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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#201

Post by wing-_-nuts »

dqpb wrote: post #157
josh_fyi wrote: post #10

Has anyone tried a legal challenge to the word "buy"? It seems like a straightforward case of misrepresentation.

If you sue Amazon, can they ban you from using their services?

This sort of thing does have a chilling effect. I've had issues with Sony and google. With a physical store? I'd have simply done a chargeback. With my them? I'm basically guaranteed to be banned from their services. That sort of thing doesn't happen in physical stores. One doesn't get barred from walmart if you have a beef at the return desk.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#202

Post by alexfromapex »

D13Fd wrote: post #186

I've always understood this and it doesn't bother me, at least for iTunes/Apple movies. Yes, you get less than a DVD/Blu-Ray in that the media could potentially disappear. But you also get more. It works on your computer, your phone, your iPad, and instantly on every TV in your house that has a streaming device. It works when you travel. You can download every movie you "own" to every device you have, almost instantl…

The public outcry being massive isn't going to stop companies from trying to exploit people. Companies that seemed consistent in the past have changed many times. Apple is actually a great example in that they were a privacy-focused company but have more recently forayed into scanning devices against customers' will and have now created their own ad business. That decision was made under the assumption that they own the devices they sell to customers for thousands of dollars not their customers. If the economy gets worse, you can bet they will look for additional ways to make money off their customers. Once you buy a decent amount of movies they will have lots of leverage over you. Look at Tim Cook's response to fixing the texting issue. They don't care about public outcry.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#203

Post by DangitBobby »

reaperducer wrote: post #151
nsxwolf wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent it? If we had originally developed film technology where everything looked completely clean, would anyone have thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how to make this look grainy"?

If film grain never existed, would we invent it? Yes, but it wouldn't be used across an entire film. Likely just in flashbacks and other dramatic scenes, the way it's applied to digital productions today. Similar to how in the 2000's, hipster bands added photographic pops and crackle to their tracks as an artistic measure.

They added those things to indicate age my mimicing older formats. They wouldn't add those effects to mimic older formats if older formats never existed.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#204

Post by titzer »

throwaway2203 wrote: post #121
titzer wrote: post #114

I am hoarding DVDs and it's because a.) it's cheap, b.) it's reliable c.) it's future-proof and d.) I don't trust tomorrow's political/cultural landscape to not disappear things down the memory hole as well as subtly editing out offensive material or otherwise altering things in hard to detect ways. Case in point, not long ago a family member witnessed "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke that ran…

DVDs have a limited lifespan as well

My oldest one is 25 years old and still works with no issues. Technically every physical object breaks down over time, but I expect that with proper storage and handling with care, a pressed DVD could last 50 years. And then you can also rip the bits and store them.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#205

Post by charles_f »

xg15 wrote: post #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 wo…

> 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

I don't see what leads you to that conclusion. I've also never heard about that happening, and I don't suspect this would happen unless something actually illegal was happening (illegal copies and such). The justification for actually blocking you from watching that movie for which you own a digital copy would be pretty hard to find. And the work around is relatively easy - dont connect your blueray player to the internet. With streaming services, you're at the mercy of the service provider to just lose a contract with a studio and stop providing their content.

> less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights

At this stage fairness is proven to be deeply ingrained, even in animals. There is something deeply unfair with losing access to something you were supposed to own, just because they can, and some corporate bean counter decided to not renew some licensing contract on their catalog because the competition offered a percent more.

> more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar

9/11 was a one-off, I didn't get familiar with this type of terrorist event. On the other hand, school shootings happen so often that I'm not surprised by them. Both still trigger outrage.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#206

Post by D13Fd »

vel0city wrote: post #182
indymike wrote: post #61

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.

I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that artist everywhere they perform forever now? No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance. Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?

Agreed. Even when you "buy" a DVD or Blu-Ray, you are actually just buying a copy of the media with a limited license to use it for certain purposes.

It's still copyright infringement if, for example, you buy a Blu-Ray disc and then open a movie theatre and start playing that disc publicly. The license you bought with the disc doesn't extend that far.

Whether you "buy" a movie via a disc or a streaming service, you're really just buying a limited license to display the movie along with either physical or digital delivery.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#207

Post by rthomas6 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #183
rthomas6 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.

I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I’ve not noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the Android OS.

That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#208

Post by OhNoNotAnother1 »

stewx wrote: post #7

One under-appreciated limitation on digital movies is geographic restrictions. You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing. Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO,…

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#209

Post by sbf501 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #60
the_af wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

DeCSS was "cracked" because Xing accidentally included an unencrypted key in their firmware.

The encryption wasn't cracked, it was subverted by poor security practices.

If Xing hadn't screwed up, it may have been another decade before it was possible to rip a DVD, waiting for some other manufacturer to screw up.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#210

Post by kortilla »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #127
josteink wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 me…

> 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. It doesn't seem like that. It is like that. Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make t…

> We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.

This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.

The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.

Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.

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