181–190 of 392 posts
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book generally cannot be removed from a shelf by a remote policy change. It may not be able to be removed from a shelf, but if it is protected by DRM they can still remotely revoke your ability to consume it, or prevent you from consuming it to begin with (for example geolocking on blu-ray disks). And in some cases a game cartridge, or other medium for software (including…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AIUI every disc is mastered with the latest revocation list. When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself.
> When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself. Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it, partly because I can imagine the sort of class action it would engender. There are reports of bricked players on the internet, and unbricking, but those mostly seem to have been caused by bad firmware updates. The wikipedia page on AACS only mentions revocations affecting future content. http…
A standalone offline player that can play Movie A today will be continue to be allowed to play Movie A forever.
Subsequently-purchased movies B, C, and/or D may or may not work (because of shenanigans like key revocations systems), but Movie A still plays fine even after these later titles have been introduced.
It's ugly, but it's not quite a brick.
The ugly part is shaped like this: A person buys a new movie and it doesn't work. They can't return the movie to the store because it's been opened, so now they're left with a disc they can't use and with less money than they had before. (Solutions include figuring out how to update the player's firmware if it's still supported, spending more money on a newer player, or becoming an Amish leatherworker and forgetting about all of this nonsense for the rest of their days.)
I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem. In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home Are you implying that lending the disc to a friend so they can watch in their own home is forbidden? Or taking the disc to the friend's place to watch together?
No, those aren't the restrictions. But there are restrictions. First-sale doctrine allows lending. But you are not allowed to play the movie in, say, a restaurant, theater, or other public place.
Right of possession
Right of control
Right of exclusion
Right of enjoyment
Right of disposition
Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use. There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline. These rips can be…
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
There is no problem, just pirate it.
> its unethical (and illegal)
I guess I'll just keep doing it then, and someone else can keep crying about it on orange computer reddit website
I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things. The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place. I think the obsess…
But there's music that Spotify doesn't work with. Music that I'd like to listen to, and that I used to own on CD. I've also got stuff in my Spotify favorites list that I have listened to on Spotify in the past, but which is greyed out today.
To pick something specific: Spotify won't play Front 242's album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil. It's present[0], but it won't play.
(I'm not even a tiny bit interested in hearing some rando's rip of that album on YouTube. I like that album because of the way the noises tickle my earbones, and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost with layers of lossy compression.)
I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it. I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV. I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical…
I would emphatically not do this, because you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty. Honestly, I'm continually surprised at how badly people miss this even as, e.g. Sony et al just take away stuff you "bought." So, to put directly. Do not reword it, you will screw it up. You must be able to hold it in your hand.
If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.
Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use. There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline. These rips can be…
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.