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The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#461

Post by javajosh »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #264
javajosh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

On the scale of evil things in the world, modifying ~10 minutes of a popular fantasy movie does not rank highly. The implication is scary, but the act itself is profoundly unimportant.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#462

Post by anikom15 »

cgrealy wrote: post #448
deadbunny wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue with resale of digital content is that there is no discernible difference between new and used. Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less? I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.

Used sellers can’t create new copies of the game. Used markets have more of an impact on retailers and dealers than on manufacturers.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#463

Post by slim »

joshspankit wrote: post #404
senko wrote: 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…

I’m going to pile on, but it’s important that it’s part of the copyright discussion: Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth. Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents . It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists t…

it's actually shrinking the realm of ideas (culture) by design. since ideas are "property" their value is function of their rareness. economic forces are literally creating artificial scarcity of ideas.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#464

Post by mmmpop »

rsch wrote: post #447
joshspankit wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to pile on, but it’s important that it’s part of the copyright discussion: Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth. Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents . It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists t…

Steamboat Willie is from 1928, almost a hundred years ago. And it is still under copyright. So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.

I'm 35 and my grandmother was born in the late 40s, my great-grandparents.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#465

Post by bitwize »

wpietri wrote: post #445
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> One needs only to taste legit French cheese, Not sure how you got from food safety to how much you like the taste of particular cheese, but to me they're very different problems. I'm only talking about food safety. > They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches from feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can handle that. Not generally, but perhaps in your area. Where I am there are special exemptio…

Real French cheese is made from raw milk, which is banned under USA food safety laws. It is objectively much tastier than the pasteurized stuff, and nobody dies from eating it.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#466

Post by npteljes »

vel0city wrote: post #182
indymike wrote: post #61

There needs to be a very large lawsuit or two about this. Claiming you can buy something, and then renting it, even if the rental is 20 years is fraud.

I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that artist everywhere they perform forever now? No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance. Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?

That doesn't compare. If I go to Amazon, look for a Harry Potter collection, I'm presented a Buy for kindle button. Not a "rent for some time, but read fast because we might take it away whenever" button. If they said rent, lease, license, borrow, peek momentarily into, it wouldn't be misleading.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#467

Post by 9991 »

bitwize wrote: post #465
wpietri wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One needs only to taste legit French cheese, Not sure how you got from food safety to how much you like the taste of particular cheese, but to me they're very different problems. I'm only talking about food safety. > They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches from feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can handle that. Not generally, but perhaps in your area. Where I am there are special exemptio…

Real French cheese is made from raw milk, which is banned under USA food safety laws. It is objectively much tastier than the pasteurized stuff, and nobody dies from eating it.

Ah, yes, taste, the most objective of the senses ...

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#468

Post by babypuncher »

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).

People complained, but I can't imagine the user experience of playing an NTSC DVD on a PAL player and TV would have been very good, or vice-versa. There isn't a clean way to convert between 50 and 59.94 fields per second. You would have ended up with either jittery playback or incorrect playback speed. The field sizes are also mismatched, which would have required some pretty gross scaling given late-'90s DVD player technology.

Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately, it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no region restrictions.

Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS, instead of using an "official" player.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#469

Post by zdragnar »

mmmpop wrote: post #464
rsch wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steamboat Willie is from 1928, almost a hundred years ago. And it is still under copyright. So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.

I'm 35 and my grandmother was born in the late 40s, my great-grandparents.

I'm 36 and my grandfather was born in 1907. YMMV.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#470

Post by babypuncher »

makeitdouble wrote: post #148
barelysapient wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's not forget, that if you brought your DVD player with you, you could still play your DVD's no matter what region you were physically in.

Except if your player wasn't conpatible with your TV of course. At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.

Support for multiple analog signal formats did not become common on TVs until people started moving away from CRTs and towards flat panel LCDs and plasmas. This transition lasted a pretty long time, as both LCD and plasma presented numerous drawbacks compared to CRTs (LCDs arguably still do), and CRTs were still very cost-effective even well into the '00s.

Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.

With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.

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