Comment by bambax
4 years ago
> 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.
That's too bad for Ticketmaster because the large print calls them a "purchase". How are consumers supposed to know which parts of their business communications are lies and which are truth? Or rather, why should Ticketmaster get to choose which of their words count and which are just decoration?
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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.
To be clear I agree with you. However I am, only very slightly, sympathetic to these companies as is always the case one company doesn't want to stand out in a bad way by renaming!
> 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".
Yeah good point, it seems like something that should have rolled into all those privacy laws.
They'll just bury somewhere in the contract that you are purchasing the limited access to the good, not purchasing the good itself.
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It depends if purchase is defined in the countrys laws. Otherwise it can be defined as anything within the purchase contract.
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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.
I think it’s specifically purchasing a license to view the content.
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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.
This is not true. The contract just needs to have consideration. It doesn't have to be "fair" in your opinion.
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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...
I don't get it, why would you want to put yourself on their radar at all? Why not just use a VPN from the start?
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> I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years.
Out of curiosity, how has this changed over years? Are they getting worse or better? My feeling is that they are completely ineffective. Anecdotically, none of my friends living in France mentioned getting emails, and some of them do torrent with abandon.
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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.
Due to the way bittorrent works, downloading is inherently distributing.
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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)
Because not everyone lives in the UK? And even if you do, ISPs can store data long-term, waiting for the laws to change and then retroactively find which customers they should keep a closer eye on.
Not to mention the non-ISP groups which also monitors the DHT for who downloads content they "own", ready to serve the data to governments at request.
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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.
Have you ever considered adding a gps tracker to it? They are tiny, cheap and I think exceptionally well suited for the particular usecase of always finding a half grand in nintendo cartrides.
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.
That doesn't matter in a duopoly. I expect the other half of the duopoly does the same thing, since they tend to move in lockstep.
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.
> That's likely because you're viewing it through a different lens than the person you're replying to
Is that lens "being a creator and wanting my copyrights to be honored too?"
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> From a moral view, if you agree on what purchase means
There's no need to "agree" on what purchase means. It just has a meaning. That meaning doesn't come from either of us. If you disagree, you're simply wrong. The law and the definitions of words are not a matter of being negotiated in online comments, even though online comments misunderstanding descriptivism might have told you that they were.
This is really just a bunch of self serving word salad, redefining words so that you can steal things and pretend you're somehow fighting back against Elsevier, who is in no way involved in this
If you've gotten to the point of trying to argue by framing everything in terms of whether someone agrees with an obviously incorrect definition of a word, then I'm not sure why you spent the time.
You seem to have lost track of the story, besides. The discussion wasn't actually about pirating what was already paid for. That's obviously fine, and something I myself have had to do. The story was "the reason I pirate is that in theory this could happen." Those two positions are leagues apart.
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> 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
Literally what you're doing in your comment, mister "if you agree on what means," but okay
Anyway, companies actually cannot do this, and if you believe that they can, try asking a lawyer about it. I'd ask you to show me a single case in American history where big-spooky-they've done this, but I know you can't, so I'm not going to waste the time. If you offer something for free then redefine free to mean "costs $100," then the court will just say you don't get your $100, and get a fine for false advertising. I have no idea why you thought this was a thing.
You spend an awful lot of time attempting to use what generic people believe as a way to argue.
Generic people believe in homeopathy, chiropracty, and astrology, too. Belief isn't a valid foundation for a discussion of this form, even if you had evidence of it, which you do not.
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> For such a person, the OP's statements are internally consistent.
Manson was internally consistent too. Who cares? Internal consistency was never challenged and isn't relevant. (This seems like pleading for intellectual authority, frankly.)
This is simple.
1. Parent poster is trying to justify taking things that aren't free without paying for them, by pointing fingers at other groups and saying "well this one non-music publishing entity did something bad first, so the whole music purchasing system should be refused"
2. You've confused that with recovering things you paid for and can no longer access through one authority, which is actually not piracy or even illegal at all under American law, obviously not immoral, and something I would never bother arguing against (something I can't imagine anyone ever arguing against)
3. You need to explain to me that there's nothing wrong with the thing that is very obviously not what I was talking about
Okay, cool, thanks for your help
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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
> Wow. You call copyright infringement "stealing"
So does the US government. So does the EU court system.
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> > I don't like what Sony is doing here, but > > but give the company a pass for removing the content they paid for
I didn't give the company any passes. What are you talking about?
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> Really hard to take this comment in good faith
What you're reacting to isn't my comment.
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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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