Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
For streaming yes, but downloads are still copyright infringement on the part of the downloader. An unauthorized copy is being made on the recipient's machine. It's true that copyright holders rarely pursue cases against individuals, and tend to focus on distributors though.
Have there been any cases since the Meta ruling with the books they torrented? If I understood it right they argued and won that they didn’t seed any of the torrents so is fair use and the judge agreed. That case made it seem like as long as you don’t seed/distribute the copyrighted material then it is legal
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
streaming is downloading, otherwise it wouldnt be visible on your hardware.
if you pay for a stream and the distributor downloads it to your buffer, the only thing preventing it from persisting is wrapping the data to contain it in a file structure. if we really want to split hairs, everytime the data is accessed a streams bits are copied into registers, but those bits have no identity beyond 1 or 0
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
The argument is that it doesn't create another copy, so it's more analogous to receiving a broadcast. Like, if a pirate radio station plays copyrighted music, then the mere act of receiving those signals isn't a copyright violation. But recording that broadcast would be.
copyright infringement is not theft, it is also not piracy.
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?
All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.
Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.
This discussion applies to any product from every virtual store, including game stores.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.
If you buy a DVD you have the right, in every sane jurisdiction I'm aware of, to rip the movie from the DVD into an iso. You can then discard/recycle the media and retain the digital copy you have the right to view privately in perpetuity. It is a single consumer license though, as is logical, so it's likely illegal for you to continue to watch the ripped iso if you resell the media with the content still on it or resell the media with any portion of the value coming from the markings from the content or the fact that it used to contain that content. You probably want to shove it in a closet somewhere or just reuse it as rewriteable media for whatever purpose you need - retaining physical ownership of the media makes things simplest legally.
In Finland DVD's CSS was ruled to be strong technical copy protection system (tehokas tekninen toimenpide). In that exact case a person had made a program which bypassed it and published it. He was found to be criminally liable though he didn't get any fine/prison time from what I remember.
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
DRM is like a vibe, man - if you have the ability to output a video stream to an arbitrary display device you can always bypass DRM and it's never been illegal[1] to do so (though publishing approaches to defeat it often is).
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Gosh, I didn't know the DMCA went that far. I had assumed it was in line with Canada's TPM related laws which do disallow direct circumvention of DRM but do specifically except format shifting if the copy will be used for a legal purpose. I guess be careful and check your local jurisdiction.
The US Library of Congress is given a Special Exemption in the DMCA [1] and so far the Library has been using it to grant a Backup Exemption that format shifting is legal for backups. Due to the nature of this exemption it has to be debated and reviewed every 3 years, so it's in a weird legal status if it "will always" be around.
Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
If I download it on my iPad I’m pretty sure it will delete itself or eventually got deleted on an update. I might be wrong but this is how these systems work.
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
>Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway
Well, they were wrong, weren't they? The way it works now is much worse: what you're purchasing is a license for playback for an indeterminate amount of time, which can be arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated by the provider.
Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.
What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.
The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.
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.
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.
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.
I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
I believe DVDs and Blu-Ray discs and players will increase in value over time, almost like samizdat printing presses -- underground video viewers that let us watch movies without the monolithic globalist corporate police state observing, penalizing, demanding identitification, and trying to extract an ounce of monopolist rentier blood.
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
Single player games putting out "seasonal content" is kind of obnoxious too though so I wouldn't exclude them all. One example is the Moogle Chocobo Carnival and Assassin's Festival in Final Fantasy XV which players had to work very hard to patch back into the game after it was removed. The limited time Stellar Blade Summer Event wasn't nearly as impressive as the carnival, but it was still a black mark on a game that was otherwise refreshingly free from bullshit.
That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.
Copyright law has been playing semantic games with "buy" and "own" for decades. When I buy(1) something, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. The person whom I buy it from doesn't have the right to rescind my rights over the thing I bought. When I buy(2) a software license, does the seller have the right to claw back the license? If not, then buy(1) and buy(2) are conceptually identical, and there's no difference between buying a license and buying the (copy of the) software. If yes or unknown, then buying(2) is not buying(1), as it does not grant ownership, but something else; not even over the license.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
Clearly, in Sony's case here it is buy(2), and they've reached into people's accounts and removed content (even using the term "purchased" in the notice email).
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
And if that one-time purchased software stops working at an arbitrary date, it should be subject to the same rules. Especially online software or software requiring servers to run.
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
> This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly, but consumers should still be aware of the fact that their rights are limited. While the Gaben lives valve will store many people's games - when the Gaben dies... well, it's going to suck - but it'll probably take a while to completely suck, we'll probably go through drawn out enshittification first. This outcome seems inevitable[1] but it is likely a fair distance off.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
> Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
Companies selling these titles should know a minimum end date. Even if contracts don't get renewed, it's unlikely they will only have the rights for less than a year.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc? I have multiple games that you can't "buy" anymore, but Steam doesn't stop me from reinstalling them as often as I like.
Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?
That's just how Valve's license agreement works. You publish with Steam and you grant Valve the right to publish the work in perpetuity.
The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.
When a movie or show gets removed from Netflix sucks but no as much since it's a subscription and you can cancel if they don't have what you like but what you do with something you bought
> How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc?
Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)
I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
I find it a bit sad that everyone is dumping on Sony here, considering it's StudioCanal that is presumably demanding the movies be made inaccessible to customers, but presumably is not offering to refund the royalties they collected. I't's natural for people to direct their ire at the reailer to whom they gave their money, but in my view its the rightsholder who is generally the abd guy in these situations.
What’s wild is there is no legal way to actually buy and truly own movies anymore. Any major service is a license and if you can even get a DVD the legality of ripping it is questionable since you have to break DRM. I have purchased a few movies (surf films) from people who actually give you the digital file and it is so wonderful.
What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.
A Jellyfin or Plex server can be had for real cheap using used hardware. A Ryzen 3 build can be found for next to nothing here in Brazil[1], so I imagine it’d be even cheaper in the US.
Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.
Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.
Makes me glad I never got in the habit of buying digital copies of movies or TV shows. This a one off many reminders that if you really want to purchase a title, get the Blu-ray or DVD
Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!
This is ridiculous. I thought at first that it concerned pirated movies that people were playing on their playstation.
But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.
I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.
Sony sucks and I will never give them another dime. Had a PS5 with a 120+ games (majority PS4), also PSVR2, got f-ed over by Sony when they would not refund in incorrect game purchase I'd bought literally minutes before asking for the refund. Gave up my PS5, I will never purchase anything from Sony ever again. Recommend everyone else do the same.
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
Wow, "purchasing a revokable license" is an insane concept. Purchase of something revokable in general feels like... not purchasing? If there was a definite time bound that's one thing, but imagine if I sell a revokable license and then revoke it a week later -- it seems like that would be allowed?
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.
ISTM there's a good argument for a plaintiff to ask the court to ignore that on the basis that it's a contract of adhesion and one that's effectively unreadable for anyone without a law degree. We're not talking about terms and conditions that fit on a single sheet of paper in a normal font, bu thousands upon thousands of words.
Is it just me who thinks that everything went wrong when we accepted the closed model hardware and their ecosystem?
If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.
Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.
If you're not experienced in media servers, I'd recommend a QNAP NAS and then install either Jellyfin or Emby. (Plex has really gone downhill in the last 10 years imho.) QNAP is terrible for experienced users, but as Baby's First NAS it's absolutely sublime.
Of course! It's fantastic. I went from Plex --> Emby --> Jellyfin and honestly if I could have afforded it I would have purchased the 100 USD lifetime license. They work really hard and deserve the money.
How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?
I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.
"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.
Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...
Correct: it's copyright infringement, not theft.
We all just need to compress them into LLM weights.
But the point is the movie industry has been trying to tell us that it is stealing.
"You wouldn't still a car" etc etc..
Which is on the side of the distributor, not the end recipient.
For streaming yes, but downloads are still copyright infringement on the part of the downloader. An unauthorized copy is being made on the recipient's machine. It's true that copyright holders rarely pursue cases against individuals, and tend to focus on distributors though.
Have there been any cases since the Meta ruling with the books they torrented? If I understood it right they argued and won that they didn’t seed any of the torrents so is fair use and the judge agreed. That case made it seem like as long as you don’t seed/distribute the copyrighted material then it is legal
It's quite clearly explained on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
Both uploading and downloading is a violation. All the major cases are against distributors, because those are the big fish. But rights holders have gone after individuals: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/lit...
streaming is downloading, otherwise it wouldnt be visible on your hardware. if you pay for a stream and the distributor downloads it to your buffer, the only thing preventing it from persisting is wrapping the data to contain it in a file structure. if we really want to split hairs, everytime the data is accessed a streams bits are copied into registers, but those bits have no identity beyond 1 or 0
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
The argument is that it doesn't create another copy, so it's more analogous to receiving a broadcast. Like, if a pirate radio station plays copyrighted music, then the mere act of receiving those signals isn't a copyright violation. But recording that broadcast would be.
There is a good epigram about DRM that goes something like
"Asking a computer to not copy things is like asking water to not be wet."
It’s too bad the judge told rights holders to forget about it when Meta violates copyright.
Piracy isn't stealing regardless of whether or not buying is owning.
copyright infringement is not theft, it is also not piracy.
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
I fully understand you, but then, copying copyrighted data can't be piracy (because literal piracy is stealing).
> PlayStation Store users who bought movies
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
There, FTFY.
Which I'm fine with, if and only if the "Buy" button is explicitly labeled "Buy a limited, revocable with no notice, license."
Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?
How did you get a private tracker?
All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.
Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.
You don't need a private tracker for stuff that comes out now.
In fact, for those things, I'd say a private tracker isn't that interesting because of the share requirements.
You find someone who is already a member and ask for an invite.
This discussion applies to any product from every virtual store, including game stores.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
Edit: clarification
However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.
If you buy a DVD you have the right, in every sane jurisdiction I'm aware of, to rip the movie from the DVD into an iso. You can then discard/recycle the media and retain the digital copy you have the right to view privately in perpetuity. It is a single consumer license though, as is logical, so it's likely illegal for you to continue to watch the ripped iso if you resell the media with the content still on it or resell the media with any portion of the value coming from the markings from the content or the fact that it used to contain that content. You probably want to shove it in a closet somewhere or just reuse it as rewriteable media for whatever purpose you need - retaining physical ownership of the media makes things simplest legally.
In Finland DVD's CSS was ruled to be strong technical copy protection system (tehokas tekninen toimenpide). In that exact case a person had made a program which bypassed it and published it. He was found to be criminally liable though he didn't get any fine/prison time from what I remember.
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Unfortunately I cannot find the exact page right now, but I found one of the appeal documents from from https://www.yumpu.com/fi/document/view/38482300/1-helsingin-.... It's probably under https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikki/, but it's no longer available and Internet Archive is currently giving 503 when trying to access the old pages.
You are only able to do this because the DRM was cracked long ago.
DRM is like a vibe, man - if you have the ability to output a video stream to an arbitrary display device you can always bypass DRM and it's never been illegal[1] to do so (though publishing approaches to defeat it often is).
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
"bypassing DRM" is explicitly illegal according to DMCA. Don't conflate "unenforce{d,able}" and "legal".
Gosh, I didn't know the DMCA went that far. I had assumed it was in line with Canada's TPM related laws which do disallow direct circumvention of DRM but do specifically except format shifting if the copy will be used for a legal purpose. I guess be careful and check your local jurisdiction.
The US Library of Congress is given a Special Exemption in the DMCA [1] and so far the Library has been using it to grant a Backup Exemption that format shifting is legal for backups. Due to the nature of this exemption it has to be debated and reviewed every 3 years, so it's in a weird legal status if it "will always" be around.
[1] (a)1(C) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
You don't have that right on the US. The AHRA is the only law which permits format shifting and it only applies to audio.
> DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable
If I am the reason for damaging my purchase then I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase.
Same happens with books, you buy the copy and if you don't take care of it, soon it will become unreadable.
DVDs degrade naturally. Good care will extend the lifespan but not indefinitely.
Other things as well degrade naturally, some faster, some slower, some depending on the use.
I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase, I am not fine when my purchase can be taken away from me abruptly by the decision of random Joe
punishing customers for not using BitTorrent seems like a weird strategy but I’m not an MBA so what do I know
The amount of people who are willing to tolerate the "cable-ization" of streaming services is far larger than those who will torrent
This isn't exactly a case of lack of regulation but IP rights/arrangements expiring. The world needs less IP protection laws, not more.
They'll combine the "buy" and "rent" buttons if there's ever any realistic pressure to change. The typical consumer doesn't care.
It's almost already like this. Buying a movie is sometimes the exact same price or only a dollar more. They know what they're doing.
Initially, the new button might say "buy license" and then eventually it will go back to just "buy".
Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
With Apple, you can at least download the media you bought and keep it.
Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?
If I download it on my iPad I’m pretty sure it will delete itself or eventually got deleted on an update. I might be wrong but this is how these systems work.
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
When this was originally tried under the OG "DIVX" brand name, everybody (including me) threw a fit.
Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway, and everybody (including me) blew them off.
>Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway
Well, they were wrong, weren't they? The way it works now is much worse: what you're purchasing is a license for playback for an indeterminate amount of time, which can be arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated by the provider.
I thought divx came with one play when you bought the disk, and then PPV after that
> Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours
Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.
What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.
The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical
A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
>What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
The image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape.
>A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
Correct, a digital physical thing stores digital virtual things, and an analog physical thing stores analog virtual things.
Digital in this context is merely shorthand for "digitally distributed", as opposed to "physically distributed"
I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
I believe DVDs and Blu-Ray discs and players will increase in value over time, almost like samizdat printing presses -- underground video viewers that let us watch movies without the monolithic globalist corporate police state observing, penalizing, demanding identitification, and trying to extract an ounce of monopolist rentier blood.
it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when in reality you’re only renting it with a to be determined end date
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
"Rent for 48h", and... "Rent until we say the time is up"?
and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
Single player games putting out "seasonal content" is kind of obnoxious too though so I wouldn't exclude them all. One example is the Moogle Chocobo Carnival and Assassin's Festival in Final Fantasy XV which players had to work very hard to patch back into the game after it was removed. The limited time Stellar Blade Summer Event wasn't nearly as impressive as the carnival, but it was still a black mark on a game that was otherwise refreshingly free from bullshit.
That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.
I'm quite alright with that can of worms being opened for software. Enthused, even.
Copyright law has been playing semantic games with "buy" and "own" for decades. When I buy(1) something, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. The person whom I buy it from doesn't have the right to rescind my rights over the thing I bought. When I buy(2) a software license, does the seller have the right to claw back the license? If not, then buy(1) and buy(2) are conceptually identical, and there's no difference between buying a license and buying the (copy of the) software. If yes or unknown, then buying(2) is not buying(1), as it does not grant ownership, but something else; not even over the license.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
Clearly, in Sony's case here it is buy(2), and they've reached into people's accounts and removed content (even using the term "purchased" in the notice email).
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
And if that one-time purchased software stops working at an arbitrary date, it should be subject to the same rules. Especially online software or software requiring servers to run.
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
I'm reasonably certain when I ordered linux CDs in the 90s, no one put a limit on the time frame I could be using them
Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ?
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
> This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
"Oh but they didn't read the fine prints so that's on them".
What a great argument.
To people, "buy" when in the context of a movie largely means owning the freaking thing.
> we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
That's normalization of deviance. It's fine if you're fine with that scam, don't come onto people who aren't.
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
Yes, 100%, and that end date should be very clearly listed too.
Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly, but consumers should still be aware of the fact that their rights are limited. While the Gaben lives valve will store many people's games - when the Gaben dies... well, it's going to suck - but it'll probably take a while to completely suck, we'll probably go through drawn out enshittification first. This outcome seems inevitable[1] but it is likely a fair distance off.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
> Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
Companies selling these titles should know a minimum end date. Even if contracts don't get renewed, it's unlikely they will only have the rights for less than a year.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
Renting what? The non-exclusive, revocable license? Because that's what purchase or buy means.
No, that’s not what “purchase” or “buy” means.
It literally is.
"Verb
"purchase (third-person singular simple present purchases, present participle purchasing, simple past and past participle purchased)
"To buy, obtain by payment of a price in money or its equivalent."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase
"Verb
"buy (third-person singular simple present buys, present participle buying, simple past bought, past participle bought or (archaic, rare, dialectal) boughten)
"(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buy#English
Pretty sure the Terms of Use say just that. They should update the language on the frontend though.
How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc? I have multiple games that you can't "buy" anymore, but Steam doesn't stop me from reinstalling them as often as I like.
Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?
That's just how Valve's license agreement works. You publish with Steam and you grant Valve the right to publish the work in perpetuity.
The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.
When a movie or show gets removed from Netflix sucks but no as much since it's a subscription and you can cancel if they don't have what you like but what you do with something you bought
> How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc?
Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)
I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.
A decade ago they pulled my purchased copy of mortal kombat 2. Not the first time they've done stuff like this.
I stuck to buying hard copies and dwindled off the series as they started to charge just to play multiplayer.
Again? They already tried to pull that one a few years ago.
[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony%27s_attempted_removal_of_...
They did get away with it in 2024:
https://filmstories.co.uk/news/funimation-streaming-app-to-s...
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
they can do it as many times as they want until it works, then that's precedent
I find it a bit sad that everyone is dumping on Sony here, considering it's StudioCanal that is presumably demanding the movies be made inaccessible to customers, but presumably is not offering to refund the royalties they collected. I't's natural for people to direct their ire at the reailer to whom they gave their money, but in my view its the rightsholder who is generally the abd guy in these situations.
No — both the person who pulls the trigger and the person who gives the order are criminals.
Sony created a contract where this was possible, is who sold the product to customers, and is physically carrying out the act.
They deserve every bit of blame.
No refunds. Sounds like Playstation customer support. The most customer-unfriendly policies a company could think of.
What’s wild is there is no legal way to actually buy and truly own movies anymore. Any major service is a license and if you can even get a DVD the legality of ripping it is questionable since you have to break DRM. I have purchased a few movies (surf films) from people who actually give you the digital file and it is so wonderful.
I'd recommend qbittorrent over transmission tbh.
I'd recommend anonymous torrents in I2P over non-anonymous standard implementation.
I'd recommend usenet over torrents tbh.
Would love to know how hidden the fine text was on that buy button. Unless it said rent this should be illegal.
What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.
I own a playstation. I do not buy digital games, only discs. See the article for why not.
The game discs hold digital data. They're certainly not analog.
it's common to refer to download-only purchases as digital and discs as physical
Analog is not the opposite of digital in this context. I feel like you knew that though.
A Jellyfin or Plex server can be had for real cheap using used hardware. A Ryzen 3 build can be found for next to nothing here in Brazil[1], so I imagine it’d be even cheaper in the US.
Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.
Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.
N5105 boards are also super cheap, and low power draw, but still with the transcoding hardware. Great experience with mine.
I will only buy digital media from DRM free stores, which as far as I know, means I can buy music, not movies.
I don’t trust any provider to honor purchases I made 20 years from now. I really wish I could, as it would simplify things for me.
Fix the headline to say Sony
Makes me glad I never got in the habit of buying digital copies of movies or TV shows. This a one off many reminders that if you really want to purchase a title, get the Blu-ray or DVD
Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!
This is ridiculous. I thought at first that it concerned pirated movies that people were playing on their playstation.
But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.
I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.
Sony sucks and I will never give them another dime. Had a PS5 with a 120+ games (majority PS4), also PSVR2, got f-ed over by Sony when they would not refund in incorrect game purchase I'd bought literally minutes before asking for the refund. Gave up my PS5, I will never purchase anything from Sony ever again. Recommend everyone else do the same.
Here is the full list of the 551 movies and TV shows being removed: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
Off to small claims court people should go. Amazon tried something similar and got in trouble because people when after them.
And people wonder why some people sail the high seas.
> Off to small claims court people should go
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
I believe you’d lose in small claims court as all of the streaming companies make it clear you’re purchasing a revokable license.
Wow, "purchasing a revokable license" is an insane concept. Purchase of something revokable in general feels like... not purchasing? If there was a definite time bound that's one thing, but imagine if I sell a revokable license and then revoke it a week later -- it seems like that would be allowed?
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.
ISTM there's a good argument for a plaintiff to ask the court to ignore that on the basis that it's a contract of adhesion and one that's effectively unreadable for anyone without a law degree. We're not talking about terms and conditions that fit on a single sheet of paper in a normal font, bu thousands upon thousands of words.
Tech EULAs are just absurdly long, and I'm sure they've expanded since this article was written in 2020: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
No, that is not what the plain meaning of “purchase” is.
Is it just me who thinks that everything went wrong when we accepted the closed model hardware and their ecosystem?
If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.
Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.
This is making me mad enough that I’m going to spend my weekend figuring out a media server and pirating movies.
If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Fuck those guys.
It’s been 20 years since I’ve pirated shit, but here we are again…
If you're not experienced in media servers, I'd recommend a QNAP NAS and then install either Jellyfin or Emby. (Plex has really gone downhill in the last 10 years imho.) QNAP is terrible for experienced users, but as Baby's First NAS it's absolutely sublime.
Thank you for mentioning Emby. I've been using it for years. It's rarely ever mentioned in the Plex/Jellyfin conversation.
Of course! It's fantastic. I went from Plex --> Emby --> Jellyfin and honestly if I could have afforded it I would have purchased the 100 USD lifetime license. They work really hard and deserve the money.
> If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing
A queerly sticky ego defense mechanism.
How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?
Movies have been pushing political agendas pretty much since the beginning of cinema.
Buddy I hate to tell you, but this already happened several years ago.
Nobody can delete 551 or even 1 movie from my Plex library other than me or the hard drive grim reaper.
By not teaching the younger generations the virtues of piracy, millennials have failed them.
It'll be all the more critical in years to come when we get more and more AI remastered versions of stuff so even stuff pre-2020 is slop.
I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.
"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.
Wow.