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Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#21

Post by nollidge »

danielweber wrote: post #19
johrn wrote: post #3

So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues. I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $…

Courts aren't stupid. Judges in particular get really annoyed if you think they'll fall for it. "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

> "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

Except... this is exactly what has happened.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#23

Post by danielweber »

nollidge wrote: post #21
danielweber wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts aren't stupid. Judges in particular get really annoyed if you think they'll fall for it. "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

> "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!" Except... this is exactly what has happened.

It did? When did a court rule that a slight change in Zevida's practice would make it legal?

Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#24

Post by majormajor »

johrn wrote: post #3

So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues. I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $…

I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual-viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law" way is that the lack of latency would require the service to need far fewer DVDs than Netflix, which would result in less payments to the content creators for the same amount of people watching their stuff. Which gets back to the mess that copyright law has evolved into -- in terms of compensation for content, is there any reason that a Netflix service should be worth more to a content creator than a Zediva service? It creates a really perverse incentive in terms of creating more useful services.

So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#25

Post by sawyer »

danielweber wrote: post #23
nollidge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!" Except... this is exactly what has happened.

It did? When did a court rule that a slight change in Zevida's practice would make it legal? Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify th…

Isn't this exactly how ReDigi operates? Is it different if the first sale is to a consumer rather than a company?

My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#26

Post by [deleted] »

majormajor wrote: post #24
johrn wrote: post #3

So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues. I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $…

I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual-viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law"…

[deleted]

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#27

Post by JoshTriplett »

narrator wrote: post #17
JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a nice hack, assuming nobody made an argument that it constituted "public performance" or something similarly crazy. Plus, you get automatic coverage of damaged disks: the company will buy back undamaged disks for what you paid minus the rental fee, or for full price in the case of an all-you-can-watch service.

Except anything with a low/bid ask spread becomes money and that comes with its own set of problems. What would happen if the DVD was sold back for more than it was bought for? It's the intersection of Banking + Copyright + Tax Law. The trifecta of screwball legal areas.

You could solve some of that by making the buyback non-transferrable (so people couldn't use this as a money transfer mechanism).

Beyond that, any pointers to information on regulations about things with a low bid/ask spread?

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#28

Post by danielweber »

sawyer wrote: post #25
danielweber wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did? When did a court rule that a slight change in Zevida's practice would make it legal? Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify th…

Isn't this exactly how ReDigi operates? Is it different if the first sale is to a consumer rather than a company? My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?

It's not "exactly" how ReDigi operates, since there is a distinction that matters about where the "performance" happens. (And that distinction matters because Cablevision, which is what allows you to offer the home-DVR as a cloud-DVR, also said that the cloud-DVR was okay because of the fact that there was a copy for each customer.) EDIT I'm not so sure about that distinction now, but there are other differences, like Zevida actually having physical media.

Nor has ReDigi been found to be legal, unless the article failed to mention the resolution of the legal action against it.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#29

Post by username3 »

johrn wrote: post #3

So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues. I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $…

I think that would work. That would be like renting. Do renters have to pay a different license? Zediva would have to deal with people that buy and not sell back.

Someone should start an Airbnb/Zediva mashup and make software to automatically buy/stream/sell DVDs from other people.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#30

Post by [deleted] »

frankus wrote: post #5

There's really the exact same copyright-induced inefficiency in traditional video rental places. It always struck me as bizarre that a video rental place could "run out" of copies of a particular film, when at trivial expense they could manufacture (on site) additional copies on demand. Intuitively it seems like this would result in more money for the rightsholders as well, although maybe the need for video rental sh…

[deleted]
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