Comment by knodi123
3 days ago
This is technically true, but not helpful. These online services have buttons that say "rent" and "buy", they don't say "rent for a little while" and "rent for a longer but unknown amount of time". Of course they can go out of business, but the impression they intentionally give to the customer is that if you click "buy", you get access to the movie for as long as the site exists.
If you're the ethical type you can "buy" it on one of these services and then pirate it in order to keep it in perpetuity. If you're the less ethical type you can skip the "buying" step.
Is it really ethical to keep giving them money? Eventually you have to face the fact that you're feeding a monster that lobbies for anti-consumer laws and makes anti-consumer technology. They're actively working to make our world worse. Helping them in that endeavor is not ethical.
Why is it ethical to give $29.98 to a forcefully inserted middleman and $0.01 to a creator? If you're ethical, pirate and then donate.
Okay, but who do you donate to in the case of a movie or show? Because for authors and musicians I agree with your take. I wish more musicians were on Bandcamp, and more authors sold e-books directly from their website.
1 reply →
Well, if I had been the ethical type (I'm not), having my paid content deleted would convert me into a non-ethical type really really quickly. Just saying.
I don't care if some lawyer suit says it's ok because I really bought a license and not the content. Screw that. I bought a movie. If that's allowed by the law, the law deserves no respect.