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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#261

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

dfxm12 wrote: post #124
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 words that explain why, if I ever wanted to collect movies, they would all be DRM-free torrents. When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam perpetuated by corporations and governments working together against our interests, then they only honourable ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch movies at all.

Why eschew ripping physical media? You'll likely have a more uniform collection in terms of quality. Also depending where you are in the world, it's either legal or just as legal as torrenting media. In the latter case, it's not really enforced. It's also probably more honourable, if that's something you really care about.

You need a real computer to rip BDs. A netbook or a Raspberry Pi aren't going to cut it because of the CPU requirements. Said Pi will have no trouble running a torrent client though.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#262

Post by indymike »

vel0city wrote: post #234
danparsonson wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a false equivalence though - it's well understood in this case that you bought the ticket not the performance, and that the ticket expires after one use. The same is not true of buying films, as it used to be possible to keep a physical copy (e.g. DVD) that no-one could take away from you, and that was recent enough that I think most people still (reasonably IMO) expect a perpetual license when 'buying' a movi…

> buying a limited license to watch a film Buying a VHS was still a limited license. You weren't allowed to reproduce it and sell the reproductions. You weren't allowed to then operate a movie theater around your off the shelf VHS tapes. You weren't entitled to a new tape once the tape wore out.

> Buying a VHS was still a limited license.

Yes, but no one would take the physical tape away when Target or their distributor lost the right to sell the video tape.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#263

Post by volleygman180 »

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,…

> re-sale of digital goods

Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#264

Post by selfhoster11 »

javajosh wrote: post #71
dublin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's a real problem for those of us who don't watch a lot of movies. Many people aren't capable of figuring out "where to look" at all anyway. I am, to some degree, but it's just not worth spending that much of my time to hunt them down on the rare occasions I really want to watch something. Also, I'll just note that we never got the 21st century we were promised, which was this - any movie ever made: htt…

>the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil. That is wildly overstated. The worst they can do to you is not let you watch their entertaining movie . Possibly even after you've paid for it (the subject of the OP) - and in that case the culprit isn't even the IP owner, it's the distributor! And honestly it sounds like the problem with digital ownership is simple fraud that is a) covered by existing law and b) to…

The stakes are not low. Denying access to, or altering, content in this way is equivalent to vandalising the cultural commons (and yes, even if it's not in the public domain - it's still cultural commons). People should be more upset about this.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#265

Post by goodpoint »

kortilla wrote: post #210
nonrandomstring wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

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

No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no proprietary "intellectual property".

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#266

Post by alexfromapex »

vel0city wrote: post #241
alexfromapex wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location. It is an event ticket. With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case. We can use the term "buy" for digital movies if you actually are just buying a ticket that lets you view the movie however wherever and when…

> When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location. Do I know this? Are you assuming I bothered to read the ticket ahead of time? I bought a ticket to the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2022 Tour. I should be able to go to all the tour, right? Oh wait, you're telling me there's text on the ticket I should have read to understand it was only for one location and…

Arguing that reading anything, even small amounts of information located directly on the ticket or receipt, is "legalese" is very reductive and seems to be coming from an emotional rather than logical argument. Event tickets are an established practice that is very familiar and straightforward to consumers and as another commenter mentioned is a false equivalence for several reasons.

There is an actual legal concept of an undue burden and that is exactly what having to read through many pages of fine print is. If you don't actually own digital content it should be highlighted very clearly, while placing a minimal undue burden on the consumer. Otherwise, it's deceptive.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#268

Post by dewey »

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,…

> 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.

In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.

If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#269

Post by withinboredom »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #252
rendaw wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot of video content. I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-enc…

Even if for some reason you don't re-encode, 18+ TB disks are now available. This means you can fit nearly 300 films' worth on a single drive like this, more if you buy multiple. I don't think it's such a bad idea to run a 4-drive cluster out of a single Raspberry Pi, with all the drives connected over USB. You don't even need backups for this, really. If you own the discs and lose the digital version, just copy it o…

I’m 90% sure an rpi can’t handle the Bitrate needed to watch a 4K video.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#270

Post by Gordonjcp »

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.

Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.

I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.

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