I purchased a track on beatport and later wiped my usb and realised I lost it I returned to beatport to find out it was a one time only download of that track. Very dissapointing when you try to do things the "right" way and are punished.
The deception of “buying” digital movies
271–280 of 565 posts
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#272We should require companies to use the word "license" rather than "buy," unless you receive a universe-wide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferrable at will, independently verifiable license (i.e., what it means to actually own a digital product).
I suspect that would quickly create a much more robust market in services offering upgraded worldwide licenses, and so on, and the market would clear at some price for those upgrades.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#273If your button says "buy" and you do indeed "rent", you will loose my respect immediately and Inwill go out of my way to avoid buying anything from you.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#274How big of a problem even is this? Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
The number of people could indeed be quite low, but I’m glad the use case is supported.
I buy digital films occasionally, only the ones that I know I’ll want to re-watch every year or two. It’s a much nicer experience to call one up on a whim than it is to find out which (if any) streaming service currently has them, sign up, then cancel. That’s worth the $10 or $15 I paid, especially considering that the wine consumed during each viewing matches or exceeds the same cost, depending on how many folks I’m watching them with.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#275How big of a problem even is this? Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
A couple of months ago I pirated "You Won't Be Alone". I finally got around to watching it last night and today I'm going to go buy a digital copy of it. Note that I already have a digital copy, it's what I watched last night! But the film isn't available on any sort of disc, and it was an amazing movie and I want to support the filmmakers any way I can. I honestly have no idea how much of my $20 is going to flow from Amazon to the production company to (hopefully) eventually the director. But what else can I possibly do?
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#276There's been a lot of discussion about this, recently.
I think that some form of persistent medium might be useful, but the comparisons between, say, CDs, and digital music files, isn't really a "fair" one.
One of the biggest things about any physical media; whether it be vinyl record, CD, or even an SD card, is that the media has a finite lifetime. It may be a long lifetime, but the clock is ticking.
When we buy a CD, we aren't buying the music. We're buying the physical media on which the music has been placed. Tick-tick-tick... Eventually, the CD will die. At that point, we can't expect the music store to give us another CD for free. We have to buy it again.
I grew up in the age of vinyl. I brought the same album over, frequently, because the records wore out. I never even thought about it.
I could record the album on tape, and have a somewhat longer-lasting copy of the music, but that, too, would eventually die. I would often record the album, as soon as I got it, then play the tape, thereafter. It prolonged the life of the album.
If we buy digital art (music, photographs, movies, TV shows, etc.), we can do so in physical media (a locked DVD, for instance), or as direct digital, "virtual" media (streaming, downloading, etc.).
The first (DVD) can be copied, like I used to copy records, but the second (downloading, as opposed to streaming), could, in theory, save a full-quality copy of the art, in perpetuity. If you got it in a thumb drive, or SD card, then the media would have a finite lifetime, but the difference between that media, and, say, a CD, is that the copy would be direct digital-to-digital (I think most CD copies, these days, are also "pure digital"). That A/D conversion introduces some "lossiness," that makes the copy ever so slightly (or, in the case of cassette tapes, a lot more than "slightly") lesser in quality than the original.
It's not quite as black-and-white as people on either side like to make it.
For the record, I am not a fan of the ability to "take away" art that may be on physical media in the possession of a customer (as opposed to blocking access to art on some kind of external media, under the control of the publisher).
Things like Kindles and iPads are a sort of "grey area," where the device is the media, as opposed to a player for media that is introduced, externally.
I have no solution, but I'm not a fan of the extremist, over-simplified rhetoric that either side uses.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#277It's not a "deception" if you understand that you don't really "own" digital content. I will "buy" it if I think I'll watch it again - soon. But there are so many good movies and TV shows that I rarely re-watch anything.
> It's not a "deception" if you understand that you don't really "own" digital content.
No, it's the wrong word regardless, and in any event I seriously doubt that the average consumer actually understands that they're being lied to.
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#278Copyright, as it exists in the 21st century, is a scam. It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very rich and powerful organizations and megacorps. I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have value. However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, b…
Copyright law was created by and exclusively for lawyers and the oligarchs who can afford them on retainer. Just look at what Disney has done to us and you'll lose all sympathy for the mouse: https://i.imgur.com/58gB0hq.jpg
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#279Earlier 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…
Handbrake, chose a profile, use a script, use a more efficient codec. Doesn’t take much manual work but computer chugs for a while.
Would this work for Dolby Vision et al?
Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe iTunes wasn't a good example but it has happened to me with other services. I live in the Netherlands where I bought a subscription for the Formula 1 TV service. Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.
>> Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different. Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch…
I think they're referring to the official F1TV app, which is region restricted in UK because of an exclusivity agreement between SkyTV and Formula One Group.
F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.
Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.
[0] https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl
In case robvdpol is an HN member, thanks for all the work you put into RaceControl. It was the best way to watch the sport.