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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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431–440 of 565 posts

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#431
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

Steam has a list of licences I own for the games I have on Steam. They could easily add 2nd hand sales to the Steam store and just transfer that license to another user. No need for a Blockchain when Steam have a perfectly working database.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just throw files on there. You should make sure the clients you're connecting support the codecs and formats natively and at that point the pi is basically acting as a NAS. It should play 4k fine like that if it has the bandwidth necessary.

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I don’t think the pi itself has the internal bandwidth necessary.

The rPI moved the NIC off the USB bus so is actuy1gbps which is plenty for even 4k and it has hardware x264/x265 so should playback fine.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#433
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US automotive lemon law for example doesn’t specifically benefit the wealthy or large corporations. What muddles the picture is people do benefit from economies of scale. So, if you make the law actually hostile for large companies both the general public and corporations are worse off.

Lemon laws only apply to cars sold with warranties. Wealthier people are more likely to buy new cars, or used cars with warranties. Poor people are relatively much more likely to buy cheaper used cars without warranties. Rich people also buy more cars over their lives, increasing their chances of coming across a lemon. Therefore, lemon laws are relatively more beneficial for wealthier people.

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#434
The anecdote in TFA is wrong, about "coming to your house and seizing your DVDs". They won't come to your house; they will revoke the decryption keys and push the revocation to your Blu-Ray player, which will then fail to decrypt your BDs. They don't need to come to visit; they thought of that already.

And it's not just movies, it's also books and music. Many people "bought" MP3s or "buy" Kindle eBooks. Amazon has already shown that it is willing to delete Kindle content remotely [1]. And come on, this is Amazon. They are happy to censor on their own [2] and in collaboration with other companies [3].

Copyright is not just a "scam" anymore. It's a tool that is being used to shape what information is available to us. It's an enforcement mechanism for the "Overton Window".

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-amazon-is-within-its-right... [2] https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-harry-became-sally [3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8523526/amazon-stop-selling-to...

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#435
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

Might as well skip the extra step and just torrent them directly. What you are doing is illegal either way, so why do the extra work?

Maybe in America (Land of the Free). Elsewhere in the world it's perfectly legal to backup your owned media.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches from feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can handle that. One needs only to taste legit French cheese, compared with, say, Austrian manufactured French cheese, to know food quality laws have little to do with actual food quality, and Austria has one of the strictest food legal systems in the World.

Food laws are about safety, not taste.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#437

I work in R&D where tens to hundreds of millions are spent on talent/materials/engineering to design new high tech materials for the world. It’s strange that this much effort practically gets about 10-15 years of protection(or less depending on prosecution time with the patent office), while a drawing of a mouse or “moving-pictures” is protected for a century.

Not using cost measured in dollars to equate the benefit of different things, but most studio films are at minimum tens of millions of dollars, with nine figures not being uncommon.

Of course, I’m just noting it’s interesting that a similar endeavor measured in dollars is protected for about the half the life of the inventors in R&D, and almost 10x that in the latter case.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#438
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'…

This is a totally uninformed question. Are you sure the bad quality from the discs is the fault of the discs rather than your blu-ray reader? I'm assuming you've had good quality from the reader for other discs??

It's a digital signal, either it reads and works or it doesn't. You don't lose quality because a "bad" player.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#439
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the TV App on macOS. Just go into the list view and right-click on a movie (or multiple) and then you can download it. I let the TV app do all its own folder/library management. I've just configured the library to be on my external drive instead of my internal drive (you can do this from the TV app preferences). Note that this doesn't remove the DRM or anything like that. This is simply storing a local copy of th…

Awesome, thank you! Have you attempted transferring those backups from one computer to another? (i.e. upgrading from one Mac to the next)

Yes in the sense that I plug in my external hard drive to the new computer and point the new computer's TV app library to the existing library on the external HD. Then it will prompt for authentication the first time I try to play something. After that the movies will play.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compliance with those laws help big ag and Starbucks WAY more than small farmers and small cafes, and pose barriers to entry.

How does compliance help them more? I'd think it's just the opposite. E.g., I live in a city that posts health department scores in every restaurant. This makes me more likely to eat at a small place because I can know that they're not cutting corners on safety. Whereas, having worked in high school at a large chain restaurant, I would expect those places to do well just through corporate persnicketiness.

I agree they pose a barrier to entry, but I think that's good. People not ready to run a clean kitchen should are not ready to serve food. Now it's possible that the bar is unnecessarily high in places. But I live in a city with lots of restaurants and a relatively low number of chains, so I'm sure it's not always the case.

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