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Comment by chorizo | Hacker News Reader

Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.

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It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.

And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.

Meta wants to make their service compatible with meta vr headsets. They don’t require ongoing access to the content. The media vendor would also benefit from this, so an agreement is in the interest of both parties.

> And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content

Are you? I don’t understand why you think this. It seems like the only payments in this area are settlements after the fact.

Counterexamples welcome.

> But tos generally don’t include commercial activities

I can't think of any ToS that prohibit a device manufacturer from testing whether the content plays on their device. That's literally why anyone buys content - to play it on their device.

How would they enforce those anyway? And how would being sued for that be worse than being sued for torrenting?

Because that would have been the right way to do it, and if they do it right even once, they can't say "We DiDn'T KnOw aNy BeTtEr" or whatever excuse they fall back to.

Leaks would be a very, very big problem given how aggressively they want to promote child safety and restrictions.

Fair. Hence it makes sense to engage a third party vendor to handle this project. Both the media provider and Mets stands to gain here

This would require an Apple level of secrecy, I think.

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