There needs to be a very large lawsuit or two about this. Claiming you can buy something, and then renting it, even if the rental is 20 years is fraud.
The deception of “buying” digital movies
61–70 of 565 posts
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is feature of DRM and has nothing to do with digital movies. If you bought DRM locked product that you are not really an owner. You can play video file anywhere in the world and any time. Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
Ok, "digital movies as most consumers know them". People aren't buying DRM-free digital movies. (Technically, DVDs and Blu-rays are digital as well, but we don't call them that)
Doesn't matter if you are talking about downsides. Digital movie has no downsides, DRM on other hands has as we all know. Only valid complaint here is DRM and it always was. We were warned but nobody listened.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#63I have bought around 100 movies on iTunes. I get the argument that I don’t “own” the movies but it’s too convenient. And the best thing about iTunes is that it upgrades the movies when new features come along. I didn’t have to pay extra for 4K or Dolby Atmos when the movie itself got upgraded. That itself is enough for me.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#64I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the TV and surround setup to take a…
I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR, but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code to use on iTunes.
The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal.
It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#65Has anyone tried a legal challenge to the word "buy"? It seems like a straightforward case of misrepresentation.
It's faster to build alternatives...
There will always at least 2 (N) groups of people who agree/prefer Nth direction
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#66The biggest deception was convincing the public that knowledge is a thing, so it can be bought, sold and change "owners". Convenient access to movies can be indeed sold, but not the movies themselves.
What it could possibly mean to suggest knowledge is or isn't a thing?
I think it means that knowledge and material things are quite different.
For example, a material thing cannot be duplicated a million times in a second. Or transmitted a million miles in an eyeblink.
And knowledge has no mass.
We could probably draw a bunch of other distinctions too.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? Because it is the same thing, but cheaper. > And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes. Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say…
The only problem with this is that with physical media, there's an intrinsic amount of "friction" that prevents gaming the system. It's not convenient to, for example, have five people buy and share one set of DVDs. The hassle of moving the disc around (which gets dramatically worse with distance) incentivizes people to buy their own copy. But digital buying and selling would make it rather easy for one person to "se…
Loaning a copy to a friend, which is what your example basically is, should also be protected by consumer laws.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#68The iTunes Store continues to be the only reputable place to buy movies, mainly because they allow downloads (except 4K...but I digress). In the past, redownloading movies wasn't even permitted. You download it and save it somewhere yourself. You can still do that to avoid any issues in the future, but I suspect the few incidents that have affected the iTunes Store are unlikely to re-occur. Why? For exactly the reaso…
Can you play those downloaded movies outside of Apple hardware/software?
Yes. A bunch of non-Apple devices have an Apple TV app now¹, and you can also play movies to any device that supports AirPlay 2¹.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#69> If you buy a DVD or a Blue-Ray at a retail store, you are able to play that disk for as long as that disk physically works (often over 20 years). There are very few if any countries that would allow a shop to send around bailiffs to seize DVDs already bought years past, because the distributor no-longer has the rights to distribute the content.
If a retailer dared attempt such seizure of people’s Property, there would mass outrage. The media would shout about the retailer being thief’s, questions would be raised in parliament and the business would most likely face legal problems.
On the other hand, if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage, even though the end result were the same.
My suspicion is the level of public outrage is less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights and more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar. Which is a problem, really.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DVDs were regionally locked as well To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop including keys for certain defeated devices in new releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking stolen drive keys completely…
> Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications...
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.