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The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#291
digital artifacts do not play well with capitalism as it is. something has to be done.

I refuse to watch what could have been vanish...(e.g. napster, megaupload, what.cd and those kinds of complete medial-cultural archives). Heck, we're going the opposite direction, libraries are starting to get mud slung. There are too many incentives to shift that public perception, into libraries being bad; just a couple more generations.

sure, people whose job is to make this expensive productions involving lots of people need to earn a living somehow... it's an open problem but we need to look beyond capitalism to find an answer acceptable to all people, both those who come up with the ideas (who when coming up with them are greatly benefited by open access to all culture) and those living off the rent of the produced cultural artifact.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#292
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format. DVDs were regionally locked as well and even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM). That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was alway…

To be fair, NTSC/PAL/SECAM were political decisions made by governments at the start of the television era, well before modern copyright maximalism had got its boots on.

Some were also technical I believe, for example with relation to the power grid frequency.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#293
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

"Noisy, grainy, just bad." AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In t…

On the other (semi-unrelated) hand, film can be much, much better than digital for some applications. For example, a transmission electron microscope that uses an emulsion film to capture the image compared to a digital capture device - the film can be magnified again with a light microscope later for much more magnification than may be accessible when all of the information is registered to a single pixel.

Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#294

How 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.

I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any streaming servies because my experience with them has been horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service…

Last I checked I was nearing 1,000 movies on iTunes/AppleTV that I "bought"

I also haven't noticed any missing or anything, but my understanding when I click the "buy" is I'm not buying to OWN the content like I'd expect with a DVD/VHS, but buying the right to watch it as long as the content is available as many times and whenever I want.

I personally think people are clinging too much onto the description of "buying" that comes with physical goods, not digital goods.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#295
post #215

Copyright, 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…

What do you think a reasonable form of copyright law would look like?

Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it originally had.

Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage creation and innovation.

But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.

Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating. There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of most books drastically drops after 10 years.

This benefits society at large, since it creates more competition, both from the original author of a work, but also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the original work.

That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to give one company the "right" to make money off an invention for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon that original idea afterward.

But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget that no idea is 100% original.

In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just rehashing of old works - so that also means that if enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas anyway.

I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series to get a new perspective on this based on the history of copyrighted works:

https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

on the other hand, I don't think Mickey should go public domain.

What is casually asserted can be casually denied. Can you elaborate your reason for thinking this? Is it a special carve-out for Mickey, or would you also include, say, Alice in Wonderland?

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

on the other hand, I don't think Mickey should go public domain.

In a way, Mickey Mouse is under both copyright and trademark.

If someone wanted to do "The New Stories of Mickey Mouse" they should be free to do so.

If someone wanted to act as Disney using Micky Mouse, then they should be sued into oblivion for acting as another company.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#299

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. 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 rate…

Is it really the case that dies/packages are tested and batched individually?

I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and known to be good) devices are crippled.

That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#300
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I 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. I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all. I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered. Yo…

I think your problem is using a Blu-ray player. If you use what I’d suspect most people use, an Xbox or PlayStation, the experience is much, much better. Even better is just using makemkv and ripping just the movie. Also works for 4k if you have the correct drive (there’s some inexpensive drives you have flash firmware)

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