: you don’t. Some people share them, but most don’t bother because there are convenient ways to pay for them, and those ways offer better value than scouring the internet for pirate downloads. So there is still a reason to hunt down pirate sites, as the copyright holder doesn’t want piracy to be too convenient, but locking down files with DRM ultimately just isn’t a great solution.

Many people no longer pirate because of how inconvenient and risky it is. It's not so simple to find a private tracker invite that you trust, use a VPN, find the quality you want, etc. One email from your ISP threatening to cancel your service is enough to scare people off. I think you greatly underestimate how much effort has gone into to anti-piracy, and how well it has worked.

Many games get their DRM removed from official distribution after a cracked copy is found circulating online. Sounds like that model would make sense for movies too.

Align the incentive with the actual work done?

Eg - fundraise to cover the cost of producing the movie and paying the salaries of everyone involved, because physically making a movie costs money. Then give the mp4 away for free because copying a digital file costs nothing. Piracy is only a problem because companies are trying to charge money for copying a file, which is fundamentally free.

Fundraise does not mean what you think it means. Asking your mom for money to make a student film is not the same as making an actual film. People raise funds for movies from investors. Investors want their money back. Nobody goes to the theater any more, so how else are they going to pay back the investors if they can't sell the product they made. This isn't Uber just burning investors cash. Why does nobody expect to get free rides from Uber, yet expect free videos?

Fundraising doesn't mean what you think it means. Investors aren't looking for their money back. They're looking to make additional money. Fundraising is saying that the money goes towards the creation of that end product and that's it.

> Sounds great, how do you propose stopping people from sharing that mp4 with the world?

You don't.

Regardless of what DRM is applied to official releases, every single mainstream movie gets released through pirate channels the same day as and often even before the official release. There may be a couple of obscure titles that slip through the cracks because no one in the pirate community noticed they existed but the stuff the industry actually cares about has never been successfully protected.

The DRM only stops people who are trying to stay "legit" from doing things they should be able to do like store it on a NAS, play it on whatever device they want, etc. It has never and will never stop pirates.

If I can go to a pirate site and locate a "REMUX" or "COMPLETE" rip of a movie, which is the case for the vast majority of movies ever released to digital formats, an official DRM-free release would change nothing for pirates and only make the experience better for people trying to stay legal.

Not to mention if I physically own the media, I'm legally allowed to make as many backups as I want as long as I don't share them. Streaming conveniently removed this feature.

Well yes, but actually no (at least if you're in the USA). The DMCA prevents the circumvention of copy protection measures, which means that by ripping a blu-ray or DVD, you're committing a crime. This is doubly bullshit in that before the DMCA was passed, copying your physical media was always legal and if you were caught distributing unauthorized copies without being paid for them, you were not a criminal but only potentially vulnerable to a civil suit from the copyright holder(s).

People can easily do that if they purchase a bluray, so the difference is not very big.

Kinda true but I definitely do not want to purchase a Blu ray because I don't want to purchase and keep a drive around either...also I have to transcode it and save it. Just want a 1080P copy. Glad to pay $5 for one.

People have been sharing stuff forever, I don't see the media industry getting any poorer...

I couldn't agree more. I use Bandcamp a lot to buy and download music in the form of DRM-free, lossless files, and GOG to buy and download DRM-free games. I wish this model was more widespread, and available for other types of media, movies and shows in particular.

Often the problem is misrepresented as "streaming vs. physical media", wrongly implying that streaming is the only means of purely digital distribution. However, it is actually a question of whether you actually own media vs. only renting them.

I'm currently setting up a Plex in my home to play our families "most popular" movies and I genuinely want to buy these movies, pay for them, and just have them but I can't do that so I have to pirate them.

I wonder how many others are in the same camp as me, I used to be a pirate back when I was a teenager but now I can genuinely afford this stuff and always prefer to pay versus pirate, but in the case of home movies I just can't do that.

I think the studios will be very surprised if they just opened the floodgates and let folks pay for and download movies, because I think a large chunk of us are like me, only pirating because there's no other avenue to acquire the movie.

Totally agree. GOG for movies would get a lot of business from me!

Maybe 0,00000001% of the general population. And 90% of posters here.

Are there truly that many movies which aren't released on physical media? I've also recently set up Plex, and just rip blu-ray copies to my NAS for it. Haven't failed to find any movies I've looked for.

Maybe they want to buy them digitally? Ripping from bluray involves a whole other process (hardware, software, os, time)

> I'm currently setting up a Plex in my home to play our families "most popular" movies and I genuinely want to buy these movies, pay for them, and just have them but I can't do that so I have to pirate them.

> have to

Can you elaborate, please?

For me, I check my used bookstores for movies that aren't easy to find anymore. I've had good luck so far. Most used movies including Blu-Ray are around $6 USD.

I can't download any 4K movies from iTunes, only 1080p.

(source: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/119599)

For some of the movies I have bought I have ended up also torrenting a copy to have and be sure I can play it. Really tempted to get a bluray player and go back to disks.

You wish it weren’t the case, but it is the case. Play the hand you are dealt and go and get your clean copies. The market isn’t catering to you but that doesn’t mean you should then cater to the market if you don’t have to.

YouTube does still allow to "buy"/rent movies one apiece.

Nowhere can one pay a fee and receive a legal digital copy of a movie. YouTube allows people to pay for the privilege of being allowed to stream a movie for and indefinite period of time. YouTube retains the right to revoke all movie "purchases" at any time.

GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.

Vimeo does offer downloadable DRM-free paid videos, I used it a couple of times for crowd-funded movies and comedians releasing their shows. But yeah, it's pretty rarely used unfortunately.

Not the same as a real file download but you can "download" a youtube video to your local cache with premium.

Want a copy forever, not a YouTube buy.

I wish there were ready-made hosted Plex servers that could accept a file transfer. Buy a movie online and give them your server "address" and they send the movie to your Plex server.

We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.

If you want your server to stay secure, then that is not really an option. Copyright is not the thing that is stopping your suggestion from happening.

Implementation details. At checkout put in a public key or something similar, at the receiving end accept a dialog to accept film <x> from <y> movie buying site.

Just have an oauth flow to grant permission to the store to upload movies. It would absolutely be possible to implement securely.

Signed URLs are a thing.

Copyright itself isn't what's stopping that, but the legal apparatuses and laws surrounding the distribution of digital copyrighted information and the industry protectionism that spawned said laws and legal apparatuses is what's stopping it.

Write your local congressman (depending on where you live this position may have a different name). Go to the local political party of your choice and make it known that this is an important issue. Remember votes are more important than money in politics - money can buy votes but only when voters don't care about issues. So if many many people make this an issue things will change.

This is actually not a bad idea.

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