> you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content
This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed? I think that's the definition of stealing.
Good thing we still have torrents.
FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level; this is easily circumvented with a VPN, but it's also easy to bypass using DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox [0].
Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading. If I purchase a dvd I can lend it to my family, I can pass it on free to a friend to watch, or I can sell it second hand. If I don't dispose of it, it's mine for life.
That just doesn't apply to these digital acquisitions which are tied to the account and which the terms do allow to be revoked.
They aren't purchases but more like very long term rentals. Of course fewer people would spend money if they were told the truth so the media companies misleadingly say "purchase". (And since they all say purchase it would be very hard for one to break rank).
It's why something like Netflix of Kindle Unlimited can work well, at least you know you are spending an amount each month for basically unlimited access to the catalog.
I recently noticed the small print on event tickets I purchase from Ticketmaster make it clear that I am actually purchasing a "license" to access the event. The ticket does not guarantee entry and the license is non-transferable, revocable without refund, etc.
Unfortunately this is a phenomenon that extends beyond digital media.
I have no doubt a small claim would result in a judgement made against Sony for the original purchase price of the item. Hopefully citizens will exert the right to do so.
> Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading.
This is why I will only purchase things I can actually keep, like CDs, DVDs, paper books and so on. It seems old fashioned, until you have a few "purchases" wiped out by some policy change out of your control.
Anything that has the word "purchase" in it should be legally mandated that there be a way for users to access it indefinitely: in this case, perhaps making it possible to download with some sort of offline DRM. (You can do this, say, with Audible books that you buy.)
Anything which is cloud-only and may disappear at any time should be labelled something else, like "lease".
Sure, they always argue that you are only "renting" them for a one-time-fee, and that the rent agreement could end at any time for any reason.
But them using the word "purchased" in this very announcement (not a mistranslation btw) gives weight to the argument that this is intentional deception of the customer. An even easier case in Germany, where courts acknowledge that customers don't read the terms of service, so any "surprising" terms hidden in the TOS aren't legally binding.
Not so fast. Every contract must be balanced, otherwise it can be challenged (and likely overruled) in courts.
If they have the right to terminate your license and withdraw access to the content, you should also have the right to terminate the contract and withdraw your money.
It cannot work just for one side without any practical reason.
Not in France, at least not immediately. The antipiracy authority first sends you an email (1st warning), then an IRL letter (2nd warning). When you receive the IRL letter, THEN you should VPN (or SOCKS or whatever) for one year, then you can go turn it off until you receive your 2nd warning again, if that happens.
I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years. I only received my first 2nd warning this year. I configured a systemd service `ssh -D myvps` and configured deluged to use this SOCKS5 proxy. Waiting for next April to turn it off...
Me as well. But unfortunately there is a trade off. For example I buy most my Nintendo Switch games in the physical form so my kids can trade them back and forth. But there have been times when my case full of games has gone missing and I panic about $600 in games last. Thankfully I have always found my games but I could see how easy it could be to lose a lot of money fast. With digital I just download the game any time I want even if I lose my switch just sign into the account on a new switch and get my stuff.
This is why I actually own all our movies on Blu-ray. These days they are cheap online and locally (I averaged $6 per movie with the most common ones being cheapest and rare ones the most expensive - $8 for the entire original Star Wars trilogy in Good box condition, and players are $7 on average at Goodwill), they are easily ripped if that is your thing into 1080p streams that still look better in some circumstances than highly compressed 4K streams, and they can be resold later and never taken away.
Even though it cost quite a bit to get the collection - after you do the math of the cost of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and [insert typical random streaming service here]... it might pay off in only a few years while retaining some resale value. It is also super fun to go bargain hunting - $2.99 for the first 4 Pirates of the Caribbean movies [literally, for me at a thrift shop]? Score!
> FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level
And some of those now resolve the IP addresses of popular torrent sites, and block their IP addresses -- or rather, redirect connection attempts to a local anti-piracy page.
I know this to be the case for at least one ISP, but it's the biggest one in the country, and needless to say they have a video on demand business as well.
Isn’t that a transaction between the user and Studiocanal that Sony just mediated? The right to view the content should still be valid through a different platform.
> This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed?
This is relatively common and has been since before you were born
.
> I think that's the definition of stealing.
It's not. This is, though:
> Good thing we still have torrents.
.
I don't like what Sony is doing here, but it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
> it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
That's likely because you're viewing it through a different lens than the person you're replying to. Try to look at it this way...
- Company sold ownership of an item to individual. This is what "purchase" means to most people.
- Company then decided that individual should no longer have access to item, so takes it away.
- Individual knows that company has no (moral) right to take away item, so takes it back.
From a moral view, if you agree on what purchase means, the individual is completely in the right. If you don't agree on what purchase means, then the individual is not in the right. There are a lot of people that do not believe that companies should be able to use a word and just define it as meaning something totally different in their specific case ("purchase" when they mean rent, "unlimited data" when they mean limited, etc); and that when a company uses a word, they are morally bound to its common definition. For such a person, the OP's statements are internally consistent.
Wow. You call copyright infringement "stealing" (which it is not) but give the company a pass for removing the content they paid for (which is much closer to "stealing").
Edit: As far as I heard it is valid for anything delivered after Jan 1st 2022, which includes continuation of exiting indefinite contracts from before that date and the continuation of them. Correct me if I'm wrong/misinformed though.
The whole reason laws exist is because we recognise not everyone can be trusted to act in a decent manner. The law gives us a way to codify what "decent" means and to explain to folks what we expect of them (as well as consequences for when folks step outside those boundaries).
What I'm trying to say is that no, it is not silly. In fact the entire civilised world is built on the premise that laws are required.
Fundamentally businesses have no morals, and everything is just an equation based on profits. If it makes economical sense to do this, many a business would be inclined to do it.
Not saying that it’s right, but it’s definitely completely understandable why we need laws to protect consumers.
It's silly that anyone buys from Sony with their track record.
Auto installing rootkit on music CDs, Dropping the promised Linux support for PS3, putting out bad marvel movies, I'm sure there's others but those three are enough for me.
Consumers rarely don't get what they paid for. In these situations it's just often that the merchants bury the fact that they can revoke access to your purchases at any point, and if you don't like it, you can go pound sand. Hence the need to write laws that don't fuck over consumers.
The right to get what you paid for is explicitly granted by law. Before that you’d need to have a bigger stick than the seller to make sure they don’t just run with your money.
Also, money is only valuable because we all agree to pretend it is, because pretending makes it useful.
It's as old as law itself, isn't it? From the Code of Hammurabi (translation from wikipedia):
> If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.
Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.
It was very scammy and weasely of execs to ever label those as “purchases” - I guess “sine die merchant-revokable rental” didn’t sound as good. Glad the EU did something about it though.
> Sony discontinued global sales of movie and TV content in August 2021, but at the time, it was promised that content already purchased would remain accessible in future.
> As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
I had a Sony Bravia TV for several years, and bought it because it came with a "Netflix compatible" sticker.
Netflix however wasn't really compatible from the get-go, and they promised it would work in the next upgrade. I wasn't in US/EU so simply returning it wasn't possible.
They kept promising it would work in the next upgrade, and I would upgrade, even though each time it was making the TV incredibly sluggish.
Eventually five or six years passed and the TV stopped receiving upgrades and it never had Netflix.
Older Sony Bravia TVs that just barely met the specs for streaming applications had to go through such roundabout ways to actually stream the content. They did not support the latest streaming standards (DASH/HLS) and basically had to stream raw MP4 files. They were a very exceptional case device at least at Prime Video. Newer devices obviously supported the regular streaming standards.
At this point (and even 5 years ago), getting a little streaming HDMI stick will provide an infinitely better customer experience for a ~$35 investment. Most smart TVs just don't have a great user experience compared to the devices designed around that.
Doesn't your country have laws against false advertisement? Such bullshit would have gotten them a (not huge, but still, it's a Matt of principle) fine in the EU.
Seems like they should have agreed on better licensing agreements.
I see the point for subscription based services, but in this case they should have an agreement to continue streaming for those who have purchased it. The content provider has been paid for it too, right?
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think licensing agreements like this is not enough in a consumer court. When you purchase something, the consumer expects to be able to access it for as long as the distributor exists.
The services use the term "Purchase" or "Buy". If that is not actually the case, they should call it something else. Otherwise it is misleading the consumers, no matter where they hide the small print in the license agreement.
At a minimum I would expect a refund, as they are no longer providing the service that was paid for.
If complaining and asking for a refund doesn't yield a result, you will have a very hard time finding a lawyer to get this through the courts, given the rather marginal value of the content that you "purchased".
It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
Paying for DRMed media is for chumps. While I agree with you overall in spirit, lets not forget that there are in fact 100% DRM free quality stores out there. And for music and games not minor ones either, in music in fact humanity outright won that war and DRM free is the standard for purchases not the exception. Even for games the selection at stores like GOG is in no way minor with lots of full AAA titles. Lots of DRM free places for ebooks too, though admittedly that one for some reason is less extensive.
But it's movies and TV shows that are the real odd ones out. That industry has always been some of the worst, and unfortunately they seem to have watched what happened with music and learned all the wrong lessons plus had the opportunity to stop the particular path towards DRM free music took from happening to them. Things are a complete mess a true perversion of the point of copyright. I hope this sort of thing eventually prompts backlash that results in legal changes.
1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.
2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.
Sadly, the lessons that businesses learn from this is "we should have better DRM so users have no alternative" and not "we should have less user hostile business models"
I tend to feel the same. Something like I understand their legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem. Silly things like why can't I watch HBO max in Germany?
Even sillier, why are there subtitles for languages available in some countries, but not in others, even on the same service? If I'm in Brazil watching a Netflix show (even some Netflix originals), I don't see the same amount of subtitle options if I was in India. Absolutely bonkers.
> legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem.
and in essence, a made up problem. The owners of those licenses simply wants to increase profits by price segmentation - that's why media is restricted in some countries from being viewed from other countries etc.
So i have absolutely zero qualms about piracy when such practices exists.
In case of HBO Max it's probably because they licensed most of their content to Sky. I'm sure once that agreement runs out we will see HBO Max in Germany. And Sky will be even more worthless to non-sport audiences.
At least with streaming services you know that it's only temporary. Often Netflix is just more convenient than searching for torrents, setting up a device with a hard disk/NAS to play offline content etc.
There are (non-trivial) ways of making back-up copies of your purchased digital material, just as there were for Blu-Ray and DVD purchases in the past; so the choice isn't solely between piracy and purchasing.
Wrong mindset. You still need to support the developers somehow. I still bought games/movies but get the non-DRM version just for the convenience i.e. not having to start launcher for playing games.
If the developers make the game/movie available in a reasonable way (e.g. DRM-free download). If they want to control what you do after the transaction then that's their problem and I see no problem with piracy.
No good option for 720p TV series though that never got a blu ray release. DVDs with horrible interlacing are usually a pretty big downgrade compared to the source material and what is available for streaming and rips thereof.
I feel lucky that I don't feel the need to "own" any particular movie. I'm content enough to rent it. I rarely want to watch the same movie again more than once every few years. In my case, it's much cheaper to rent on demand than to digitally "buy" it.
Of course, some movies exist exclusively on platforms like Netflix. If I want to watch something bad enough, then I'll go ahead and pay for one month, which is again cheaper than buying outright. And then I'll usually suck up all the other exclusive content that month, so it doesn't feel too much like a rip off. It's still annoying though.
This is the reason I've given up on "owning" digital content on online platforms. At this point I will not purchase movies or tv-shows, only stream them on streaming platforms. Studios are shooting themselves in both feet by making it impossible to truly own content. By implementing customer hostile licensing models for digital purchases people will move towards streaming instead which generate far less income than selling the content à la carte.
It's been the same idiocy for more than 2 decades now. It always has to be some convoluted contribution model designed to frustrate the customer. Just fucking sell the movie in a free, standardized format with no strings attached.
So then it'll be possible to copy it but copying is illegal.
Well guess what ... The only difference now is that the pirate is better off and the customer is a chump.
I agree. I think Bandcamp is a shining example of how digital sales could be handled. They provide DRM free open format files that you can re-download whenever you want to. No-one is going to take away the files you've already downloaded and saved on some disk. Bandcamp might go out of business and in such a case you'd lose access to any content you have not saved. But that is a fair trade-off.
But the movie industry believes DRM free formats would undercut their region based business model and allow rampant piracy. Like people haven't been cracking DRM-locked content for ages already. And they might be right about increased copyright infringement, but dismantling the whole notion of ownership is not the solution.
I feel the need to give a shout out to Bandcamp who, upon purchase of digital music media, allow immediate download of said media in various formats, including FLAC.
It's not just Bandcamp though - DRM-free files are the default in the music industry and they can be bought from various stores, including lossless formats.
> Practically speaking, digital is far more durable in the balance.
It is, until it’s not. You wouldn’t loose an entire part of your physical collection because some company on the other side of globe decided you shouldn’t be able to use it. But that happens all the time with DRM content. If you only lost 1 album, you are lucky. Past performance is not is not indicative of future results.
The problem is the bait-and-switch. All the really good stuff is behind a second paywall. The movies you really want to watch cost extra money to rent and "more" extra money to "buy." I'm paying for the cake, but then getting charged extra for the icing. It's really starting to irritate me.
Croatian Telekom recently removed certain Cinemax channels from the premium package and are now asking for additional compensation if you'd still like to view them, in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
Imagine someone changing the contract's contents one sided.
They argue they sent an SMS so it's all fine.
Well I don't think so.
That leads me to another case, Daybreak Games Company and Everquest 2.
They run those TLEs aka nostalgia servers every few years. In the past incarnations you could earn certain vouchers by completing "heritage quests", long winded quests which take some group effort to complete and lots of running around and whatnot. With those vouchers you could "buy" weaker version of those heritage items, on live servers (aka non-nostalgia).
They have recently removed the vendors where you can buy those items from, an awful breach of trust and something you have worked hard for simply removed because they felt like it.
> in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
I don't know about Croatia, but usually such a change in service allows you to break the contract on your end without any penalty (as in, end subscription right there and not pay the rest of the 2 years).
It might be hidden in the fine print though and they probably don't want you to know that option exists legally.
Depends on the contract. My cable changed ~10 years ago to stipulate ">200 channels, changing depending on licensing and availability" after first round of national regulator forcing them to allow early cancellation.
Yes, but in the meantime you risk losing your phone line for at least some days (“if you do not pay…”) and that is a risk that nobody wants to assume nowadays (for good reasons).
For those people that wonder why consumers still torrent movies and TV series, here's your reason. And while media companies continue this behaviour, piracy will continue unabated.
Things like subtitles and even audio tracks has to be the laziest mistakes by these companies. How hard can it be to copy all subtitle files to all folder in the CDN? (I know, it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but it can't be much).
If an movie doesn't even have the original audio track, it'll just lead me to unsubscribe faster.
You do not own most forms of content/entertainment you consume. Maybe the only exception is what you created yourself and haven't sold the rights of.
This applies to all forms of content/entertainment consumers would like to enjoy in perpetuity. It's a tale as old as money. People will try to find new ways to generate money from creating things (example: NFT) and other people will try to find new ways to circumvent paying for it (bad example: take a screenshot of said NFT).
Most consumers might pay for 'fair' agreements, but don't like it when the agreement is altered. And when the consumer complains about that, the creator/company quotes Darth Vader that they should pray they won't alter it any further.
I do not disagree with both sides. I understand making money is important. I can also understand that stripping away those initial rights of the license is not fair.
The problem with copyright is that it's enforced by governments — who have monopoly on the use of force. NFTs are not enforced by governments, so they're just this funny cringy thing some people engage in, and that some other people, like me, make fun of.
It’s time for a law that gives you the right to keep pirated copies if you own (as in press the buy button, even if it’s an indefinite rental) the original.
Movies, like a lot of music, should just be downloadable DRM-free when you purchase it. This would probably increase my spending on movies and series instead of ripping BluRays or finding the right linux iso.
The law could just be that piracy is not considered "piracy" if you otherwise have a license for the content you're pirating. So it would make it legal to use piracy for format-shifting or working around situations like this one.
I'm not sure if that would apply to torrents, as you are also effectively sharing content with others while downloading.
It would be better that the law would require to make the content available for a download, using DRM / encryption that can work offline without any connections to a DRM server. Maybe using a personal encryption key.
Private copy levy alows private copies of content.
"A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
"Privatkopieringsersättning"
EU version
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
"(38) Member States should be allowed to provide for an exception or limitation to the reproduction right for certain types of reproduction of audio, visual and audio-visual material for private use, accompanied by fair compensation. This may include the introduction or continuation of remuneration schemes to compensate for the prejudice to rightholders."
> Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
I'm not sure what your view on this law is, but I might add that it's a terrible idea, badly implemented.
For those of us who use hard disks for data backups, our own music, or large image files (I backup scans of large-format film photographs which can be almost 1GB each), the law taxes us unjustly, and also the distribution of the proceeds is inequitable and doesn't benefit artists or creators, but rather the bureaucracies that administer it.
The private copy law does not permit you to obtain copies from elsewhere, make copies from a source that was not legally obtained, or to bypass a technical protection measure to make such copies.
Czech republic has such a law! You are allowed to create a personal copy of copyrighted media you purchased. IDK if pirating is "making a copy", but it doesn't really matter in Czech republic since piracy is not prosecuted anyways.
As far as I know, Belgium has such a law that you can take a backup copy of the original. That would have been my argument when being sued: "Those are all backups of the original. I lost all the originals, so good thing I took a backup." ;)
Strictly speaking the backup must be based on what you actually have bought (i.e. if you strip the DRM from your purchase and store that, that's fine). That means you cannot download essentially an identical copy, that's still naughty. I know this is idiotic, but apparently whoever writes laws doesn't know this.
Inevitable. If you truly want to own your content, you either need to purchase physical media or visit TPB.
Having expectations that a corporation is going to uphold some prior agreement is a fun joke. Especially, when you’ve already given them your money.
The only way to fix the behavior is to fix the consumer, but most people don’t have the patience to manage terabytes of on-site media in such a way that it can be reliably accessed by mobile devices.
I think we will get there sooner than later. Solid state storage is progressing in capacity pretty swiftly. 100 and 200tb SSDs already exist. They are just super pricey.
Home file servers/media servers would likely become more popular if you could just plug a small low power device into the wall.
Something like this already exists (one/two-bay NASes with HDDs) but it's pastime sysadmin hell to make those work well as a cloud replacement without compromising security in a big way. Someone would have to pour a huge amount of work into making watching a movie on one of those really simple and convenient even while on the go; like, Netflix simple. I have a Synology and it's a long long way from that, I can't even show photos from there on the Apple TV and their cloud features aren't compatible with my carrier's CGNAT, and their app for watching video on tvOS is kinda brittle. All of that's already way past the point most people would have sent the device back. I mean, it's not impossible, but I don't see a declouding on the horizon at all.
And then, where would people get their content from? TPB etc. isn't really a solution for the masses, for obvious reasons.
The other part of that statement was 'easily accessed by a mobile device'. That's a much bigger problem, since now you're running a server, and you've got to secure a server.
Even if you trust the contracts, I do not get why you would want to own anything DRMed. That ties you to a platform and a technology at a given time. You may want to move away from this platform and the technology may not be playable in the future.
And the encrypted data (decrypted by said license) shared in a distributed public swarm, crowdsourcing the responsibility to keep it in existence and accessible.
That protocol can be exercised by you to take personal responsibility for your own content, or you can yolo that responsibility onto the network and hope enough other people share your particular interests.
If this sort of activity continues, I can only see it decreasing the effective value of good ‘purchased’ through these online stores. People will only pay similar prices to physical goods for digital goods if they behave similarly, if they do not, the price must surely come down to reflect this.
This can be easily fixed by exclusivity deals, cancellation of "unsecure" physical copies and the fact that none of modern media display devices even feature physical media drives.
You can't vote with your wallet if they kill all the alternatives with the help of IP law ;)
Most probably that will force most of the people to stick to using more TikTok (or whatever video platform will be popular at a future time) and less feature movies. Which I find a real shame, because I personally love movies, but imo that's the direction things are going.
There are videogame streamers and YouTubers who easily provide over 4 hours of content on a regular basis, mostly for free. It's going to be either making subscriptions as content rich and cheap as possible or hoping to get a renaissance of movie nuts culture.
Stop buying a digital product on a locked ecosystem.
Frankly this is the same as 1984 on the Kindle. Those who have the common sense to steer clear are laughing whilst these companies engage in borderline illegal activities.
Even when the billionaires and gigacorporations own every physical asset on the planet, surely they can still let the little people ‘own’ some digital assets?
Isn’t the ideal to have us all continue our excessive mindless consumption within virtual spaces, maximum profit for minimum environmental cost?
Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion but I do think there is merit in considering new economic models that disrupt current platforms.
Not a new model where access to the media is restricted only to the purchaser - and corporations fight to maintain DRM and inevitably become gatekeepers of popular culture. Instead, a model where creator revenue is not tied to media access. See [1] and [2].
NFTs are just a few bytes in a distributed database, they absolutely do not solve these issues. The PlayStation store would still do content delivery and could simply refuse to do so, NFT or no NFT.
You could do content delivery in a decentralized manner (like, say, through IPFS) but then how do you enforce than only the NFT owners can watch the movie? The database is public, anybody can just look up the NFT and find what URL it points towards. You could "right click" the movie, so to speak.
NFTs are a really, really, really dumb concept, even by cryptocurrency/blockchain standards. Any use of NFTs for right management would require a proprietary, trusted, black-box player to enforce the DRM. If you use a proprietary, trusted, black-box player what's the point of using an NFT in the first place?
I don't think you understood my post. I am not proposing a way to replicate PlayStation store with NFTs - and restrict access to the media files based on who purchases the NFT. I am proposing a new model that does not rely on limiting access in order to fund the production of artistic media.
I suggest you read the two posts in full that I linked, as it might make this a little clearer.
> Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion
It’s rather extreme; mention anything cryptocurrency related in a not negative way, and it gets downvoted. Making a neutral observation tends to be neutral.
Because as it was presented it solved the wrong problem: "how to prove you purchased the movie". But the problem is: the vendor doesn't dispute your purchase, but they define that purchase as being of an arbitarily revocable access right. So your NFT proves for all time that you own the equivalent of a broken link - how exactly does this help?
There is a unique downside to NFTs, I just realised.
In order for it to mean anything, the NFT blockchain cannot be managed by just one server. And further, not by the entity which sold you the thing.
So we need maybe all streaming services to each have multiple blockchain servers, all supporting the same chain. Then we know one org cannot play games (rollback the chain, try to take back purchases).
We'd need all studios/media producers to agree that this meant "sold" too.
And lastly, we'd need to separate "sold" fees from "streaming" fees, so one could buy, but streaming services could get paid for front end support/platform/ongoing streaming costs.
And naturally, in this world, you could download any copy of this media.. and store locally, and forgo streaming costs.
But for all of that to work, you'd need something else. Laws stating that, basically, if the NFT servers were ever discontinued, a static copy would be provided, and all would gave ownership validated forever ... or the content creator would give up all copyright on the media.
In other words, you sell without physical media, you must use a blockchain, and once you do that you must always provide servers to verify, or you lose all copyright.
That last bit is important. It puts the burden on the content creator. Sell digitally, and you must make sure it's a real sale, or else.
Anyhow, my point in all of this is the immense downside.
A public copy of everything you watch, listen, read, tied to your public ID.
There is no other reality. Schemes of non-ID based authentication are blather, because to truly claim ownership, your identity must be known. And even if some method to separate ID from chain ownership are hatched, it a hack a day world, your ID->chain ID will get out.
There is no anonymity in this.
Which means everything you watch, read, view, would be public knowledge. The chain, by its very nature, must be viewable by everyone, all the time.
Right now, this info is very dispersed, spread over providers and sellers. And if you have any doubt of the value of this information, to profilers, the government, note that post 9/11, there was an immense fever raised by librarians, for the US government wanted a record of all books to be kept, and who checked them out.
So any NFT/chain plan, means all your ownership data, ready to be used by the government for profiling you, by banks to profile you to determine risk, by political opponents to discredit you, and more.
Content producers get to decide the economic model. They effectively have a monopoly on content people want to watch. And they've decided that Widevine/PlayReady/FairPlay DRM is what's required. And all of those require by design an online server to enable access to the media.
All of those services will one day deprecate/retire their servers, and all paid content downloaded to your devices today will become unplayable. Your granddaughter won't be able to watch any films she finds on your old iPad she finds in the attic 100 years from now.
Unless you can convince studio execs that they will earn more money with your new economic model, it's going nowhere.
> Content producers get to decide the economic model.
Only insofar as we keep paying them, and ceding control of our media to them. The Camp Chaos example has no content producers dictating an economic model - because consumers and fans are paying the artists directly.
The model for media already transitioned from the consumer owning the content (CDs, DVDs,...) to the consumer having a permission to consume the content.
The industry deliberately drove this transition so they can earn from each consumption and break the reselling-market.
The fact that they also wanted to DIRECTLY replace the CD/DVD by showing a "Buy Movie" button, but actually using the same licensing model, the same infrastructure and the same utterly careless approach on content-management:
For this we don't need a new economic model. The industry WANTED this model, and executed it without the connected responsibilities.
A court should have already found this practice to be illegal years ago, either the careless handling of sold property, or the explicitly misleading sales of VOD with the claim that the customer will actually OWN a copy of the content.
I don't see a technical problem that if the content I purchased at some point is no longer economic for the seller to host on his platform, that he is required to allow me to download it or send me a USB-stick with the content...
> the content I purchased [...] is required to allow me to download it
This would work if laws mandate that media like movies, eBooks, music must be downloadable DRM-free by purchasers, which will probably never happen as the entire industry is built against peer-to-peer file sharing and media piracy.
The industry likes this model but the consumers do not. They like the convenience of having all their media in a single nice UX like Netflix, PlayStation store, or Spotify. They do not like that profits are usually directed away from creators, and that "ownership" in these stores is more like temporary licensing of DRM content. This is where a new economic model could be introduced to fund some media production and distribution - for those creators and consumers willing to embrace it.
There's no model here. A band sold merch. If they had sold a branded beanie baby during beanie baby mania (and had been a band that appeals to suburban mothers), the same thing would have happened.
So how long will this mania last? They were sold during a bear market and at one of the lowest points of NFT market volume, but still did pretty well. If NFTs continue to be seen as tulips or beanie babies* for the next several years, and wildly outperform regular band merch sold through a distributor, maybe it’s worth considering as a new model for artists and creators. If NFTs crash to zero next month and artists stop earning from them, then I will agree with you.
* by you, I should add. Others see it as a digital object worth owning that is not tied to a single speculative bubble.
In case somebody forgot: you never purchase a digital copy, you only purchase a license to exclusively watch a movie anytime you like using the vendors consumer platform. Anyone ever read the license agreements when "purchasing a movie" online?
This is the reason I do not buy movies any longer; 1 streaming account on Netflix is enough for me, I do not care about anything else anymore. May they rot in consumer hell.
Streaming services have no pretense of ownership. You can watch whatever they happen to have as long as you keep paying.
When you buy a title on Amazon, Apple, etc., the digital services are selling you on "ownership". In theory, this will be in your account forever (without any money changing hands after the initial transaction). The reality is obviously not so simple.
Its trivial to bypass any region locking, reverse any PAL speedup, and upscale during playback - and the sound quality is already generally excellent. Unlike several generations of hard drives which I've lost completely, all of the DVDs I've ever owned still work just fine.
If space is a concern, buy some file binders and some paper disc sleeves and store your discs and covers in them.
If convenience is a concern, fair enough - but I find the experience of going to thrift shops and markets to find gems to be a fun and cheap hobby.
I have nothing against installing firmware cracks/torrenting replacements. I'm just stating that games on physical media are the only thing that it's relatively safe to pay Sony for.
With the Playstation Plus changes they have made, they are making Microsoft Game Pass look better and better.
They keep acting like they have a massively dominant position instead of having a competitor with deeper pockets who is willing to take losses to undercut them in close proximity
Buying digital licences is for suckers. Piracy is forever, plus you learn practical skills like redundant data storage and offsite backup methodologies.
Seriously, the 'value' related criticisms of cryptocurrencies have come true, but for digital licensing.
This has happened a few times (e.g Deadpool), in those cases the game has still remained available for users who had already purchased it, just unavailable for new purchases.
Valve rarely has to pull games in this case, the agreements they have with developers seem to protect them. I can't remember the last time a game was removed from people's Steam libraries.
However, developers do have the ability to replace games in your library, so often an original game will be replaced with a low-quality remaster.
I suspect this won't happen, and that Valve have contingencies in contracts to ensure this never happens. You might no longer get updates to a game, but that would likely be it.
Why? How is this different to films?
Games are what Steam does. Films are not really what the Playstation Store does. Sure you can buy them, but who does? Not enough to cause irreparable reputational damage would be my guess. Also, the Playstation Store has far less negotiating power with film distributors than Valve/Steam does with game publishers, so the contract terms aren't likely to include contingencies for this sort of situation.
NFTs don't let you include the movie itself as a payload, so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system. In this case, there is no disagreement that the consumer purchased the movie, just a refusal to honor that purchase. An NFT that said you bought a movie is meaningless if the system streaming the movie to you to stops honoring it. It's no different than what is happening here.
> so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system.
Yes, but that's exactly what you don't get with a central database. There is no way to use your Sony-database-entry to access the movie from whoever holds the rights right now. Companies also go out of business or change plans, so that central database will cease to exist in the future anyway.
With an NFTs you have a proof of ownership. You still would need a service to honor your NFT token, but NFT usage would be the very thing that makes those services possible to exist in the first place.
We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services. With movies that doesn't work, as companies don't even give you a raw file of a movie, but they might be willing giving you NFTs, as those don't circumvent the DRM measures they have in place.
Either way, NFT are of course only a small piece of the puzzle here, there is a lot of supporting infrastructure that would need to be build and that nobody is building right now. And given the energy usage and cost of blockchains, it's not really usable for your $3 movie anyway. So it's not a workable solution at the moment. But even with all it's faults, it's still the closest thing to a possible solution for digital ownership that we have.
HN hates NFTs because of 'self evident' statements like this, it's seen as little more than micro-hype statements to up the value of something seen as useless.
NFTs do not solve this problem, the content has been removed. If you feel they do, feel free to explain how it would have helped in this situation.
Only in theory - multiple streaming services would have to be licensed rights to the movie, so that if PlayStation revoked your right to watch it, you could use the NFT in another service like Netflix. This is unlikely to happen with big Hollywood movies cause of their tight IP laws.
NFT could be applied to movies in new ways[1], but probably not in the way of limiting access to the file.
How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.
Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?
Please don't take HN threads into hellish generic flamewars. We've been through this a thousand times already. Pouring out a whole bunch more gasoline and setting it on fire is exactly what you should not be doing here. We want curious conversation.
Personal attack is also completely off limits, and you did it more than once in this thread. No more of this, please.
I can't believe I'm going to defend NFTs, but ... _if_ copyright law were satisfied that you aren't infringing if you purchased perpetual access to a copy--digital or otherwise--then "a glorified receipt" could be all that was needed _if_ the system honoured users with a right to access, on any system on which it was available, for cost, a work that has been legally purchased.
In USA, I can't see why proof of purchase and TPB wouldn't be enough. Platform issues don't negate the rights you purchased.
When you buy stuff on these digital stores, you agree to pay for an indefinite license to the content. So it can be pulled at any time.
Why would these stores use NFTs attached to ownership licenses when they could just reword their ToS to include ownership. They don’t want to sell ownership to begin with so they would never use NFTs either.
You could even have the content shared over public BitTorrent networks, encrypted with a symmetric key and then store a personalised asymmetric decryption key (the symmetric key encrypted using the owner wallets public key, ensuring only the current owner can derive it from the public NFT data) in the NFT. You would re-compute this asymmetric key for the new owner during the TransferNFT function and store it in the contract.
Yeah, the symmetric key would probably leak quickly, and the content decrypted and shared, the point here is to make the system so convenient and simple that it discourages piracy, which you can never fully beat anyway.
Yugalabs[0] assign copyright license to whoever owns the NFT on the chain forever.
So if someone mints a NFT, they get a perpetual license to use it however they like. The downside is if they lose the NFT for any reason such as theft, they lose the license as well.
Other NFT projects of yugalabs store data on chain or use a separate storage chain built for permanence. This basically means they cannot take the content down once they have uploaded it and attached it to a NFT.
However this doesn't solve anything unless corporations are forced to accept it as the only way to sell content.
One big problem it may solve for corporations is uniqueness and validation of all license in existence through a ledger. If a company sells their content exclusively via NFT, they can take advantage of immutable receipt system and built in programming capabilities to embed royalties on transfer. This would make it hard for people to sell their copies without giving companies a cut. Legally, that is. Nothing stops them from ripping off a copy and selling it but it would be easy to prove it is invalid and enforce via legal system.
0] Yugalabs is a big NFT IP company valued at 4 billion. They are behind monkey jpegs which are called BAYC.
And I want to know what drives a person like you to post toxic comments like this.
Why not just say "An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with a regular receipt." without the rude and spiteful attitude?
> you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content
This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed? I think that's the definition of stealing.
Good thing we still have torrents.
FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level; this is easily circumvented with a VPN, but it's also easy to bypass using DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox [0].
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https
Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading. If I purchase a dvd I can lend it to my family, I can pass it on free to a friend to watch, or I can sell it second hand. If I don't dispose of it, it's mine for life.
That just doesn't apply to these digital acquisitions which are tied to the account and which the terms do allow to be revoked.
They aren't purchases but more like very long term rentals. Of course fewer people would spend money if they were told the truth so the media companies misleadingly say "purchase". (And since they all say purchase it would be very hard for one to break rank).
It's why something like Netflix of Kindle Unlimited can work well, at least you know you are spending an amount each month for basically unlimited access to the catalog.
I recently noticed the small print on event tickets I purchase from Ticketmaster make it clear that I am actually purchasing a "license" to access the event. The ticket does not guarantee entry and the license is non-transferable, revocable without refund, etc.
Unfortunately this is a phenomenon that extends beyond digital media.
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I have no doubt a small claim would result in a judgement made against Sony for the original purchase price of the item. Hopefully citizens will exert the right to do so.
They call them purchases. They should not be allowed to use that terminology. They are rentals.
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> Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading.
This is why I will only purchase things I can actually keep, like CDs, DVDs, paper books and so on. It seems old fashioned, until you have a few "purchases" wiped out by some policy change out of your control.
It’s not stealing, it’s in the contract. That’s why I only Torrent
Anything that has the word "purchase" in it should be legally mandated that there be a way for users to access it indefinitely: in this case, perhaps making it possible to download with some sort of offline DRM. (You can do this, say, with Audible books that you buy.)
Anything which is cloud-only and may disappear at any time should be labelled something else, like "lease".
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Sure, they always argue that you are only "renting" them for a one-time-fee, and that the rent agreement could end at any time for any reason.
But them using the word "purchased" in this very announcement (not a mistranslation btw) gives weight to the argument that this is intentional deception of the customer. An even easier case in Germany, where courts acknowledge that customers don't read the terms of service, so any "surprising" terms hidden in the TOS aren't legally binding.
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Not so fast. Every contract must be balanced, otherwise it can be challenged (and likely overruled) in courts.
If they have the right to terminate your license and withdraw access to the content, you should also have the right to terminate the contract and withdraw your money.
It cannot work just for one side without any practical reason.
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Exactly. These scumbags are not to be trusted. Ever.
That's why I don't buy ebooks on Amazon.
I download elsewhere, store somewhere safe and upload to my kindle for reading.
These corporations want us to be ethical and respectful to copyrights, but they act unethically when it comes to respecting consumers' basic rights.
Thanks for linking to firefox's dns-over-https instructions. I wasn't aware that I can just enable that in the settings.
You should use a VPN anyway if you're going to torrent.
Not in France, at least not immediately. The antipiracy authority first sends you an email (1st warning), then an IRL letter (2nd warning). When you receive the IRL letter, THEN you should VPN (or SOCKS or whatever) for one year, then you can go turn it off until you receive your 2nd warning again, if that happens.
I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years. I only received my first 2nd warning this year. I configured a systemd service `ssh -D myvps` and configured deluged to use this SOCKS5 proxy. Waiting for next April to turn it off...
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Depends on where you live. In Brazil for example it's perfectly legal to download copies, you're just not allowed to distribute or profit off them.
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why? I have never used a VPN for decades and terabytes of torrenting. Not a peep from my ISP (virgin media, uk)
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> Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs
Not this one: http://piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iaxmqhsd52c...
And that's why I'm still this weirdo who buys DVDs and even CDs.
Me as well. But unfortunately there is a trade off. For example I buy most my Nintendo Switch games in the physical form so my kids can trade them back and forth. But there have been times when my case full of games has gone missing and I panic about $600 in games last. Thankfully I have always found my games but I could see how easy it could be to lose a lot of money fast. With digital I just download the game any time I want even if I lose my switch just sign into the account on a new switch and get my stuff.
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You can buy DRM-free digital and lossless music though. It's only the movie industry that has it backwards.
This is why I actually own all our movies on Blu-ray. These days they are cheap online and locally (I averaged $6 per movie with the most common ones being cheapest and rare ones the most expensive - $8 for the entire original Star Wars trilogy in Good box condition, and players are $7 on average at Goodwill), they are easily ripped if that is your thing into 1080p streams that still look better in some circumstances than highly compressed 4K streams, and they can be resold later and never taken away.
Even though it cost quite a bit to get the collection - after you do the math of the cost of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and [insert typical random streaming service here]... it might pay off in only a few years while retaining some resale value. It is also super fun to go bargain hunting - $2.99 for the first 4 Pirates of the Caribbean movies [literally, for me at a thrift shop]? Score!
> FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level
And some of those now resolve the IP addresses of popular torrent sites, and block their IP addresses -- or rather, redirect connection attempts to a local anti-piracy page.
I know this to be the case for at least one ISP, but it's the biggest one in the country, and needless to say they have a video on demand business as well.
Forging DNS is one way to gain a "special" reputation for an ISP.
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You can also use goodbyedpi to circumvent blocked sites by ISPs
https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
Isn’t that a transaction between the user and Studiocanal that Sony just mediated? The right to view the content should still be valid through a different platform.
> This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed?
This is relatively common and has been since before you were born
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> I think that's the definition of stealing.
It's not. This is, though:
> Good thing we still have torrents.
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I don't like what Sony is doing here, but it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
> it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
That's likely because you're viewing it through a different lens than the person you're replying to. Try to look at it this way...
- Company sold ownership of an item to individual. This is what "purchase" means to most people.
- Company then decided that individual should no longer have access to item, so takes it away.
- Individual knows that company has no (moral) right to take away item, so takes it back.
From a moral view, if you agree on what purchase means, the individual is completely in the right. If you don't agree on what purchase means, then the individual is not in the right. There are a lot of people that do not believe that companies should be able to use a word and just define it as meaning something totally different in their specific case ("purchase" when they mean rent, "unlimited data" when they mean limited, etc); and that when a company uses a word, they are morally bound to its common definition. For such a person, the OP's statements are internally consistent.
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Wow. You call copyright infringement "stealing" (which it is not) but give the company a pass for removing the content they paid for (which is much closer to "stealing").
Really hard to take this comment in good faith
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> since before you were born
Color TV didn't exist when I was born (or VCRs).
Your remark makes me think you don't know what you're talking about and just assume things without thinking for yourself.
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I really would like to know how they will get around article 10 of EU directive 2019/770 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Edit: As far as I heard it is valid for anything delivered after Jan 1st 2022, which includes continuation of exiting indefinite contracts from before that date and the continuation of them. Correct me if I'm wrong/misinformed though.
Isn't it silly that there needs to be laws written to ensure consumers simply get what they paid for?
The whole reason laws exist is because we recognise not everyone can be trusted to act in a decent manner. The law gives us a way to codify what "decent" means and to explain to folks what we expect of them (as well as consequences for when folks step outside those boundaries).
What I'm trying to say is that no, it is not silly. In fact the entire civilised world is built on the premise that laws are required.
Fundamentally businesses have no morals, and everything is just an equation based on profits. If it makes economical sense to do this, many a business would be inclined to do it.
Not saying that it’s right, but it’s definitely completely understandable why we need laws to protect consumers.
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It's silly that anyone buys from Sony with their track record.
Auto installing rootkit on music CDs, Dropping the promised Linux support for PS3, putting out bad marvel movies, I'm sure there's others but those three are enough for me.
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Not more silly than there are laws against theft and murder
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Consumers rarely don't get what they paid for. In these situations it's just often that the merchants bury the fact that they can revoke access to your purchases at any point, and if you don't like it, you can go pound sand. Hence the need to write laws that don't fuck over consumers.
The right to get what you paid for is explicitly granted by law. Before that you’d need to have a bigger stick than the seller to make sure they don’t just run with your money.
Also, money is only valuable because we all agree to pretend it is, because pretending makes it useful.
IP is the root of the silliness
That's a large part of what the entire legal system is for.
It's as old as law itself, isn't it? From the Code of Hammurabi (translation from wikipedia):
> If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.
Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.
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It was very scammy and weasely of execs to ever label those as “purchases” - I guess “sine die merchant-revokable rental” didn’t sound as good. Glad the EU did something about it though.
> Sony discontinued global sales of movie and TV content in August 2021, but at the time, it was promised that content already purchased would remain accessible in future.
> As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
Sounds about right for Sony.
I really hate Sony.
I had a Sony Bravia TV for several years, and bought it because it came with a "Netflix compatible" sticker.
Netflix however wasn't really compatible from the get-go, and they promised it would work in the next upgrade. I wasn't in US/EU so simply returning it wasn't possible.
They kept promising it would work in the next upgrade, and I would upgrade, even though each time it was making the TV incredibly sluggish.
Eventually five or six years passed and the TV stopped receiving upgrades and it never had Netflix.
Older Sony Bravia TVs that just barely met the specs for streaming applications had to go through such roundabout ways to actually stream the content. They did not support the latest streaming standards (DASH/HLS) and basically had to stream raw MP4 files. They were a very exceptional case device at least at Prime Video. Newer devices obviously supported the regular streaming standards.
At this point (and even 5 years ago), getting a little streaming HDMI stick will provide an infinitely better customer experience for a ~$35 investment. Most smart TVs just don't have a great user experience compared to the devices designed around that.
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I mean, it was probably Netflix compatible via HDMI? I don't see the problem here.
\s
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Doesn't your country have laws against false advertisement? Such bullshit would have gotten them a (not huge, but still, it's a Matt of principle) fine in the EU.
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Seems like they should have agreed on better licensing agreements.
I see the point for subscription based services, but in this case they should have an agreement to continue streaming for those who have purchased it. The content provider has been paid for it too, right?
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think licensing agreements like this is not enough in a consumer court. When you purchase something, the consumer expects to be able to access it for as long as the distributor exists.
The services use the term "Purchase" or "Buy". If that is not actually the case, they should call it something else. Otherwise it is misleading the consumers, no matter where they hide the small print in the license agreement.
At a minimum I would expect a refund, as they are no longer providing the service that was paid for.
If complaining and asking for a refund doesn't yield a result, you will have a very hard time finding a lawyer to get this through the courts, given the rather marginal value of the content that you "purchased".
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why are we "expected" to honor their copyright for eternity when they do not honor their commitments ala "evolving licensing agreements".
what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
Due to my evolving licensing disagreement, I use torrents for all my movies and TV show watching needs.
> what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
That is already how consumers behave. You're living the dream right now!
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Because we have little money for lawyers, while they have much money for lawyers
You're confusing the creator with the distributor platform
You don't get to steal from a musician because Sony cheated you
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> why are we "expected" to honor their copyright
Because you don't want to be a thief
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> they do not honor their commitments
They do, in fact.
It seems like you just assumed they committed to something they didn't, and are angry now that you've finally read the actual commitment.
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> what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.
Then you'd be a thief who pointed fingers at other people to justify your own choices
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It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
Paying for DRMed media is for chumps. While I agree with you overall in spirit, lets not forget that there are in fact 100% DRM free quality stores out there. And for music and games not minor ones either, in music in fact humanity outright won that war and DRM free is the standard for purchases not the exception. Even for games the selection at stores like GOG is in no way minor with lots of full AAA titles. Lots of DRM free places for ebooks too, though admittedly that one for some reason is less extensive.
But it's movies and TV shows that are the real odd ones out. That industry has always been some of the worst, and unfortunately they seem to have watched what happened with music and learned all the wrong lessons plus had the opportunity to stop the particular path towards DRM free music took from happening to them. Things are a complete mess a true perversion of the point of copyright. I hope this sort of thing eventually prompts backlash that results in legal changes.
music has a lower production cost than tv shows and films. the copyright holders are more willing to distribute them at a lower price
Feels like there's a 10-year cycle of this:
1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.
2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.
3. Goto 1
Sadly, the lessons that businesses learn from this is "we should have better DRM so users have no alternative" and not "we should have less user hostile business models"
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I tend to feel the same. Something like I understand their legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem. Silly things like why can't I watch HBO max in Germany?
Even sillier, why are there subtitles for languages available in some countries, but not in others, even on the same service? If I'm in Brazil watching a Netflix show (even some Netflix originals), I don't see the same amount of subtitle options if I was in India. Absolutely bonkers.
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> legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem.
and in essence, a made up problem. The owners of those licenses simply wants to increase profits by price segmentation - that's why media is restricted in some countries from being viewed from other countries etc.
So i have absolutely zero qualms about piracy when such practices exists.
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In case of HBO Max it's probably because they licensed most of their content to Sky. I'm sure once that agreement runs out we will see HBO Max in Germany. And Sky will be even more worthless to non-sport audiences.
At least with streaming services you know that it's only temporary. Often Netflix is just more convenient than searching for torrents, setting up a device with a hard disk/NAS to play offline content etc.
There are (non-trivial) ways of making back-up copies of your purchased digital material, just as there were for Blu-Ray and DVD purchases in the past; so the choice isn't solely between piracy and purchasing.
Kinda is because it’s so much simpler to download it for free. Or get it from the library (if you have a decent public library system)
I'd rather send an amount of money to the actual creator (without intermediaries) and still pirate the content just because it's more convenient.
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Many of these files have uncracked DRM so not sure that's true.
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Wrong mindset. You still need to support the developers somehow. I still bought games/movies but get the non-DRM version just for the convenience i.e. not having to start launcher for playing games.
If the developers make the game/movie available in a reasonable way (e.g. DRM-free download). If they want to control what you do after the transaction then that's their problem and I see no problem with piracy.
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You could also buy the DVD/Blu-Ray/UHD and rip it...
That's more effort than torrenting to get exactly the same end result.
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No good option for 720p TV series though that never got a blu ray release. DVDs with horrible interlacing are usually a pretty big downgrade compared to the source material and what is available for streaming and rips thereof.
The major problem with Blu-ray is ensuring authenticity. There are so many fakes out there.
I feel lucky that I don't feel the need to "own" any particular movie. I'm content enough to rent it. I rarely want to watch the same movie again more than once every few years. In my case, it's much cheaper to rent on demand than to digitally "buy" it.
Of course, some movies exist exclusively on platforms like Netflix. If I want to watch something bad enough, then I'll go ahead and pay for one month, which is again cheaper than buying outright. And then I'll usually suck up all the other exclusive content that month, so it doesn't feel too much like a rip off. It's still annoying though.
You can do this via purchasing physical media, too. You can even pass it along when you're done with it.
Paying for media is a good thing. Paying for content without getting the media is a problem.
> It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps.
It's for honest people.
Unfortunately honest people are synonymous with chumps these days as a result of increasingly user hostile behaviour of most big corps.
And it’s the honest people that repeatedly get taken advantage of, then.
This is the reason I've given up on "owning" digital content on online platforms. At this point I will not purchase movies or tv-shows, only stream them on streaming platforms. Studios are shooting themselves in both feet by making it impossible to truly own content. By implementing customer hostile licensing models for digital purchases people will move towards streaming instead which generate far less income than selling the content à la carte.
It's been the same idiocy for more than 2 decades now. It always has to be some convoluted contribution model designed to frustrate the customer. Just fucking sell the movie in a free, standardized format with no strings attached.
So then it'll be possible to copy it but copying is illegal.
Well guess what ... The only difference now is that the pirate is better off and the customer is a chump.
I agree. I think Bandcamp is a shining example of how digital sales could be handled. They provide DRM free open format files that you can re-download whenever you want to. No-one is going to take away the files you've already downloaded and saved on some disk. Bandcamp might go out of business and in such a case you'd lose access to any content you have not saved. But that is a fair trade-off.
But the movie industry believes DRM free formats would undercut their region based business model and allow rampant piracy. Like people haven't been cracking DRM-locked content for ages already. And they might be right about increased copyright infringement, but dismantling the whole notion of ownership is not the solution.
I feel the need to give a shout out to Bandcamp who, upon purchase of digital music media, allow immediate download of said media in various formats, including FLAC.
Keep fighting the good fight Bandcamp!
It's not just Bandcamp though - DRM-free files are the default in the music industry and they can be bought from various stores, including lossless formats.
I just don't understand this attitude
I used to own physical media. It got destroyed and scratched and lost constantly.
I've been buying digital media online for decades. So far I've lost one album.
Practically speaking, digital is far more durable in the balance.
> Practically speaking, digital is far more durable in the balance.
It is, until it’s not. You wouldn’t loose an entire part of your physical collection because some company on the other side of globe decided you shouldn’t be able to use it. But that happens all the time with DRM content. If you only lost 1 album, you are lucky. Past performance is not is not indicative of future results.
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The problem is the bait-and-switch. All the really good stuff is behind a second paywall. The movies you really want to watch cost extra money to rent and "more" extra money to "buy." I'm paying for the cake, but then getting charged extra for the icing. It's really starting to irritate me.
Croatian Telekom recently removed certain Cinemax channels from the premium package and are now asking for additional compensation if you'd still like to view them, in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
Imagine someone changing the contract's contents one sided.
They argue they sent an SMS so it's all fine. Well I don't think so.
That leads me to another case, Daybreak Games Company and Everquest 2. They run those TLEs aka nostalgia servers every few years. In the past incarnations you could earn certain vouchers by completing "heritage quests", long winded quests which take some group effort to complete and lots of running around and whatnot. With those vouchers you could "buy" weaker version of those heritage items, on live servers (aka non-nostalgia). They have recently removed the vendors where you can buy those items from, an awful breach of trust and something you have worked hard for simply removed because they felt like it.
> in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
I don't know about Croatia, but usually such a change in service allows you to break the contract on your end without any penalty (as in, end subscription right there and not pay the rest of the 2 years).
It might be hidden in the fine print though and they probably don't want you to know that option exists legally.
Depends on the contract. My cable changed ~10 years ago to stipulate ">200 channels, changing depending on licensing and availability" after first round of national regulator forcing them to allow early cancellation.
Yes, but in the meantime you risk losing your phone line for at least some days (“if you do not pay…”) and that is a risk that nobody wants to assume nowadays (for good reasons).
For those people that wonder why consumers still torrent movies and TV series, here's your reason. And while media companies continue this behaviour, piracy will continue unabated.
Shit half the time inpirate is so I can get English subtitles. Netflix Japan is horrible for those.
Things like subtitles and even audio tracks has to be the laziest mistakes by these companies. How hard can it be to copy all subtitle files to all folder in the CDN? (I know, it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but it can't be much).
If an movie doesn't even have the original audio track, it'll just lead me to unsubscribe faster.
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You do not own most forms of content/entertainment you consume. Maybe the only exception is what you created yourself and haven't sold the rights of.
This applies to all forms of content/entertainment consumers would like to enjoy in perpetuity. It's a tale as old as money. People will try to find new ways to generate money from creating things (example: NFT) and other people will try to find new ways to circumvent paying for it (bad example: take a screenshot of said NFT).
Most consumers might pay for 'fair' agreements, but don't like it when the agreement is altered. And when the consumer complains about that, the creator/company quotes Darth Vader that they should pray they won't alter it any further.
I do not disagree with both sides. I understand making money is important. I can also understand that stripping away those initial rights of the license is not fair.
The problem with copyright is that it's enforced by governments — who have monopoly on the use of force. NFTs are not enforced by governments, so they're just this funny cringy thing some people engage in, and that some other people, like me, make fun of.
It’s time for a law that gives you the right to keep pirated copies if you own (as in press the buy button, even if it’s an indefinite rental) the original.
Movies, like a lot of music, should just be downloadable DRM-free when you purchase it. This would probably increase my spending on movies and series instead of ripping BluRays or finding the right linux iso.
The law could just be that piracy is not considered "piracy" if you otherwise have a license for the content you're pirating. So it would make it legal to use piracy for format-shifting or working around situations like this one.
I'm not sure if that would apply to torrents, as you are also effectively sharing content with others while downloading.
It would be better that the law would require to make the content available for a download, using DRM / encryption that can work offline without any connections to a DRM server. Maybe using a personal encryption key.
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Private copy levy alows private copies of content. "A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
"Privatkopieringsersättning"
EU version https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... "(38) Member States should be allowed to provide for an exception or limitation to the reproduction right for certain types of reproduction of audio, visual and audio-visual material for private use, accompanied by fair compensation. This may include the introduction or continuation of remuneration schemes to compensate for the prejudice to rightholders."
> Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
I'm not sure what your view on this law is, but I might add that it's a terrible idea, badly implemented.
For those of us who use hard disks for data backups, our own music, or large image files (I backup scans of large-format film photographs which can be almost 1GB each), the law taxes us unjustly, and also the distribution of the proceeds is inequitable and doesn't benefit artists or creators, but rather the bureaucracies that administer it.
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The private copy law does not permit you to obtain copies from elsewhere, make copies from a source that was not legally obtained, or to bypass a technical protection measure to make such copies.
I wonder, if I'm on the copyright holder side, how can I access that money?
Czech republic has such a law! You are allowed to create a personal copy of copyrighted media you purchased. IDK if pirating is "making a copy", but it doesn't really matter in Czech republic since piracy is not prosecuted anyways.
In Poland you can keep as many pirated copies as you like, and make new ones for friends and family. Its codified as part of private fair use https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Dozwolony_u%C... and probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
As far as I know, Belgium has such a law that you can take a backup copy of the original. That would have been my argument when being sued: "Those are all backups of the original. I lost all the originals, so good thing I took a backup." ;)
Strictly speaking the backup must be based on what you actually have bought (i.e. if you strip the DRM from your purchase and store that, that's fine). That means you cannot download essentially an identical copy, that's still naughty. I know this is idiotic, but apparently whoever writes laws doesn't know this.
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In practice there are no penalties for pirate content, although sounds like a good change.
In Germany? No, they really fear their enforcement authority.
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Decriminalize piracy for natural persons (not corporations.)
Infinite letter of marquee
Inevitable. If you truly want to own your content, you either need to purchase physical media or visit TPB.
Having expectations that a corporation is going to uphold some prior agreement is a fun joke. Especially, when you’ve already given them your money.
The only way to fix the behavior is to fix the consumer, but most people don’t have the patience to manage terabytes of on-site media in such a way that it can be reliably accessed by mobile devices.
I think we will get there sooner than later. Solid state storage is progressing in capacity pretty swiftly. 100 and 200tb SSDs already exist. They are just super pricey.
Home file servers/media servers would likely become more popular if you could just plug a small low power device into the wall.
Something like this already exists (one/two-bay NASes with HDDs) but it's pastime sysadmin hell to make those work well as a cloud replacement without compromising security in a big way. Someone would have to pour a huge amount of work into making watching a movie on one of those really simple and convenient even while on the go; like, Netflix simple. I have a Synology and it's a long long way from that, I can't even show photos from there on the Apple TV and their cloud features aren't compatible with my carrier's CGNAT, and their app for watching video on tvOS is kinda brittle. All of that's already way past the point most people would have sent the device back. I mean, it's not impossible, but I don't see a declouding on the horizon at all.
And then, where would people get their content from? TPB etc. isn't really a solution for the masses, for obvious reasons.
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The other part of that statement was 'easily accessed by a mobile device'. That's a much bigger problem, since now you're running a server, and you've got to secure a server.
Usage rises to fill capacity. The studios will start releasing higher res, less compressed films with insane levels of detail.
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Even if you trust the contracts, I do not get why you would want to own anything DRMed. That ties you to a platform and a technology at a given time. You may want to move away from this platform and the technology may not be playable in the future.
It's low hassle, affordable and very accessible. Most people have Netflix which lets you own exactly nothing.
Or they could put the license you purchase in a public distributed database.
And the encrypted data (decrypted by said license) shared in a distributed public swarm, crowdsourcing the responsibility to keep it in existence and accessible.
That protocol can be exercised by you to take personal responsibility for your own content, or you can yolo that responsibility onto the network and hope enough other people share your particular interests.
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Finally a use for blockchain!
If this sort of activity continues, I can only see it decreasing the effective value of good ‘purchased’ through these online stores. People will only pay similar prices to physical goods for digital goods if they behave similarly, if they do not, the price must surely come down to reflect this.
This can be easily fixed by exclusivity deals, cancellation of "unsecure" physical copies and the fact that none of modern media display devices even feature physical media drives.
You can't vote with your wallet if they kill all the alternatives with the help of IP law ;)
Most probably that will force most of the people to stick to using more TikTok (or whatever video platform will be popular at a future time) and less feature movies. Which I find a real shame, because I personally love movies, but imo that's the direction things are going.
There are videogame streamers and YouTubers who easily provide over 4 hours of content on a regular basis, mostly for free. It's going to be either making subscriptions as content rich and cheap as possible or hoping to get a renaissance of movie nuts culture.
Well, guess this is a good reminder to everyone that anything you purchase on these online stores generally are not really yours.
Same applies to Steam, Playstation games, etc.
More reason to support DRM-free solutions or just buy physical media you can backup.
Stop buying a digital product on a locked ecosystem.
Frankly this is the same as 1984 on the Kindle. Those who have the common sense to steer clear are laughing whilst these companies engage in borderline illegal activities.
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse
That was the end of Sony purchases for me.
you will own nothing and you will be happy
I own nothing [1] and I'm quite happy, and I have a lot of leftover cash each month.
[1] Except for a few 2TB external hard drives to store the media I don't "own".
Even when the billionaires and gigacorporations own every physical asset on the planet, surely they can still let the little people ‘own’ some digital assets?
Isn’t the ideal to have us all continue our excessive mindless consumption within virtual spaces, maximum profit for minimum environmental cost?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrEUzKTt7j0
Exactly like I said a few days ago; funny enough: [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970488
I wonder what quote people brought up during the licensing bickerings of way before that "what if we were all to just like rent things lmao" article.
The Old Man : Anyone can buy OCP's stock and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?
You can pirate everything, pay nothing and be quite happy too.
Edit: allegedly.
> due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers
An impressively high weasel quotient in these words.
> you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
I expect this policy decision will not survive contact with the courts of Germany and Austria.
> An impressively high weasel quotient in these words.
If they changed "evolving" to "devolving" it would be quite honest, since this is clearly a regression.
Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion but I do think there is merit in considering new economic models that disrupt current platforms.
Not a new model where access to the media is restricted only to the purchaser - and corporations fight to maintain DRM and inevitably become gatekeepers of popular culture. Instead, a model where creator revenue is not tied to media access. See [1] and [2].
[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/camp-chaos-songcamp-nfts-50-pe...
[2] https://mirror.xyz/herndondryhurst.eth/S-W2ZXRbrcy8bVGrKwMXS...
NFTs are just a few bytes in a distributed database, they absolutely do not solve these issues. The PlayStation store would still do content delivery and could simply refuse to do so, NFT or no NFT.
You could do content delivery in a decentralized manner (like, say, through IPFS) but then how do you enforce than only the NFT owners can watch the movie? The database is public, anybody can just look up the NFT and find what URL it points towards. You could "right click" the movie, so to speak.
NFTs are a really, really, really dumb concept, even by cryptocurrency/blockchain standards. Any use of NFTs for right management would require a proprietary, trusted, black-box player to enforce the DRM. If you use a proprietary, trusted, black-box player what's the point of using an NFT in the first place?
It's a CD key with extra steps.
I don't think you understood my post. I am not proposing a way to replicate PlayStation store with NFTs - and restrict access to the media files based on who purchases the NFT. I am proposing a new model that does not rely on limiting access in order to fund the production of artistic media.
I suggest you read the two posts in full that I linked, as it might make this a little clearer.
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> Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion
It’s rather extreme; mention anything cryptocurrency related in a not negative way, and it gets downvoted. Making a neutral observation tends to be neutral.
Because as it was presented it solved the wrong problem: "how to prove you purchased the movie". But the problem is: the vendor doesn't dispute your purchase, but they define that purchase as being of an arbitarily revocable access right. So your NFT proves for all time that you own the equivalent of a broken link - how exactly does this help?
There is a unique downside to NFTs, I just realised.
In order for it to mean anything, the NFT blockchain cannot be managed by just one server. And further, not by the entity which sold you the thing.
So we need maybe all streaming services to each have multiple blockchain servers, all supporting the same chain. Then we know one org cannot play games (rollback the chain, try to take back purchases).
We'd need all studios/media producers to agree that this meant "sold" too.
And lastly, we'd need to separate "sold" fees from "streaming" fees, so one could buy, but streaming services could get paid for front end support/platform/ongoing streaming costs.
And naturally, in this world, you could download any copy of this media.. and store locally, and forgo streaming costs.
But for all of that to work, you'd need something else. Laws stating that, basically, if the NFT servers were ever discontinued, a static copy would be provided, and all would gave ownership validated forever ... or the content creator would give up all copyright on the media.
In other words, you sell without physical media, you must use a blockchain, and once you do that you must always provide servers to verify, or you lose all copyright.
That last bit is important. It puts the burden on the content creator. Sell digitally, and you must make sure it's a real sale, or else.
Anyhow, my point in all of this is the immense downside.
A public copy of everything you watch, listen, read, tied to your public ID.
There is no other reality. Schemes of non-ID based authentication are blather, because to truly claim ownership, your identity must be known. And even if some method to separate ID from chain ownership are hatched, it a hack a day world, your ID->chain ID will get out.
There is no anonymity in this.
Which means everything you watch, read, view, would be public knowledge. The chain, by its very nature, must be viewable by everyone, all the time.
Right now, this info is very dispersed, spread over providers and sellers. And if you have any doubt of the value of this information, to profilers, the government, note that post 9/11, there was an immense fever raised by librarians, for the US government wanted a record of all books to be kept, and who checked them out.
So any NFT/chain plan, means all your ownership data, ready to be used by the government for profiling you, by banks to profile you to determine risk, by political opponents to discredit you, and more.
In a sense, this is very dangerous...
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Content producers get to decide the economic model. They effectively have a monopoly on content people want to watch. And they've decided that Widevine/PlayReady/FairPlay DRM is what's required. And all of those require by design an online server to enable access to the media.
All of those services will one day deprecate/retire their servers, and all paid content downloaded to your devices today will become unplayable. Your granddaughter won't be able to watch any films she finds on your old iPad she finds in the attic 100 years from now.
Unless you can convince studio execs that they will earn more money with your new economic model, it's going nowhere.
> Content producers get to decide the economic model.
Only insofar as we keep paying them, and ceding control of our media to them. The Camp Chaos example has no content producers dictating an economic model - because consumers and fans are paying the artists directly.
The model for media already transitioned from the consumer owning the content (CDs, DVDs,...) to the consumer having a permission to consume the content. The industry deliberately drove this transition so they can earn from each consumption and break the reselling-market.
The fact that they also wanted to DIRECTLY replace the CD/DVD by showing a "Buy Movie" button, but actually using the same licensing model, the same infrastructure and the same utterly careless approach on content-management:
For this we don't need a new economic model. The industry WANTED this model, and executed it without the connected responsibilities.
A court should have already found this practice to be illegal years ago, either the careless handling of sold property, or the explicitly misleading sales of VOD with the claim that the customer will actually OWN a copy of the content.
I don't see a technical problem that if the content I purchased at some point is no longer economic for the seller to host on his platform, that he is required to allow me to download it or send me a USB-stick with the content...
> the content I purchased [...] is required to allow me to download it
This would work if laws mandate that media like movies, eBooks, music must be downloadable DRM-free by purchasers, which will probably never happen as the entire industry is built against peer-to-peer file sharing and media piracy.
The industry likes this model but the consumers do not. They like the convenience of having all their media in a single nice UX like Netflix, PlayStation store, or Spotify. They do not like that profits are usually directed away from creators, and that "ownership" in these stores is more like temporary licensing of DRM content. This is where a new economic model could be introduced to fund some media production and distribution - for those creators and consumers willing to embrace it.
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> https://www.billboard.com/pro/camp-chaos-songcamp-nfts-50-pe...
There's no model here. A band sold merch. If they had sold a branded beanie baby during beanie baby mania (and had been a band that appeals to suburban mothers), the same thing would have happened.
So how long will this mania last? They were sold during a bear market and at one of the lowest points of NFT market volume, but still did pretty well. If NFTs continue to be seen as tulips or beanie babies* for the next several years, and wildly outperform regular band merch sold through a distributor, maybe it’s worth considering as a new model for artists and creators. If NFTs crash to zero next month and artists stop earning from them, then I will agree with you.
* by you, I should add. Others see it as a digital object worth owning that is not tied to a single speculative bubble.
And corporations still complain about piracy but they do not help themselves.
In case somebody forgot: you never purchase a digital copy, you only purchase a license to exclusively watch a movie anytime you like using the vendors consumer platform. Anyone ever read the license agreements when "purchasing a movie" online?
This is the reason I do not buy movies any longer; 1 streaming account on Netflix is enough for me, I do not care about anything else anymore. May they rot in consumer hell.
How is Netflix better? You still don't own it and they are probably more likely to remove it than a movie store.
Streaming services have no pretense of ownership. You can watch whatever they happen to have as long as you keep paying.
When you buy a title on Amazon, Apple, etc., the digital services are selling you on "ownership". In theory, this will be in your account forever (without any money changing hands after the initial transaction). The reality is obviously not so simple.
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This happened to me on Amazon, I think it was.
They shouldn't be allowed to use the word "buy".
Moves like this are why I still have DVDs.
Its trivial to bypass any region locking, reverse any PAL speedup, and upscale during playback - and the sound quality is already generally excellent. Unlike several generations of hard drives which I've lost completely, all of the DVDs I've ever owned still work just fine.
If space is a concern, buy some file binders and some paper disc sleeves and store your discs and covers in them.
If convenience is a concern, fair enough - but I find the experience of going to thrift shops and markets to find gems to be a fun and cheap hobby.
That's why I only buy games from Sony and only on disc.
And you make sure the player never, ever, has access to the internet, in case it downloads a licence update for the game that revokes your use of it.
You need to make sure the disk doesn't physically degrade or get destroyed
I still have a working PS2 but most of my game disks are no longer playable due to scratches or got lost/damaged from moving
I have nothing against installing firmware cracks/torrenting replacements. I'm just stating that games on physical media are the only thing that it's relatively safe to pay Sony for.
With the Playstation Plus changes they have made, they are making Microsoft Game Pass look better and better.
They keep acting like they have a massively dominant position instead of having a competitor with deeper pockets who is willing to take losses to undercut them in close proximity
Buying digital licences is for suckers. Piracy is forever, plus you learn practical skills like redundant data storage and offsite backup methodologies.
Seriously, the 'value' related criticisms of cryptocurrencies have come true, but for digital licensing.
If the answer involves giving money to Sony, you asked the wrong question.
If you "buy" a digital asset, you should be given legal cover to "pirate" it as a backup to protect against this possibility.
Seriously, what happens if the games I bought on Steam are no longer valid due to some potential disagreement between the game publisher and Valve?
This has happened a few times (e.g Deadpool), in those cases the game has still remained available for users who had already purchased it, just unavailable for new purchases.
Let's hope it stays that way. Lots of people have sunk quite a bit of cash into buying games. I personally have a collection worth 10K
There have been a couple cases of a game being removed from both the store and users' libraries, such as Order of war: challenge.
Valve rarely has to pull games in this case, the agreements they have with developers seem to protect them. I can't remember the last time a game was removed from people's Steam libraries.
However, developers do have the ability to replace games in your library, so often an original game will be replaced with a low-quality remaster.
I suspect this won't happen, and that Valve have contingencies in contracts to ensure this never happens. You might no longer get updates to a game, but that would likely be it.
Why? How is this different to films?
Games are what Steam does. Films are not really what the Playstation Store does. Sure you can buy them, but who does? Not enough to cause irreparable reputational damage would be my guess. Also, the Playstation Store has far less negotiating power with film distributors than Valve/Steam does with game publishers, so the contract terms aren't likely to include contingencies for this sort of situation.
> I suspect this won't happen, and that Valve have contingencies in contracts to ensure this never happens.
They don't, and they literally can't.
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Steam has been around for almost 19 years, and with a vast catalogue of games nothing like this has happened to content on Steam.
This ladies and gentleman is DRM ... they do what you want with your payed content ... in your face
I remember Richard Stallman warned us of this sort of thing for many years.
Yeah, we said stuff like this would happen. Why are people surprised?
Thanks! Another very good example of why DRM is bad for my list.
This is not acceptable
Allways buy the tape, record, CD, DVD, Etc make a backup
Good old DVDs and Piracy
As much as HN hates NFTs, they could really help solve this problem. Decentralized online digital ownership is a great use case.
NFTs don't let you include the movie itself as a payload, so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system. In this case, there is no disagreement that the consumer purchased the movie, just a refusal to honor that purchase. An NFT that said you bought a movie is meaningless if the system streaming the movie to you to stops honoring it. It's no different than what is happening here.
> so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system.
Yes, but that's exactly what you don't get with a central database. There is no way to use your Sony-database-entry to access the movie from whoever holds the rights right now. Companies also go out of business or change plans, so that central database will cease to exist in the future anyway.
With an NFTs you have a proof of ownership. You still would need a service to honor your NFT token, but NFT usage would be the very thing that makes those services possible to exist in the first place.
We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services. With movies that doesn't work, as companies don't even give you a raw file of a movie, but they might be willing giving you NFTs, as those don't circumvent the DRM measures they have in place.
Either way, NFT are of course only a small piece of the puzzle here, there is a lot of supporting infrastructure that would need to be build and that nobody is building right now. And given the energy usage and cost of blockchains, it's not really usable for your $3 movie anyway. So it's not a workable solution at the moment. But even with all it's faults, it's still the closest thing to a possible solution for digital ownership that we have.
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HN hates NFTs because of 'self evident' statements like this, it's seen as little more than micro-hype statements to up the value of something seen as useless.
NFTs do not solve this problem, the content has been removed. If you feel they do, feel free to explain how it would have helped in this situation.
Only in theory - multiple streaming services would have to be licensed rights to the movie, so that if PlayStation revoked your right to watch it, you could use the NFT in another service like Netflix. This is unlikely to happen with big Hollywood movies cause of their tight IP laws.
NFT could be applied to movies in new ways[1], but probably not in the way of limiting access to the file.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/camp-chaos-songcamp-nfts-50-pe...
How does that help when the google drive link on your NFT goes offline?
Don't mean to seem like I'm piling on, but I sincerely would be interested how they would help here?
NFT's: Anyone can check and verify ownership.
Receipts/Credit Card statements: only people with access to the finance system and authorization to check, can verify ownership.
For some things, a common public ledger is appropriate. For everything else, there's Mastercard ..
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How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.
Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?
Please don't take HN threads into hellish generic flamewars. We've been through this a thousand times already. Pouring out a whole bunch more gasoline and setting it on fire is exactly what you should not be doing here. We want curious conversation.
Personal attack is also completely off limits, and you did it more than once in this thread. No more of this, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32010891.)
I can't believe I'm going to defend NFTs, but ... _if_ copyright law were satisfied that you aren't infringing if you purchased perpetual access to a copy--digital or otherwise--then "a glorified receipt" could be all that was needed _if_ the system honoured users with a right to access, on any system on which it was available, for cost, a work that has been legally purchased.
In USA, I can't see why proof of purchase and TPB wouldn't be enough. Platform issues don't negate the rights you purchased.
When you buy stuff on these digital stores, you agree to pay for an indefinite license to the content. So it can be pulled at any time.
Why would these stores use NFTs attached to ownership licenses when they could just reword their ToS to include ownership. They don’t want to sell ownership to begin with so they would never use NFTs either.
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You could even have the content shared over public BitTorrent networks, encrypted with a symmetric key and then store a personalised asymmetric decryption key (the symmetric key encrypted using the owner wallets public key, ensuring only the current owner can derive it from the public NFT data) in the NFT. You would re-compute this asymmetric key for the new owner during the TransferNFT function and store it in the contract.
Yeah, the symmetric key would probably leak quickly, and the content decrypted and shared, the point here is to make the system so convenient and simple that it discourages piracy, which you can never fully beat anyway.
Maybe they are thinking of BAYC and yugalabs.
Yugalabs[0] assign copyright license to whoever owns the NFT on the chain forever.
So if someone mints a NFT, they get a perpetual license to use it however they like. The downside is if they lose the NFT for any reason such as theft, they lose the license as well.
Other NFT projects of yugalabs store data on chain or use a separate storage chain built for permanence. This basically means they cannot take the content down once they have uploaded it and attached it to a NFT.
However this doesn't solve anything unless corporations are forced to accept it as the only way to sell content.
One big problem it may solve for corporations is uniqueness and validation of all license in existence through a ledger. If a company sells their content exclusively via NFT, they can take advantage of immutable receipt system and built in programming capabilities to embed royalties on transfer. This would make it hard for people to sell their copies without giving companies a cut. Legally, that is. Nothing stops them from ripping off a copy and selling it but it would be easy to prove it is invalid and enforce via legal system.
0] Yugalabs is a big NFT IP company valued at 4 billion. They are behind monkey jpegs which are called BAYC.
And I want to know what drives a person like you to post toxic comments like this.
Why not just say "An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with a regular receipt." without the rude and spiteful attitude?
You're asking me why I'm not kind to somebody who has fallen for / is shilling for an absurd scam? I slam the door on Jehovah Witnesses too.
> otherwise intelligent people
[citation needed]
Harr harr mateys...