Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 565 posts

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#351

Post by FalconSensei »

rthomas6 wrote: post #253
scarface74 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your movie is from any of the five participating studios you buy the movie once and it works across all of the major video platforms if you use Movies Anywhere https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768... Blu ray players are also locked down and the embedded keys are subject to revocation

If you buy blu-rays from those five participating studios, they also give you the same Movies Anywhere digital copy.

US only though, so if you move you are out of luck.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#352

Post by EMIRELADERO »

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.

That's not a license, that's just buying a copy enshrined in a physical medium. All the restrictions you mentioned derive from copyright law itself, not a license.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#353

Post by m463 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #47

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. 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…

Except for the unskippable nonsense, and the hit-or-miss ability to resume a show you that you paused or stopped.

other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#354

Post by kalleboo »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #218
kalleboo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have DRM attached and need to be played on a computer that has logged in to your iTunes account and been "blessed". But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity. You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloa…

> But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity. I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed. During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don…

> I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed

To be fair, it was a LONG time since stopped buying video from iTunes. Like 5 years at least. I subscribe to a bunch of the streaming services but instead of bothering to figure out exactly where something is streaming I just download it from the Pirate Bay where I know I can find everything right away.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#355

Post by moffkalast »

wpietri wrote: post #350
Xeoncross wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the US have any state or federal laws that don't benefit the wealthy at least as much as a regular citizen? As far as I'm aware, even laws for the small business play into the favor of larger corporations either directly or via auxiliary laws.

Food safety laws are a good example. By acting as a floor on manufacturer and restaurant hygiene and ingredient quality, they help the poor a fair bit more than the rich.

The rich also need to well... eat. It benefits them as much as anybody.

For example milk started to be regulated more only after someone in Al Capone's family got poisoned and he bribed the right people to make it a thing. You're kidding yourself if you think any of that was to benefit the poor in the first place lmao, just happens to be a side effect.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#356

Post by moffkalast »

FalconSensei wrote: post #290
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #278

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.

At this point it should've been public domain twice over, it's old as dirt.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#357

Post by gibspaulding »

anjbe wrote: post #335
retrac wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best example to work with is Star Wars, or maybe The Lord of the Rings. The harm of eternal copyright is probably best demonstrated with these. They've both entered popular understanding, becoming casually referenced all over the place. "We need to make a little stop in Mordor first" is probably more widely-understood than most references to Greek mythology at this point. The people who grew up in the cul…

Star Wars is a particularly salient example because the original cuts that made the films such cultural icons are completely unavailable from anyone other than third‐party sellers, due to the wishes of the (former) rights holder. After the Special Editions were released, the theatrical editions made it onto DVD one time, and never did again. J.J. Abrams has indicated that there are difficulties behind the scenes (per…

You may have avoided mentioning this on purpose, but I'll go for it. The "Despecialized Editions" [1] of the original Star Wars trilogy are an amazing project to take the HD special editions and edit out all of the changes to match the theatrical edition. They look a lot better than the scans I've seen, but still match the old VHS box set I grew up watching.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_Edition

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#358

Post by wpietri »

the_af wrote: post #40
abraxas wrote: 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…

> 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).

Overall I think geo-locking was bad, but I wouldn't go this far:

> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.

Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#359

Post by abetusk »

jacobr1 wrote: post #341
forrestthewoods wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

10-year extensions with graduated costs. You get first 10 years upon publication, for free automatically, or for a nominal filing fee to register your claim. The next 10 years costs (extending to 20 total) now costs a meaningful fee. Maybe a fraction of sales structured like a license owned by the public/government, maybe a known schedule of fees based on the type of work, but either way it is a non-trivial sum. Then…

Personally, I think this is the best solution I've heard. It still has problems in that copyright holders need to be proactive and it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension fee that doesn't become popular until later but I think these are reasonable compromises to make to serve the larger good.

I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms and extension protocols.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#360

Post by moffkalast »

buttercraft wrote: post #338
forrestthewoods wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A decade or two tops. That is enough time to monetize your work. Then, you get out of the way and let others benefit from your work just as you benefited from the works of so many others who came before you. You're still free to keep creating new things.

Just like patents are right now.
Post reply on HN