> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book cannot be remotely erased, edited, or deactivated. It is a physical object you can own, resell, lend, archive, or play offline indefinitely.
Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.
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.)
Possible solutions include small claims court. You can't refuse a refund for a defective product just because you had to open the box to find out it was defective.
Yeah, the distributed responsibility might make this difficult, but maybe not impossible.
Is the disc defective because it doesn't play in a labeled player, or is the player defective because it doesn't play a labeled disc?
Can the licensing body be held responsible?
In point of fact, you'd probably get your money back in small claims court just by suing the store, with evidence that your player plays other discs, just not this particular disc.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really fix the problem, so much as show that an angry-enough consumer with time, energy, and money, can usually get a token of recompense.
I think by default it's whichever one you bought later. The judge may tell you it's the other one. But it doesn't matter because either way the store has to issue a refund.
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 freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.
This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
Despite paying for Netflix and Disney+ and Prime and etc, I have pirtated 1080 copies, with subtitles, of all our favorites because network access is unreliable and service provides add and remove media without warning.
As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.
Disney+ is notorious for this. Disney also has a number of shows that they refuse to provide on physical media. If they are removed from their platform and not licensed elsewhere they effectively become lost media.
There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.
Somehing like, make sure your DVD
- has unskippable advertisment
- long intro, also unskippable
- ...
If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.
I actually remember getting so frustrated that I ripped some of my DVDs, made a copy without that, and put it in the same case so that I could just enjoy the movie. VHS you could always fast forward, which is not something I thought I would miss as much as I do. Physical goods that work offline are my default.
When you watch on vhs or laserdisc the loss of resolution only bothers you til the movie sucks you in.
At that point it’s irreverent because your eyeballs are not watching a long sequence of pretty still pictures, but rather your brain is watching a story in a way similar to reading a good book.
Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.).
You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.
Not really. If the discs you have play today, they may or may not continue to work offline depending on the player, but every so often discs are released your player won't have the right keys for and those won't play until you connect your player to the internet so it can download the newest set of keys. Some keys will expire after a certain amount of time (for example the PS3 warned they'll only last 12 to 18 months https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/vide...) and you'll have to connect the player to the internet to watch content that used to work. The manufacturer of your player could also shut down their server and stop providing updated keys and then you'd have to buy a new player to play any new discs. New discs can also break your old players (https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/vcaniv/help_wi...). The capability is also there for them to revoke keys entirely which will stop your old discs from working even if you connect to the internet and you'll be forced to repurchase your movies, but I haven't seen that used so far.
I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.
I borrow my Criterions from the library or a local movie rental place run by a film fan. I used to use SwapACD for music but activity there has really died off - regret declining titles offered to me after I started streaming music as they were rare one-offs.
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.
Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.
Not gp, I want to pay the creators. I also want to own what I pay them for. When I have this option (bandcamp, physical media etc.) I'm going for it without even thinking. It's not about the money. It was about the money when I was 13. Now it's simply about owning my stuff. Renting is not for me. If I don't have any other alternative than pirate, what should I do?
Sharing is caring. If I can share my money with creators I go for it every single time, especially when these creators are simply making my life better with their art.
It's more complex than "want stuff for free". Usually I hate free stuff as they cost in time or worse.
Your values are outdated and impractical. You've obviously stalled at the "law and order" phase of moral development which enables the parasites who are abusing copyright law in order to extract every cent from us.
I don't think the idea of "paying creators for things I want" is outdated or impractical. Law and order is the foundation of civilization, and just because some dumb companies charge more than you want does not mean you are righteous for breaking the social contract.
I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.
You call my comment word salad, but the model you present of supply-and-demand is so shallow it can't be used to explain why copyright was first created, and what problem it solved.
Something that legislation about copyright usually does get right.
This Santa Claus version of reality is exactly the kind of mainstream ignorance I was complaining about.
"As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations."
I honestly just don't know what your are trying to say and what it has to do with boomers. Are you just talking about physical media copying of books, CDs, DVDs, etc.?
Since that's not what the world was like before copyright, and since copyright is more often used to rip people off than protect them, this seems unlikely.
We got the PC only because the clone market got in on the action and the courts found that the only thing copyrightable was the PC BIOS. The PC got better because dozens of companies were able to copy and improve.
Imagine how many new remixes and takes on music and films we could have if you didn't have to worry about a corp breathing down your neck if your chords are a bit too similar to something from 50 years ago.
Have a look at Chinese factories borrowing manufacturing processes from each other in order to work more efficiently. They don't give a shit that someone else is using their process, since wanting to protect that and not having everybody else be able to use it is literally backwards thinking (towards the past!).
Actual important research, like medical stuff and whatnot, should be government funded either way. Even the US does this, did it more in the past, and it was good work.
You can look up Gabe Newell's quotes on this, but the reason for piracy often has more to do with the fact that the pirate product is better (or more respectful to the user, or less hoops to jump through) than economic reasons.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
My issue is not understanding "why people are frustrated", it's that people think that frustration entitles them to take things they do not need from artists and creators who are trying to make a living.
If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
I'm sorta in the same boat there. There are plenty of people willing to give their work away, sell it DRM free, or sell it at a lower cost (offsetting the fact it is licensed). Plus you have things like libraries and the public domain. There are more than enough alternatives, in many cases, to avoid supporting sketchy business practices. But a lot of people become fixated on getting a particular thing.
Mind talking me through the ethical problems of copyright infringement? I'm not a fan of copyright in general, and from that perspective, I fail to see the problem in copying files.
Sounds like we need economic and/or social reform if people are starving.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).
It is impossible to having to have a meaningful discussion with someone living in fantasy land. Good day. I'm here if you wish to discuss reality and not some imagined communist utopia.
There are some cases, such as the "I purchased this and then they removed the media I had purchased" cases being discussed in other parts of the thread, where the artist has already been compensated for the media they created. In those cases (specifically those cases), I feel like the people who then say "F it, I'm not buying it twice just to make Sony/Apply/Disney/whoever richer" and go download a pirated copy are ethically in the right: they compensated the creators in return for the right to watch the movie as many times as they wanted, and a third party (the middleman/distributor) then took that away from them. That the legal terms of the purchase said (in the fine print) "this is a license that can be revoked at any time" does not make what the distributor did ethical. What the distributor did was legal but not ethical.
Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
This is an international website. Many people here come from countries where pirated CD and DVD stands were part of the local marketplace or mall. Your harping on ethics just won't be relevant to those fellow readers.
Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
I had a FreeNAS I bought around ~2010 and didn't use it for a couple of years at one point and when I went to use it again I could no longer update it, which meant I was on an ancient version of FreeBSD and none of the modern software ran on. So this literally happened to me already.
A NAS, yes, but why bother with a backup process? I know it's sacrilege for most admins, but if you're already pirating the media you can just pirate it again if your storage breaks. Yes it takes a while but so would restoring from regular backups.
> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).
I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.
Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.
> You need to keep your NAS up to date.
My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.
I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.
> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now
I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)
> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.
I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.
And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.
> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.
Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.
> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).
On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.
On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.
And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?
Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.
Or you just buy a random NAS from a store, and do none of that. Sure, that's more expensive and less featurefull, but you do not need to know anything.
This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this bad?
I tried this with Halt and Catch Fire (and some others). I was able to get season one, but it turns out they don’t produce a lot of stuff on physical media anymore, and if they do, it’s often only briefly.
Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.
I’d be in favour of a law that if a product cannot reasonably be purchased legally obtaining it via other means is not piracy (e.g. in my country 80% of movies are not available simply because the market is too small, even though I would be ok with English - I still don’t want to pirate so I buy physical media)
That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
There was a touch of hyperbole ;) we live in the Information Age after all.. but to answer your question,
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution
Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.
From the beginning. Ownership is intangible. It exists only because of the collective consent to laws.
The difference between ownership of a physical object and ownership of an intellectual one is a matter of conventional. It's easier to define ownership of an object that is excludable, but that's human convenience, not a physical law.
Some dogs have a concept of items belonging to them. Early humans had weapons and, with our lizard mind, things wouldn't go well when neanderthal B considered neanderthal A's weapon was now is. They also had "homes": caves/camps that belonged to them.
Fighting physically for ownership predates fighting judicially for ownership.
To the extent that you can "own" another animal: the ownership of a female by a male is definitely a thing in the animal kingdom.
And before the first law was ever written, human slavery (estimated to be at least 4000 BC, with mentions in the first law ever written) did exist too.
Ownership predates the law that later on codified the concept of ownership.
Do we really take away from the artist? In what way?
The obvious answer is that you take away a purchase the person to give the gift would have made. One could argue that there is also value in propagating someone’s art and potentially increasing the artists customer/patron base. Think of it as advertising or to put it in the context of a drug deal, the first hit’s free. The gift recipient may then go on to buy another work from that artist and even pass on the one they were given to someone else, continuing the cycle.
I’d also argue that there isn’t widespread agreement on reasonable compensation for artists. Personally, I don’t consider artists to be special enough in the context of people that make and produce goods, that they should get unique treatment. Why does a family deserve the financial benefits of trademarks and copyrights decades after the artists death. That’s just one example, but in a time when many’s artists view their livelihoods to be at risk because of AI, it’s not popular to engage in any debate that undermines the artist in any way.
Unfortunately many game disks only contain a downloader nowadays and you often need to bind them to an account to play. Plus the version on disk without updates is probably buggy. Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's edition is an example that has a disk, but isn't really any better than a Steam key.
On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download.
So overall I don't think the physical form matters that much compared to DRM.
It's disgusting how a previously open platform for gaming (PC) was turned into what it's become with Steam. Young people either don't know or don't care that it used to be the norm to buy and install a game without a middleman "service".
That argument has been harder to make with time. A couple years ago I made the difficult decision to get rid of some old game copies. I wasn't realistically going to use them ever again, and the sentimental value for me is entirely about the memory, not the media. Part of my steam collection is nearly as old and it is on track to greatly outlast. It is also significantly easier to own and use in just about every aspect, even if it is technically just a revocable license.
Beyond that, Steam and the digital media model allowed a great many people to publish games that wouldn't otherwise have been able to publish games. It made the indie world of games possible. It also did more than anyone to bridge the platform gap between windows and linux.
I'm really worried about what will happen to Valve when Gabe retires.
I can see a bean counter making a very convincing case that it's cheaper to go back to Windows and avoid all this Linux reverse engineering gubbins which isn't bringing in an immediate profit, especially when they're giving away all theirs efforts by open sourcing Proton.
Gabe allegedly (nobody knows because it's a private company) owns 50.1%, it's not majority employee owned. It's possible he might turn it over to the employees or some kind of co-op style board but who knows if he's offered the right price by a cashed up investor.
He's got children to consider and could reasonably want to set them and his grandchildren up for generational wealth.
Which just further highlights the importance of actual DRM free ownership. Even in the face of a relatively benevolent corporation, that corporation won’t be that way forever. Leaders and cultures change, sometimes overnight (look at what happened when Broadcom bought VMWare, they started extorting customers immediately). Adobe is another good example that pulled the rug out from underneath creatives and started renting software instead of selling it.
PC game piracy was pretty mainstream back then. It was a real problem for video game creators.
But Steam is also more annoying than it needs to be, especially forcing updates and not letting you transfer games so it's not comparable to owning a disc.
> Streaming services rent you access. Digital stores sell you a license that can be taken away. Physical media gives you an object that is yours, offline, and in your hands.
>
> Physical media can be given away, inherited, or found at a thrift store decades from now. A digital license becomes inaccessible when an account is closed or deleted. A vinyl record or printed book can remain usable across generations.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.
Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?
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 obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.
With Qobuz (lossless music streaming), you can both pay a subscription and buy individual songs, without DRM. You then own those, supposedly forever (at least good luck getting my songs out of my backups, or preventing my airgapped/offline computers from sending them to my stereo amp).
I think it's a good middle ground: you pay a subscription, artists at least get a little something (the biggest issue for artists is the unlimited amount of fully AI-generate slop music), and you get to have actual DRM-free files.
Ripping physical music CDs to bit-perfect FLAC files --and automatically verifying with online databases of other people's rips that your rip is instead bit-perfect-- is kinda a big thing in the audiophile world too.
No. 2 is enough though surely, I've had multiple incidences now where a series we've been watching on a streaming platform has disappeared without warning, running my own little media server alleviates that entirely.
I subscribe to Spotify. I've got a whole galaxy of music available to me just about anywhere I go. It's very convenient and I use it all the time.
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.)
My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore
I bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.
It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!
Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.
Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System
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.)
Is the disc defective because it doesn't play in a labeled player, or is the player defective because it doesn't play a labeled disc?
Can the licensing body be held responsible?
In point of fact, you'd probably get your money back in small claims court just by suing the store, with evidence that your player plays other discs, just not this particular disc.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really fix the problem, so much as show that an angry-enough consumer with time, energy, and money, can usually get a token of recompense.
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 freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
They need to wake up.
As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
Somehing like, make sure your DVD
- has unskippable advertisment - long intro, also unskippable - ...
If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.
At that point it’s irreverent because your eyeballs are not watching a long sequence of pretty still pictures, but rather your brain is watching a story in a way similar to reading a good book.
You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.
Downloaded stuff comes into one service on a server I own (Jellyfin or Plex) and I can see _everything_ there. Every movie and TV show.
On the official services, that I pay for, I need to go through a good half dozen trying to see what's where this time.
I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
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
It’s reasonable to not want to do that, even if it’s not the most severe kind of unethical or illegal act.
Sharing is caring. If I can share my money with creators I go for it every single time, especially when these creators are simply making my life better with their art.
It's more complex than "want stuff for free". Usually I hate free stuff as they cost in time or worse.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
Something that legislation about copyright usually does get right.
This Santa Claus version of reality is exactly the kind of mainstream ignorance I was complaining about.
I honestly just don't know what your are trying to say and what it has to do with boomers. Are you just talking about physical media copying of books, CDs, DVDs, etc.?
Imagine how many new remixes and takes on music and films we could have if you didn't have to worry about a corp breathing down your neck if your chords are a bit too similar to something from 50 years ago.
Have a look at Chinese factories borrowing manufacturing processes from each other in order to work more efficiently. They don't give a shit that someone else is using their process, since wanting to protect that and not having everybody else be able to use it is literally backwards thinking (towards the past!).
Actual important research, like medical stuff and whatnot, should be government funded either way. Even the US does this, did it more in the past, and it was good work.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
If you want artists to make a living, you need to end shareholder capitalism, not reinforce it.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
Backup the .torrent files, skip the rest.
> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).
I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.
Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.
> You need to keep your NAS up to date.
My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.
I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.
> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now
I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)
> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.
I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.
And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.
> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.
Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.
> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).
On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.
On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.
And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?
Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.
Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
Are you sure that's true? If so, in which century did it start being true?
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution
Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.
The difference between ownership of a physical object and ownership of an intellectual one is a matter of conventional. It's easier to define ownership of an object that is excludable, but that's human convenience, not a physical law.
Fighting physically for ownership predates fighting judicially for ownership.
To the extent that you can "own" another animal: the ownership of a female by a male is definitely a thing in the animal kingdom.
And before the first law was ever written, human slavery (estimated to be at least 4000 BC, with mentions in the first law ever written) did exist too.
Ownership predates the law that later on codified the concept of ownership.
Is that why it did fall apart?
The obvious answer is that you take away a purchase the person to give the gift would have made. One could argue that there is also value in propagating someone’s art and potentially increasing the artists customer/patron base. Think of it as advertising or to put it in the context of a drug deal, the first hit’s free. The gift recipient may then go on to buy another work from that artist and even pass on the one they were given to someone else, continuing the cycle.
I’d also argue that there isn’t widespread agreement on reasonable compensation for artists. Personally, I don’t consider artists to be special enough in the context of people that make and produce goods, that they should get unique treatment. Why does a family deserve the financial benefits of trademarks and copyrights decades after the artists death. That’s just one example, but in a time when many’s artists view their livelihoods to be at risk because of AI, it’s not popular to engage in any debate that undermines the artist in any way.
No, every time we do that, we do not give to the artist. But not giving is not the same as taking.
On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download.
So overall I don't think the physical form matters that much compared to DRM.
Beyond that, Steam and the digital media model allowed a great many people to publish games that wouldn't otherwise have been able to publish games. It made the indie world of games possible. It also did more than anyone to bridge the platform gap between windows and linux.
I can see a bean counter making a very convincing case that it's cheaper to go back to Windows and avoid all this Linux reverse engineering gubbins which isn't bringing in an immediate profit, especially when they're giving away all theirs efforts by open sourcing Proton.
He's got children to consider and could reasonably want to set them and his grandchildren up for generational wealth.
Granted, his money, he can do as he pleases, but the Newell dynasty already exists, regardless of what happens to his shares.
But Steam is also more annoying than it needs to be, especially forcing updates and not letting you transfer games so it's not comparable to owning a disc.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?
Frank Herbert, Dune
I think we do what we want come hell or high water.
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 obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
It was a good time though.
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
I think it's a good middle ground: you pay a subscription, artists at least get a little something (the biggest issue for artists is the unlimited amount of fully AI-generate slop music), and you get to have actual DRM-free files.
Ripping physical music CDs to bit-perfect FLAC files --and automatically verifying with online databases of other people's rips that your rip is instead bit-perfect-- is kinda a big thing in the audiophile world too.
A spectacular number of publishers region-block all their music videos on YouTube for copyright reasons
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.)
[0]: https://open.spotify.com/album/1moLnvmMDvUQa1Dp0loJDf
It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!
Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.