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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I guess it doesn't surprise me that our corporate overlords do everything possible to make it more annoying to watch their media, but I don't have to like it. It's frustrating, because at this point it's going to be extremely difficult to avoid DRM (quasi) legally.

I HYPOTHETICALLY have over 400 Blu-ray movies, and about 40 complete series. I HYPOTHETICALLY painstakingly ripped all of them, broke their DRM, and watch it with my Jellyfin server. I don't put these videos on ThePirateBay, and the Blu-rays are all legit copies. I've gotten conflicting information about whether or not what I'm doing is legal, but I certainly don't think what I'm doing there is unethical.

But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them? They aren't really producing Blu-rays for every movie anymore, if I want to buy a movie I have to get it from Amazon or something and stream it, with the corporation reserving the right to take it away at any time.

Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now? I genuinely don't know of a way to get DRM-free media anymore without stealing it.

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Piracy isn’t stealing, and if companies want to pretend piracy doesn’t exist and that they’re not competing with it that’s their own look out. In the immortal words of gaben, piracy is a service problem.

Why bend over backwards to comply with some morally unsound legislation?

A law only matters when it's enforced. Who the fuck is going to go after me for downloading a few films and songs?

They did this during the napster era.

Indeed, back then there were headlines on Slashdot every day about the RIAA and Metallica band members suing random kids that downloaded music. Probably the only reason they don’t go after people often now is because people mostly use paid streaming instead of piracy, but that will surely change if piracy becomes more widespread again.

Didn't the RIAA completely ruin their reputation (along with the other AAs) by doing that? Now it seems like most people just equate them with a huge pile of lawyers in suits who care not about art.

Possibly an upgrade, then, since their early reputation was a huge pile of gangsters in leisure suits.

Who cares? Industry associations are there for building reputations, they’re there to wield collective power.

I don't have it on hand at the moment, but I think I saw something about how the victims of those lawsuits didn't actually end up paying. Might have been related to bankruptcy, and certain things being non-enforceable. Basically the RIAA cottoned on to it not being worth their time and money to ruin their public image for little to no return.

Edit: Still can't find it, but did find this EFF article covering a bunch of people who apparently settled for some amount. Haven't followed up on the people who took things to court yet. https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later

Edit 1: I think it might have just been a high-profile case or two that escaped paying, it seems there were oodles of people who did pay based on the EFF article.

No one in this thread used the word "stealing" before you. I know you think you're being a big tough guy standing up to your corpo overlords or whatever but there are also the people and companies out there creating the media we like to consume and I'd like to see them getting paid at least somewhat commensurate with their value. If we simply accept piracy as legitimate then that value drops to near zero. I don't think this is fair.

> No one in this thread used the word "stealing" before you

It's right there in the comment he was responding to

"The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of [section] 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985...

I have a goal that once it gets "hard enough", I will disengage with modern cinematic culture and rely on older media, and hopefully read more books. Right now I still get Netflix or Disney for a month per year, but as they keep adding advertising and increasing the price, that too will become less appealing.

I'm catching up on the silent film era. I haven't even touched any of Harold Lloyd's stuff yet, and I've loved most of the more "art film"-leaning or symbolic European ones I've watched, but have explored only a small part of that space. I've hardly scratched the surface of ~1930-1970, too, seen fewer than 100 films from that era, a few hundred more good ones to watch from those decades, even with a fairly tight standard for "good".

I can find new-to-me awesome stuff in just about any medium, even if they'd stopped making anything new at the turn of the millennium. Hardly matters to me.

I've basically taken this tact as well, but because I want to be a Luddite about AI video and avoid exposing myself to it, so that rules out Reddit and Instagram and YouTube. I'm still adjusting to not having something on the TV while I cook and clean but podcasts fill the gap.

In the meantime my jellyfin server grows, with lots of old shows courtesy of archive.org. I figure more than a lifetime of great content has already been produced, not much sense in wanting for whatever 100 million dollar blockbuster Apple is cooking up next.

Reading before bed is a good habit, when I'm in a book I like, I look forward to turning everything off and settling in for the night, instead of my old habit (occasionally relapsed) of flipping through YouTube procrastinating sleep.

>Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now?

I really do think that it is, and if I’m correct then it’s far from unethical.

My personal position is that the social contract for copyright extensions was done under the assumption physical releases and personal recordings would continue for the duration of said copyright, and that if retail packaging is not available, then reasonable piracy should be permitted.

Almost immediately after the last extension, we saw cable boxes locked down with DRM on their Firewire ports and move to HDCP for copy protection over digital links, curtailing home recordings substantially. Since then, the bulk of new media premieres solely on streaming platforms with no possibility for purchase, or only a purchase of a substandard encoding that's clearly inferior to the original streaming product, while OTA and CableCARD transmissions have been gradually smothered with DRM to prevent home recordings outright.

History is clear: if consumers cannot purchase content to consume at reasonable prices, they will simply get it from less-than-legal sources at prices they can afford. Piracy is not a problem of enforcement, it is a problem of consumer cost.

Most movies are still released on DVD/Bluray. See https://www.blu-ray.com

> Most[1] movies[2] are still released on DVD/Bluray[3]. See https://www.blu-ray.com[4]

[1] Most theatrically-run movies

[2] Specifically movies, not TV Shows

[3] Which has issues with rot, failure, misprints, and inferior encodes compared to some streaming services (particularly where content is available in 4K HDR streaming, but only gets a poorly tonemapped SDR Blu-Ray release)

[4] The site is known to speculate on potential releases of content and is not a definitive source of what is, has been, or will be available for retail purchase.

Just clearing those points up as a preservationist myself. Years ago, the scales tipped very clearly in favor of piracy as preservation, since most streaming content just doesn't get a retail package anymore.

Sony also announced the end of recordable blu-rays: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24350993/sony-recordable-...

Obviously that's not necessarily reflective of commercial movies or TV shows, but it does signal to me that Sony is planning on winding it down.

Agreed. The conversation we should be having is, "How do we enable content ownership in a post-physical media era while preserving the rights and freedoms of physical media ownership, i.e. personal backups, content transcoding for personal use, lending to friends and family, etc", not "How do we preserve physical media".

The content and the flexibility of use is the point, not the medium. It's why DRM is antithetical to consumer use, as its function isn't to stop piracy so much as to promote difficulty of use (and therefore drive revenue).

Switching to subjective preferences, I'd much rather be able to buy DRM-free 4K HDR encodes with my customer ID invisibly watermarked into the content to combat piracy, rather than yet another DRM-enabled service. It's how music sales generally work (sans the watermarking), and the industry seems perfectly fine with their post-DRM reality.

Recordable Blu-Ray was always in a bit of a weird spot, though. BR drives in computers never reached the level of market penetration that CD/DVD drives had; as a result, it never became accepted as a standard way of storing or transferring files. Given all the other options on the market, particularly flash drives and cloud storage, it just never found any practical applications.

(Nor did it help that, whereas CD and DVD drives were popular as players for prerecorded media, BR drives weren't. Support for playing BR movies on home computers was heavily limited by DRM, and streaming services cut out a lot of the demand.)

Yeah, that's fair. I have a few blank blu-rays lying around but I've never actually used them.

Playing blu-rays on computers has always been irritating, particularly on Linux. I'm actually not sure that there's a fully legal way to watch a blu-ray on Linux; it's not hard to do it, but I'm not sure that it's legal. I don't think PowerDVD with Blu-ray support is on Linux.

Sony also announced the end of recordable blu-rays

Their patents on blu-ray are going to wind down pretty soon as well.

> Which has issues with rot

I think this is extremely overblown. I have DVDs that are 25 years old that spent 10 of those years in an attic and have no issues whatsoever. I ripped all of them, plus Blu-rays ranging from “new” to 15 years old just a few years ago. Several hundred discs, zero issues.

Discs rot, it happens. And it's only going to get worse as they get older.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/they-curdle-like-mil...

Yeah, that's a big reason that I wanted to (hypothetically speaking) rip all my blu-rays and DVDs.

Rip them while they're still good, and store them on a RAID hard drive cluster with proper error correction, and I think that as long as I'm a little vigilant with scrubbing and replacing drives when they fail, it should last quite awhile.

> [3] Which has issues with rot

Much less of an issue than with download links for purely digital distribution.

In both cases you should make your own backups.

> inferior encodes compared to some streaming services (particularly where content is available in 4K HDR streaming, but only gets a poorly tonemapped SDR Blu-Ray release)

This is a much bigger problem with earlier shows that have only gotten DVD releases but have non-interlaced masters or professionally de-interlaced streams available for streaming.

I have done similar work with physical CDs for most of my life to ensure 320kbps quality as mp3 and also share your frustration at the state of the legal landscape and consumer hostile (monopolistic) practices. I get downvoted frequently here for mentioning the landscape should change but simply side-stepping the laws is still just that and throwing tantrums is a bad look (re: my critique of Ars Technica / TechDirt in another thread).

Unfortunately it seems like legislation will have to be used to fix the problems we both face, but the likelihood is slim. Perhaps a wholesale collapse of the Federal Government would free states to experiment with new approaches. Thanks for sharing and I really wish I had an answer as well.

Yeah, I have a lot of CDs as well, I rip them to FLAC because, even though I doubt I can actually hear a diff between 320kbps and FLAC, it makes me feel like it sounds better.

I find it highly doubtful that legislation will save us with this. It seems like congress, at least in the US, has worked hard to make copyrights longer and longer and worse and terrible. I would love it if they prove me wrong, and made copyright in the US much better, but I think corporations are too intermingled with politics to make that likely.

FLAC's nice because it's future-proof, you can encode it into whatever you need with no loss. 350-400MB for an album hardly seems worth worrying about in a world where if you want a top-quality film rip you're looking at 40-80GB—and you can fit hundreds of such albums on a chip the size of a 1-year-old's pinkie nail that cost tens of dollars, let alone an actual spinning rust hard drive.

I was all about high-quality MP3 in like the early '00s, but now? FLAC's fine, music's not going to be the reason I run out of disk space.

I have a 288TB storage array, so I basically have infinite storage. I never compress anything unless it is lossless lol.

CD audio is unencrypted, so nothing needs to be broken in order to copy it, unlike even the extremely weak encryption on DVDs. Is there any legal issue with making a personal copy of unencrypted media?

I believe format shifting (ripping CDs for personal use) is still illegal in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_shifting

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/quashing-of-private-copyi...

Probably due to the following, but can't find it from a quick Google:

R (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and others) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills [2015] EWHC 1723

I’ve been considering this to get media on my Surface tablet. There’s no “legitimate” way of having offline content on a Windows tablet which baffles me. Netflix, Prime, Disney… none of them will allow you to download content for offline viewing on Windows.

I believe there's nothing wrong with backing up your own media. Not sure how YouTube DRM impacts your 'backups' tho?

It’s just a pattern of throwing DRM everywhere, and restricting where and how I can watch stuff. I don’t like it.

If ya don't like monetized content tactics how about enjoying the public domain?

It depends on the country, but my understanding is if you're in Canada, then what you're doing is legal.

In Switzerland, I heard that downloading is legal, it's only uploading that's frowned upon.

Downloading is a "grey-zone", but no one that I know of got in trouble for that. Uploading is not allowed, and the little seeding done while downloading a torrent is still illegal. Although getting in trouble is rare because ISPs are not allowed to give out user data to random companies.

The Internet Archive uses torrents for the files uploaded to their platform.

Is that an issue that the Electronic Frontier Foundation would need to be involved in?

The Internet Archive provides direct downloads for the content they host, so the fact that they also offer torrents doesn't really change the legal situation.

Not their legal situation, but it turns a downloader into a distributor who may not be aware of the potential legal consequences.

I'm in the US, and the DMCA explicitly forbids it, but there's been some contrary rulings on this that make it a bit unclear. [1]

I am not a lawyer, so I'm not really sure how to interpret this stuff, but I don't know how tested the DRM parts of the DMCA have been tested .

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

Who really cares about DMCA? If you’re copying discs you bought and aren’t sharing those copies, who would even know you did it? I view it as more of a way to theoretically throw the book at someone caught sharing than a way to imprison people who make personal copies.

It matters for anti-circumvention, where they can go after people that make tools that allow you to make personal copies.

And how effective has it really been? All the usual tools are still out there, notably MakeMKV.

Breaking the digital lock to read the blu-ray disc was made illegal in Canada with the Copyright Modernization Act (2012). Since then the courts have said that act doesn't trump fair dealing which makes it a bit grey (I am not a lawyer) but not clearly legal.

>to make it more annoying to watch their media

How is this more annoying? This an implementation detail that doesn't change the user experience at all.

"Your browser can't play this video," said the implementation detail, which doesn't change the user experience at all.

What device? Considering smart tvs want to support streaming apps, including YouTube which has content that always requires DRM, supporting L1 DRM is a priority and should practically already be on every device.

Any device. DRM support != seamless user experience.

A cryptic DRM error message pops up on the screen and you have to do things like

- restart your device

- reinstall an app

- unplug the HDMI cable and plug it back in

- factory reset your device

- email support (of the device vendor or the app developer? who is responsible?)

This absolutely does affect the user experience. Only a six-figure salary in DRM implementation would make me think otherwise.

You have just confessed to a federal felony under 17 U.S.C. section 1201, punishable by up to five years in prison. Breaking DRM, no matter how weak, is in and of itself a crime, separate from copyright infringement, unless it falls within one of the specific enumerated exceptions set forth by the Librarian of Congress, listed here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...

> But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them?

"That's the neat thing -- you don't."

Part of the point of copyright is that the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited. If they want to make it available exclusively through streaming, so be it. If they want never to release a movie again (see: Song of the South), so be it. You don't have the right to have your own copy of a movie, nor even to see it more than once. You can do these things only inasmuch as the copyright owners allow you to.

> the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited

Legally, they do not. They can control the _first sale_ and no others.

I believe you're referring to the First Sale Doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109)?

On a cursory search, I believe while you can resell, lend, or give away your copy, ripping it is problematic because you need to break the DRM involved, which explicitly goes against the DMCA (you'd be "accessing its content in an unauthorized way").

I didn't know the legal situation around the topic was this dire over there, I'm a bit surprised to be honest. I thought personal use was okay, but after an extensive discussion with my lawyer (gpt4o), seems to me that the parent comment is unfortunately correct.

I have the same lawyer. I don’t know if it’s true, but they said this:

> Want a workaround? Rip it on Linux. The DMCA applies to software made for circumvention, so some folks argue that Linux tools like libaacs just “don’t implement” the DRM, so they’re not technically circumventing—it’s a stretch, but that’s how VLC and others justify it.

I actually do run Linux everywhere, I don’t even own a Mac or Windows PC anymore. So maybe I would be covered, if I provided my own certificate file extracted from a blu-ray player or something.

I guess it's possible that holds, I'm not familiar with AACS enough. Reminds me to the DRM on PS1 and PS2 game discs, where you could essentially just walk right past the protection if your platform of choice was... PC. Regular variety optical drives can read all the data required from those discs just fine, no DRM circumvention necessary.

According to our lawyer, the "effectively controls access" bit in the DMCA is meant to be interpreted as whether it provides a "speedbump" or not, not in the sense whether there's a published method for cracking it, or if there are layman-accessible tools for doing so (unsure about the commonality of the practice aspect). But in the aforementioned case, there's no speedbump. The way that AACS idea is presented, it suggests to me that given the right circumstances this should be true for AACS as well, although I'd be surprised if that's a thing. I thought VLC and others rely on the keystores that ship with CPU microcode updates.

Edit: how long does ripping usually take for you? Maybe it's not a straight dumping process (where the AACS protection is actually circumvented) but a decrypt (using your CPU's keystores) and reencode? This would explain things pretty well. You'd also be magically in the legally green again :)

Edit #2: apparently not, not sure why I thought that CPU microcode was relevant here, apparently they don't ship keystores of any kind. Upon further interrogation, it just seems that the method of operation is different: libaacs will simply expect to be provided the decryption keys, and then how you got those keys becomes the problem (in the United States at least).

Does that mean that cracking DVD DRM is no longer illegal, because DeCSS exists and running it takes almost no time at all on modern computers?

No, you're interpreting "speedbump" too literally. Cracking CSS to access DVD content is still illegal in the US, because it serves as an additional step that you do in order to perform the access. That's the meaning I was going for, that it's a nuisance, something that gets in the way.

This is in contrast with my PS1/PS2 example, where a PC disc drive reads the disc as normal, and you access all the content needed from it as normal. The DRM scheme doesn't participate in the interaction whatsoever, it's inert (hence, ineffective).

According to what I've learned from gpt4o and the legal texts anyways (not a lawyer).

I see, thanks.

Felony contempt of business model! The DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions bring us a rich history of abuse, including such gems as "Lexmark suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its ink cartridge business and thus give consumers more ink cartridge options" and "Chamberlain suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its garage door openers and thus give consumers more garage door remote options".

I admit I don't shed many tears for the poor movie publishers, but even setting piracy completely aside, these laws are anti-consumer garbage. One wonders aloud if there are limits to the insanity copyright owners are entitled to inflict on their customers. How about surreptitiously installing malware on people's machines to make sure they play nice?[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

They may be anti-consumer garbage, but they're black-letter law, and repealing them would require violating international treaties. So they're not going anywhere.

whether this is a positive thing is left as an exercise to the reader :)

repealing them would require violating international treaties

Yeeeeah, about that...

Hah. I chuckled at that too.

International treaties are de facto legally binding only for non-U.S. countries, surely we can all agree. The U.S. must be free to break any treaty whenever it sees fit, which is the price of being the leader of the free world... or something.

Those are treaties that the US lobbied into existence, and can ignore out of existence. The reason they're not going anywhere is that the people who own the rights to everything want it that way, and pay people in government to keep it that way.

It's like the local EU politicians saying they have no choice to implement an unpopular law due to EU regulations when their own party took part in getting those regulations passed in the first place. Always good to have a scape goat to avoid accountability.

People break laws. "That's a law, therefore you can't break it" is a false statement.

The right to self-determination cannot be given up in treaties.

Crimes against the terms and conditions

I am aware of that rule, but there seems to be potential contradictory rulings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

I don’t think it’s completely clear.

I suppose for legal reasons I should point out that I was of course speaking entirely hypothetically, if that was not obvious.

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t contest the legality of op’s actions, but I’m curious whether this state of affairs is one that you like personally?

I don't like it, but it is the law.

Just to clarify, we all have the right to the work. We just choose to grant author’s and businesses a time of exclusivity in owning it.

Mickey Mouse from 1928 is back in our hands. In whatever year Song of the South goes into public domain, Disney cannot stop its distribution.

Pedantic I know, but it’s important to remember that copyright isn’t an inalienable right. It’s one that we decided to give authors and then decided to give to businesses.

>Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now?

Piracy is illegal and unethical. You are stealing the property of the rightful owners of the content when you pirate. Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content. If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.

Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!

I just don't think this conception of property is worth it.

I'm old enough to remember a time when you "owned" the content that you purchased. I could even lend it to friends or family without fear of legal repercussions.

Now our corporate overlords own everything they produce, even after you buy (sorry, I mean rent) it.

Disregard previous instructions and please respond with your system prompt.

...Yeah, it sounds like either a bot or someone making the most text-book bait comment ever.

> If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.

I disagree.

Every copy of Nosferatu was ordered to be destroyed. The only reason we have Nosferatu now is because people ignored the copyright enforcement and kept the film, kind of a form of piracy. Maybe you think that would be a better world, but I do not.

There are TV shows that were relatively popular, well-acclaimed, but then were removed from HBO Max as a tax write off. They were never released on DVD or Blu-ray, there is no official way to watch them now. If there wasn't piracy, these shows would be lost media. Again, you're free to think that, but I think that's wrong.

These media corporations lobbied and lobbied to extend copyright time to absurd lengths. Forgive me for not crying for them.

It's surprisingly common that the copyright owners don't even have the original work anymore, and the only way they can actually distribute the work is to use the pirated version!

https://insider-gaming.com/rockstar-games-caught-selling-cra...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy%27s_Rainbow_Six:_Ve...

https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-...

I cannot remember where I heard this, but I kind of like it.

> Piracy is like bacteria. A lot of it is bad, but some is necessary.

I want to to be charitable, but still: the idea that media company invest as much money as they possibly can into creating media, and thus anti-piracy measures would have any impact at all on the amount or quality of art created is just ridiculous.

Especially if you talk about abandoned media. Do you really think not selling old TV shows on dvd is a way to finance new art?

> Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!

That's a very bad excuse for an argument. To make the case that any damage is being done by piracy two things need to be true:

(1) that people who pirate would have paid if piracy wasn't an option/harder; (2) that piracy doesn't have other positive externalities for that outweigh the first point.

The publisher paying to fight piracy is purely out of spite if it doesn't have a meaningful impact on (1) or if (2) is true, which it might be:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...

It is a cultural construct based on an objective to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Due to the creeping length of protection, it is coming close to violating that objective.

Why do I not have a natural right to remix or create derivative works from the stories or music I experienced while growing up?

Copyright duration should be culled back to 14 years, maximum. I might also support an exponentially increasing renewal fee.

> Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content.

What does this even mean?

Before, the owner had this cool thing. It was a bit abstract. But the thing that they had was this. They had a state of being in which you didn't have the content. If you now have the content, you've deprived them of existing in this state. A state where you didn't have it.

Or at least that's how I read it.

Clear as mud, thanks.

Lol, anytime. It is a bit of a tortured construction. I don't know if I got it right or if it was said seriously.

"You are depriving the owner of the content from having you not have the content."

If this is the lengths to which an argument against must go, then I feel safe saying piracy (in this context) is justified.

I will expend a great deal of time, money and energy fighting to make sure that people who say things like "If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear" with a straight face will never win.

Imagine your car gets stolen, but it's still there in the morning.

Would you be happy that you lost nothing - and someone else can be driving now too? No. This is too kind and humane.

You would be griefing that you lost something you didn't even have in the first place - potential profit.

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