*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
They could offer a way to download a copy and steganographically tag it to hell with your id so that they know if you distribute it. You can “loan it out” by letting friends stream off your Plex or whatever. If you start selling that streaming service or it shows up in torrents, it has your ID on it.
Boom, you own it forever and you’re incentivized not to over share.
Or you know sell DRM free versions and let people do whatever, but that probably has a snowballs chance in hell.
If somebody gets access to your system, they could use that to blackmail you, and/or frame you for distributing said media.
“Give us $X, or we leak and distribute Y media on your behalf, and you will get sued by the corporate goons for shit loads of money”
The only real solution is to completely overhaul IP law, and/or nationalizing funding for the arts. If we’re gonna keep corps that own/produce media, then they should have a very short and limited amount of time to distribute it before it becomes common property of the people.
Your first proposal still falls victim to the fact that screen recording exists.
Like every system? What’s the actual distinction you’re trying to point out?
Guy clearly never recorded music of off the RADIO!
Oh, the memories… but we were paying a slight copyright fee on every blank disk and tape purchased in those days, regardless of use.
The fingerprinting I’m talking about gets encoded in the screen recording too. Subtle pixel changes here or there over the entire length of the video. It’ll be lossy when it’s transcoded, but over the whole video it’s there enough times it won’t matter. Even scaling to lower quality won’t fix it and then it’ll also be lower quality.
It’ll be like DRM, there will be people trying to remove it like anything else. They’ll break one thing and another will come along. There would still be a black market, but most people can get an unrestricted copy in exchange for money so there’s one less reason to pirate.
Unless you’re actually pointing a camera at the screen, then OK, you do you.
I literally watch TV through a capture card right now out of stubbornness and principle. Anything I want to record, I can just hit a button and safely keep. No DRM preventing me from taking screenshots, I can manipulate the picture to hide obnoxious graphics or ads (great for sports); the sense of control is extremely gratifying.
I just bought a 4k 60hz loopthrough usb3 card so I can start saving the media I want from the services I still subscribe to. What software do you use for recording?
I think I’ll try using OBS to capture a video tonight, granted its quality will be tied to the output but it requires no additional hardware. Then edit in DaVinci to get rid of the obvious mistakes i’ll make. I only have a 4070 ti super tho
I mean Amazon did this for their mp3s. It was literally just an id3 tag with a unique identifier. Not hard to remove but “good enough” to keep regular people from overly distributing it. You’ll never win against the real Pirate community no matter what you do, so just give people real incentive to buy and actually own.
Leopards ate my face.
I never DREAMED Amazon would take away my content I bought! Just because they erased the novel 1984 off of everyone’s Kindles a few years back doesn’t mean leopards would eat MY face.
🏅
Piracy is only illegal because we made it so. We can change that.
I think what we should do is to have better non-piracy ways of owning things instead of “making piracy legal” (what does that even mean?)
I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making “piracy” legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn’t be. Making “piracy” legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.
Most people would be fine with this in the case of a home user duplicating one or two copies for his kids to watch and as backups. But we have seen whenever a rule permits something, someone will work out the MAXIMUM way in which they can abuse it for profit. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.
Ideally, we could have laws that are really finely built to be specific to that first scenario. But I honestly don’t know how you write those.
what does that even mean?
Something like this: https://www.eff.org/pages/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
Thanks for sharing! I wish they had the date of publishing listed for this article. I get the feeling it was written 15 years ago, well before streaming music services existed. Would love to see them update this based on the latest technologies and services.
Looking into the metadata of the included PDF version reveals that it’s from 2004, so even a bit older than that.
Wow good find using the pdf metadata!
The EFF’s concept was from the Napster days, but I think this was written later on.
I want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work. Why do they get to still make money off their work 70 years after they died?
Yes, it would probably mean that billion-dollar-movies aren’t viable anymore, and most YouTubers couldn’t live off their videos, but I see that as a good thing.
want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work.
Do you? Because that’s how game developers get their ideas crushed in favor of yet another game as a service that nobody asked for but makes stock holders happy.
And for alternative creators, who would pay? Do they need to be churning content as a job and not because they are inspired?
I get the idea, it’s just that seems hard to pull off
Also depends on the country. It isn’t everywhere. Non-commercial file-sharing is legal in a number of European countries and I’m sure elsewhere.
It could be taken as a sign of the health of the democracy’s function and technically literacy of the population. In a society of tech heads with a highly functional democracy, it would be DRM measures that would be illegal…
How do you change that without completely stripping property rights away from artists though? Not just corporate IP, but all artists?
Piracy doesn’t take money from artists, just ask Cory Doctorow, a person making their living as a writer while uploading the torrents of his novels himself.
Corporate consolidation is what kills the artists. The studios make less movies per year, so the a list actors go to television and take the roles Rob Morrow used to get.
Is it fine for a billion dollar company to ripoff smaller artists? It’s a form of piracy, so this would be allowed, too.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s the neat part: you don’t have to, because copyright was never a property right to begin with.
First, not only are ideas not property, they’re pretty much exactly the opposite of it. I’ll let Thomas Jefferson himself explain this one:
It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
Second, a copyright isn’t a right, either; it’s a privilege. Consider the Copyright Clause: it is one of the enumerated powers of Congress, giving Congress the authority to issue temporary monopolies to creators, for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Note that that’s a power, not an obligation, and the purpose is not “because the creator is entitled to it” or anything similar to that.
Besides, think of it this way: if copyright were actually a property right, the fact that it expires would be unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But it does expire, so it clearly isn’t a property right.
Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.
Its happening for quite some time now. Recently sony did that on the playstation. Thats why we need to go back to self hosting the files (without drm).
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
I remember that time. I rented a couple of apple movies when netflix wasnt a thing.
Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
I dont think streams have a future either. Look at the amount of abuse potential by companies and how far enshittification already progressed. If you have prime, you now get ads in prime video. Its disgusting.
Probably has a future? It’s already here.
“Has a future” in this context means “Streaming media without explicit ownership rights will continue to be here/relevant in to the future, unlike the idea of ‘owning’ digital media”
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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What would it take to get a “Steam but TV/movies instead of games”? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn’t be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
They’ve said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven’t said what it is, but my guess is some kind of “you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM”.
Yeah I don’t trust the good will of corporations, even the ones I personally like
Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can’t take that away.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.
But… do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn’t anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
No. That’s why.
Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn’t last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
Why is licensing so easy with games though? It really seems like there’s this arbitrary difference in how the video games and streaming industries work.
I’m not who you asked, but my opinion is that it comes down to the types of people you’re dealing with and age of the industries. The video game industry isn’t that old, especially in its modern, mega blockbuster age. By its very nature, it’s something that is on or near the leading edge of technology. This means the people involved are usually (though not always) forward thinking and live in the modern world.
By contrast, the motion picture industry is over a century old. It’s deeply established in how it does business and you can see the effects of that entrenchment every time a new technology emerges that affects how people watch film and TV. They went to court to make VCRs illegal. DVDs were too high quality, so they made a self destructing kind of DVD (remember divx before it bizarrely became the name of a codec?). The industry went to war with itself more than once with format wars (VHS vs Beta, HD-DVD vs Blu-ray). This isn’t an industry that handles change well, and they’ve always believed everyone is a lying thief.
All this to say, the video game industry is trying to make money in the modern world, while the TV/film industry is trying to cling to a business model one or two generations out of date because they fear change. There’s no technical reason that a game or a movie couldn’t be licensed for exactly the same amount of time. It’s just how the people with power in both industries operate.
If the movie industry was smart, they’d have looked at what the music industry did and just copy/pasted that. The music industry has 2 kinds of stores, neither of which they involve themselves in running:
- Streaming services like Spotify or Tidal. For the most part, all the streamers have the same content and they compete with each other on price and features. AFAIK, none of these services are run by a record label.
- Download to own stores, like Amazon or iTunes. You pay a reasonable price and you get a DRM free file you get to keep forever. Again, the stores have largely the same catalogs and compete on price and features. And again, none of the labels own these stores.
Compare that to the TV/film industry who looked at all that and decided to do the opposite. They run their own streaming only stores that are all bleeding money instead of fostering competition by encouraging more places like Netflix to start up. They don’t, to the best of my knowledge, run any stores where you can download a DRM free video file after paying a reasonable price. This whole industry is fucked, but it’s so massive it can absorb decades of bad decisions because there’s enough good actual product that people will pay for. And that insulation from their shit decision making and their fear of change is why TV/film licenses are so much more restrictive than game licenses, at least IMO.
Convincing analysis. I guess the question is, if we assume this is the case, will the industry ever heal?
It’s hard to say. Look how long it took for the music industry to stop suing their customers en masse and just adapt to a changing market. The film/TV industry hasn’t even begun walking that path. It may never change, but if it does, I suspect it’ll take a very long time.
I think it’s like this: if your game is not on Steam, you won’t sell many copies. Publishers fight to make sure the game is on Steam.
If your movie isn’t on Steam, the company doesn’t care. No one goes to Steam for movies. So Valve has to fight to get the rights to distribute (and compete with streaming services).
Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
That, right there, is how you can tell the entire premise itself is ridiculous nonsense: if you buy something, there’s nothing to maintain because every right associated with the purchase is transferred in perpetuity. There is no licensor left to need to maintain an ongoing relationship with.
If Steam “needs” a “license” to continue to host the files its customers have purchased on their behalf, it means somebody fucked up.
@SorteKanin @thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games
Any idea why there is this discrepancy between TV and games?
Money. It’s much better if you can sell the same thing over and over again.
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
Other comments are wrong, its complicated residual structures on tv/movies.
Exactly. The licensing and sublicensing structures in TV and film are way more complicated than in video games. They also intentionally license for relatively short durations for tax reasons and other corporate considerations that have nothing to do with the end viewer or consumer.
The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
Just another victim of WEF.
I understand that things don’t last forever. But and it sounds selfish to say and maybe people might agree, I’d like for these things to last as long as I’m alive to view them whenever I please.
Though I’m really sick of this god damn hot potato shit with the content that’s spread across several streaming platforms. As well as unstable services. “Oh, we’ve shut this down, fuck your purchases” “Oh, we couldn’t sustain this platform, go elsewhere”.
It means a lot to the customer. Doesn’t mean dick to these services.
My whole library is wipped out
I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to “follow the rules” unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn’t make anything that isn’t designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they’re also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don’t.
The whole thing needs to go, all of it.
Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.
Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?
Unlikely.
I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.
The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face
We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.
It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.
You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.
My library almost got wiped out when my backup HDD started to fail. Managed to duplicate it onto a new SSD, now I’m fine.
Don’t trust services, trust yourself.
If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.
Yeah archive then
deleted by creator
I’m just confused about why people are so mad about it. In other cases where you rent space to put physical things you own so you can still access them later this happens too. Let’s get into an example, and you guys tell me if I’m misunderstanding something:
If you have a car and have to change between summer and winter tires and you don’t have space at home to store the winter tires during the summer, you can go to a tire-hotel and they will 1. Sell you new tires, 2. switch your tires - a service you pay for - and 3. store the tires for you until next winter - a service you pay for too. Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.
Isn’t it the same with the movies you buy and store at a place where you then rent storage to keep them there? As long as they allow you to download your purchases I see no difference. You can’t make someone else to keep working the same job until the heat death of the universe.
No, that’s not how it works.
With streaming, you’re licensing the use of the media, but only until said media is no longer licensed to the streaming service by the media copyright holders.
I’m guessing you haven’t seen shows fall off your streaming service? Hell, Netflix warns you of things dropping off. Doesn’t sound like ownership.
But Netflix never let me buy a movie or TV show. They just sell me access to their library for a limited time.
I bought some music from Apple, DRM free and I downloaded it and have it on my own hard drive, and share it between all my devices.
Apple also sells you access to their library for a limited time like Netflix, but then you’re not buying the songs, you’re buying access to them for a limited time.
Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.
That’s where there’s no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying “Just so you know, we’re burning your tires next week. No, you can’t come and get them.”
But in this case, as per op, you would never own the tires. Just rent them so then when the tire hotel closes you never can collect the tires that you thought you bought.
The streaming websites|apps don’t allow you to download the purchased movies or shows so no files to keep.
You don’t own anything that is not on your own system and/or without any DRM.
You will own nothing and be happy.
This is why sites like lemmy are important.
We need to put an end to corporate tyranny.
Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Unironically the future of capitalism, as it devolves into feudalism with more killer robots.
You’ve got the CEO (Absolute Monarch) who owns all the shit and you work on it in exchange for not being killed or deported. Maybe you get some treats from time to time. More likely, you just get someone from the PMC to tell you to pray more.
Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
A handful of humans with the power to deliver unlimited genocide on their neighbors are hard to keep in check.
Corporations had already proven they cannot be trusted with any long-term leasing or subscription long before they started passing that phrase around.
Corporations have also already proved very difficult to actually hold to account. They can basically do as they please, with relative disregard for any consumer protections that may already exist. It’s not good, but it can get worse.
Yep, we are what make these sites important.
