PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For::Sony says Mythbusters and more Discovery TV shows are going away whether you bought them or not
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If you don’t own it when paying for it then you aren’t stealing it when pirating it.
Woah.
🏴☠️Ahoy Mateys! Avast and shiver me timbers. Tis a good day upon the high seas
Why they be cryn they boots, while ye be livin free all those years, lootin and rapin as ye please. There be nuff lootin for all of ye. The seas are vast and there be nuff ships fer everbody!
Full speed ahead Mr. Coheeeen
Ram dam dam be dam, ram dam dam be dam
This is why you either buy physical media or pirate.
Amazon does the same thing. You don’t own digital content you pay for, you’re renting it.
You’re paying to use their license, piracy or buying the media physically is the only way to own it.
If the button says"buy", ownership is inferred. That’s a lie, of course.
You own it as long as they have a license to host and stream it.
They should be offering refunds for this at least, but you literally cannot own something that permanently lives on someone else’s device.
If you want to truly on something, you need to control physical access to it. If there is an option to download the media when you buy it, and you can store it on your own device, then you own it. If not, then you only have access as long as you’re paying someone else for access to their storage.
Which is almost impossible now. You can’t even play offline games without internet access because companies force you to use their app to launch it.
I thought I would be able to get around that system with EA by purchasing a hard copy of the game circa 2016, but nope, I just bought a plastic case to throw away. I miss the old days of owning things.
The problem is that what you’re buying is a license. Of course it has to be a license, because unlike a physical good, anything delivered digitally could be replicated infinitely, and of course you wouldn’t be allowed to do something like open your own storefront to resell copies of it. Nor would you legally be allowed to play it on the radio, as background music in a store, etc.
“Buy” isn’t really that different here than if you bought a ticket to a concert; of course you wouldn’t be able to attend next year with the same ticket, but you still bought something. The problem is that with digital licenses, they can be INCREDIBLY varied, and sellers don’t make even a small attempt to clarify what the terms are.
You use the word ownership, but at least from a legal standpoint, that doesn’t really mean anything intuitive, unless it means you hold all rights to the IP (which, again, you don’t). It would be nice if there was some widespread legal definition and norms about “ownership of a digital copy”, but no such concept exists, and frankly the rights holders are not incentivized to try to create something like this.
“Not incentivized”!
They like using the current word “buy” because people think it means they “own” a digital copy. Since that’s not true what we’re really saying here is that they like lying because that makes them more money.
I think the more honest term is “rent”. A normal rental agreement online is for like 48hrs. This is a rental agreement for a much longer, but unspecified, time period.
You’d think a court case would clear this up. But probably not.
Part of the problem is that court cases don’t materialize from nothing. A judge can only rule on a case before them. So you would need someone to bring out a specific complaint against a specific party. So there needs to be a lot of money on the line for someone who actually feels they can win. A class action against all online media storefronts just isn’t that.
Also, it’s a difficult case because the terms of the legal license that each customer are being asked to read and agree to ARE being upheld properly – so you either have to make the case that asking a customer to agree to terms digitally that they’ve pretty please read isn’t binding (which kills all digital commerce, because it all becomes a liability nightmare!), or, that the website etc is materially misleading / misrepresenting the agreements; we’ve talked about consumers maybe being prone to misunderstanding “buy” here, but I really don’t believe it’s a legal slam dunk.
If anything, the faster path to improve this the way you’re looking for would be legislation.
If you can’t own digital copies since they’re not property, then piracy isn’t theft.
It’s not theft. It’s why they named it piracy instead of theft. Because it’s different.
It’s weird this needs to be repeated so often. Just goes to show how often media corpos repeated the lie that creating a copy of something and sharing it with someone else is the same thing as stealing physical property from someone.
Easy there on the sound logical arguments buddy, you’ll have the lawyers shitting their pants.
You will own nothing, we will bleed you dry, and you will love it.
You will love getting used to less
Another case of Physical > Digital
This is why I only watch my VHS copy of Space Camp. Do you really own your media if you didn’t get Space Camp out of the 99¢ bin following the Challenger crash when movies about launching kids into space were on sale?
Underrated movie.
People this doesn’t affect are pirates. People who get to enjoy their media without worry are pirates. When pirates are getting the better experience and it’s customers who are getting affected what incentive is there to not pirate other than personal morals. Because it sure isn’t for a better product.
A lot of people are getting back into pirating because of this. If a show isn’t on a streaming service you use, you either pay $2/episode and hope that Amazon doesn’t drop it, or you pirate it. I went almost a decade without pirating, and now I just bought a 5tb SSD for my Plex server. I’m tempted to fully convert now that I’ve already set everything up, too.
I am coming back after I get a server set up.
It’s seems everything I ever want to watch is either not available or spread across numerous services.
Just last week I was recommended to watch Knives Out. I find the second one on Netflix which I use a family account and then the first one wasn’t available and I would need Amazon for that. Why would I keep jumping through these hoops when I can just download what I want when I want and watch it whenever I want.
It bears repeating. Piracy is a service issue first. I’ve paid for several streaming services for music and video, but they just cannot compete with the convenience and features of self-hosted options. It’s not at all unusual for people to pirate stuff they have legitimately paid for just because of the convenience More than once I have bought a an album on the very same day I downloaded a pirate copy, just because it was slightly easier to get it on all my devices that way.
While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.
Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.
Aye!
Louis agrees with you
Well, I guess now is as good a time as any to become a pirate. Drink up me hearties, yo-ho!
Looks like enshittification of the internet is really kicking in. Decentralized platforms, and piracy needs to be the new normal
Not enshittification. Just a corporation following through on the inevitable result of these one sided EULAs everyone “agrees” to.
It’s been “kicked in” for years.
I remember a long time ago buying the first iPhone model. Eventually, Apple released an update that added an “App Store” that allowed you to download third party apps.
Google released a preview / trailer for a new app called Google Goggles. It was like something from the future, and I wanted it more than anything. However, months and months later, it still hasn’t showed up on the App Store.
Eventually, Google released a statement saying Apple was blocking them from releasing it because it competed with Apple in some way, or some shitty thing like that.
It was then that I realized I had paid about $700 for a brand new device which I thought I had owned, but actually did not. I then switched to Android and never purchased an iPhone again.
This has been happening for a long time.
Sometimes I feel bad for using vpns and stremio and keeping hundreds of my favorite movies and shows on Plex then this happens and I’m happy I’m prepared for enshittification. I don’t lose sleep over piracy one bit. I’ve written guides and shared libraries with family also. Fuck corporations that can just retract contracts when they feel and take back what you already paid for. No thanks.
I’ve pretty much switched to streaming and paying for content. This makes me question that decision. This just makes the pirates look right.
Piracy has always been the better choice
It’s always been a balance between getting the stuff instantly and for a charge or waiting a few minutes and having to look for the item and maybe not being able to find it.
If you’re paying for it and you’re still not able to find it then there is no benefit to streaming. All they had to do was make streaming just a little bit better and experience than piracy. It’s actually a pretty low bar because they’ve got all the access and the infrastructure to be able to do this but lacking that, well, like my computer science teacher always used to say " information wants to be free "
Obviously
I’ve switched to streaming and don’t “buy” anything. If content isn’t available on those few streaming sites I’ll try a different provider but I will not “buy” (eg rent for more money).
It’s all a word game though. I think I actually do have one movie on Amazon. Enough people were over and wanted to watch it that we felt the larger rental fee (“buy” option) was worth it.
ComiXology is an interesting example of this. They have a shitty UI and an odd attempt to emulate the “collector” experience (obviously I think it’s horrible). It’s like a bad drug trip of skeuomorphism. I quickly decided we’d never “buy” anything there either.
I went back to mp3s and flacs for my music a few years ago. And quickly followed that up with my own Plex server. Two of the best decisions I’ve ever made. If you’re remotely tech savvy it takes no time at all and having every tv show, film, music, video that has ever released on all of my devices at any time within seconds is pretty sweet, for near-free
I’m leaving Plex for Jellyfin. It’s free, and Plex has been pushing bloat for so long, I can’t be bothered with it. It used to be great, just open Plex and there’s your media. But now it’s full of random streaming channels and shit. It takes multiple non-intuitive clicks to get to what I want. I tried Jellyfin and it’s perfect, just like Plex used to be.
If you’re using an Android TV device like the nVidia Shield Pro, I recommend also installing Kodi for playback. It has much better codec support meaning less transcoding (and further quality loss), and there’s a few oddities in the Jellyfin Client subtitle support.
Took me about a day of Googling and faffing about to get everything working and it pumping out all the full quality audio formats to my AVR. Seems that by default it likes putting everything in stereo.
Yes I personally use Emby now, but I would recommend Jellyfin these days instead of Plex.
The question I have, because I’m considering self-hosting something like that, is will my non-text have a family be able to understand how to use it? If not then it’s not really going to be worth it right?
Ideally I want something that would seamlessly replace Spotify and all video streaming services as well and, if my dreams can come true, also work with Google Assistant.
I have my music on my server and can stream it like Spotify. The frontend user experience of Plex, Jellyfin and Emby is literally just like Netflix, the untrained eye wouldn’t tell the difference.
If they can’t figure it out then it’s a them problem right?
Not really when you are going to be texted about it. I spent 3 hours trying to get jellyfin to work on my phone. Staying with Plex as they have better apps.
What was the issue? My experience was the opposite… I installed the app (android) and went to my IP, it works. I was surprised how simple and easy it was. Or were you trying to use it outside of your home LAN?
On my lan, get black screen on movies.
You sound like someone that has never supported a production server.
The main reason I pay for content is that I don’t have the time to provide reasonable customer service to my family. If they can’t use it, it is without use; useless.
Also, I do plenty enough care and feeding of complex systems at work. When I get home, it’s nice to stop working.
I haven’t tried audio streaming but the video in Jellyfin works just like netflix or any other video site.
Meh, it’s no extra clicks to get what you want on Plex once you actually configure your home to show what you want. I just pushed all those options down to the bottom of my home list, but you can just as easily remove them entirely. IDGAF about bloat. Those are just features I’m not using. I’m sure I use features somebody else doesn’t care for. Besides, the “bloat” you’re referring to is mostly just free streaming content from various channels collected in one searchable app I already have. I’d never stream any of that shit if it wasn’t on Plex already. Reminding me that a show I pirated is available on a streaming service I actually pay for is actually kinda neat. It means I can go watch it there to support it, while making sure I’ve got it in the format I want and where I want.
I’m all for diversity in our self-host streaming software and fully support Jellyfish, but let’s not pretend that the latest halfbaked option is superior because it has fewer features and is less polished. Plex used to kinda suck, lots of features have gotten better. Saying Jellyfin is just like what Plex used to be is not a compliment.
If you want to complain about Plex at least point to something truly awful, like needing Internet access to access local media because of the way Plex account authentication works or the botched and ill conceived rollout of social media features.
So pirate the shows. Easy peasy.
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft.
This is why we must protect physical media.
Not necessarily. A torrent is more sustainable. Eventually people with physical copies will die or they get lost/broken a torrent can be spread to many more people, making it less likely to die, and new users can get access to it. Just make sure to seed over 1x at leasy so you can spread it.
You just need to read physical media like stored somewhere you have physical control over, without DRM, and there hardly remains any disagreement.
Sure, but generally physical media means a dedicated item for each one. It’s usually called digital media if it’s stored on a drive somewhere. For example, my computer doesn’t have any way to play physical media, or the Xbox series S is all digital.
They can also revoke the licences on the disks.
What does that mean practically though?
Depends, I think (don’t quote me on this though) blu rays DRM keys can be revoked for that disk, meaning Blu ray players can reject a DRM.
You can also revoke a key hooked to a Blu ray player - making it possible to stop a player from playing any DRM protected DVDs that the key used to work for.
Oh wow okay, so it would fuck over a lot of people but not everyone. I knew about blu ray but I was thinking everyone with DVDs would be safe. If that happens, though, VHS tapes will probably be popular again
For DVD’s it only applies to new movies, old movies will still play but if your player is blacklisted it won’t play any new movies.
The way it works is as follows: The movie data is encrypted using a key, this key is unique to the movie. The key itself is then again encrypted with another key. Since the keys themselves are tiny (especially compared to an entire movie) it’s possible to put hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on the disc. Each DVD player manufacturer has their own key(s). When you put in a movie, the player will look at the list of hundreds of encrypted keys, and decrypt the one that can be decrypted with it’s own key.
If a DVD player is considered to be compromised, new DVD’s will no longer include a key that can be decrypted by that player in the list of hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on new disc. Alls your old discs still have a key that can be decrypted by your player, so those still work, but new movies will refuse to play.
Nah. This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.
Even if that were the case, which it’s not, the device would need to connect to the internet for this scheme to work.
This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.
There are several ways to disable your player.
First, the movies themselves are encrypted with a unique key, that key is then encrypted with another set of keys and stored on the disc. Your player will read those encrypted keys off the disc and use it’s own keys to decrypt the key needed to decrypt the movie. If the blu-ray association determines that your player is compromised, they change the way the movie key is encrypted so your players key can no longer decrypt it. This means your player simply won’t play any movies newer than a certain date.
For blu-ray drives in your PC it’s a bit different. Your software player needs a so called ‘host key’ to be able to access the blu-ray drive. Once the key you are using is found to be compromised it’s put on a revocation list. When a new blu-ray movie is mastered they include the latests revocation list on that disc. If that list is newer than the one in the drive, the drive updates it’s internal list using the list from the disc. If your player software uses a key on that list, the drive will refuse to read any movie. You need a new, unblacklisted, host key to be able to play movies again.
There is no need to connect to the internet for any of these schemes, the updates are simply distributed through the blu-ray discs themselves.
So that’s what happened to my Blu-ray drive on my PC! I had to flash the firmware to a custom version for ripping to get it to read anything.
That is incredibly shitty behavior. I’m putting the disk that I purchased into my own hardware. The studio already got my money from the sale, why the hell do they care?
That is incredibly shitty behavior. I’m putting the disk that I purchased into my own hardware. The studio already got my money from the sale, why the hell do they care?
They care because:
for ripping
There would be no problem if you used a licensed software player to simply play back the disc. The problem is you’re trying to rip it with an illicit host key. They don’t want you ripping the disc and spreading it over the internet. You’re only allowed to play it from the original disc using a certified player.
