‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
Ownership rights are buried in the fine print and downloading or buying physical copies may be the only ways to keep your favourites
If it isn't on your shelves (or server) it isn't your library, it's someone else's access.
93🏴☠️
85Arr!! (stack)
24Yarr harr fiddle dee dee!
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If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.
Fair winds and following seas to you fellow sailors, arrrrr
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From my nixos config.
Corps are fucked, I've got no issues pirating content. If I want to support someone I'll pay up but the majority of content is background filler for me.
Why would I want to sub to Amazon just to watch Jeremy Clarkson's new show, where he was paid $200m to support him? It baffles the mind the volume of cash that's thrown around in that world.
I'd much rather spend my money down the pub on a Sunday, which is owned by locals, has local beers on tap with a local solo musician jamming out the front.
For me, there's much more value in an experience with the quirks of it being live, a quick witted bartender, a great cover, an old bloke retelling stories he's told 100 times before, a forgotten lyric or even a snapped string on a guitar.
Or I'm starting to show my age 😎
17I can understand piracy when they take away something you’ve already bought, but I’d not want to do it for something I haven’t bought yet.
I wanna be able to support people creating what I like.
8I actually probably provide more support for the things I like because I pirate. Look at it this way - if I had to subscribe to a million services, I just wouldn’t watch a lot of things (because I don’t like spending money month over month for services). Now, I download what I want to watch, and if it’s good I go and tell my friends and family (who aren’t pirates) how good it is and they go and watch it, bringing more eyeballs to their show/movie than they would’ve had otherwise. Pirating isn’t stealing or taking away from creatives imo
8Though I agree about 'financial support for content creator' I think our model of copyright doesn't work.
I'd love your opinion
Should a content creator keep making money forever once something is produced ? Would you prefer to buy rather than pirate a movie that was made 100 years ago ? Let's say you never bought any Charlie Chaplin movie, would you buy it if you wanted to watch it ?
The reason I ask is because I'm still unclear myself about what is morally right on this topic. I tend to pirate a lot nowadays because I don't know how to support content creators without filling the pockets of intermediary leeches
8I have bought some games after pirating them - because I loved them. Still kept the pirated copies for the sake of ownership though.
6Especially with movies, the people who made the thing are already paid by the time it is released. As little as possible. VFX houses are often fucked royally and don't even break even. Even big-name actors are usally screwed over by Hollywood accounting.
By paying you only feed the leeches who then use their resources to fuck over everyone else.
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The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it
- Paul Muad'Dib65Living in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don't even bother as long as you aren't distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.
52In the US its the service providers that get in trouble not the users
6In Italy nobody gives a fuck, unless you start making people pay for your piracy service (e.g. illegal sports streaming)
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Streaming for things you consume. Offline media for things you like.
41Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to "buy" or "own" anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you're buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that's what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.
39Should companies work on improving access to services and making sure paying consumers get a better experience?
Nah, let's spend more money paying lawyers to go after a few people, that'll show em.
34I think it’s wild how people post “omg I just got this entire series for $299! It was on sale so I had to!” Like in 5 years, you may not even have it! Company goes under. Gets bought out. Or my personal favourite, it becomes unavailable because the owner pulled it over a legal dispute. Like so many songs off Spotify. These companies never get involved like well we got our cash too bad so sad.
🏴☠️
33You will own nothing and be happy.
29This is why I'm actually ok with Hulu. All the Futurama, archer, and Rick and Morty episodes are worth the monthly fee everything else is a bonus. If those disappear I'm ok with cancelling the service.
-19But if that's all you watch, why not get it off of Hulu?
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Buy physical media
28If you are into collecting, that is. I am kind of triggered by the binary "physical vs. non-owned" because physical is not for everyone, if I was dead set on paying and the media was not available DRMless, I would rather buy a digital copy plus pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it. Buying a disk only to throw it out after ripping is wasteful. If you keep them, they take up too much space and are too inconvenient to use compared to a few external drives.
15Eh, they're not that big, especially if you discard the cases and store them in a binder.
I would also rather buy digital, but in general, they're not available DRM-free. I can rip the DRM from physical media, so that's what I do. Pirating is technically illegal, even if I own license, so that's not something I'm interested in.
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Physical media is bad for the environment and should be banned already. Get a NAS and selfhost
1Self host what? Last I checked physical media is the only way to own something.
0TBF I'm pretty sure all the rare earth minerals and manufacturing that goes into the NAS and hard disks is far worse than some small plastic discs. I say this a a huge NAS user myself.
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The other concern is censorship. Essentially a movie that you bought is on a server and then someone's decided that words, content, or scenes are no longer appropriate. The video, song, etc, is different from the original and without any notification. The old scenes get sent to the memory hole. Oh dear Winston, I fear we will meet soon!
24RIP the D&D episode of community
4Piracy is pretty much the only way the original Star Wars movies are still available.
"I am altering the movie. Pray I don't alter it any further." - George Lucas, probably.
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my arrs love me, and i love my arrs
23Aarrrrr, I spotted a mythical jellyfin, strrrrraight ahead! It's even new and shiny!
3can't be arrs to make a better joke
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That’s why I’ll keep buying physical for the games or movies I love.
The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.
I’d have nothing against digital games or movies if you didn’t see such behaviors.
22Make sure you've got a spare DVD/Blu-Ray player somewhere that works without needing an internet connection.
Oh, you mean when the discs themselves no longer contain the data.... Yeah...
10The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.
That's a big concern. There's communities trying to document which games are complete on the media and can be played from start to end without updates (so no major game-breaking bugs or huge performance issues) like this one:
I'm also part of a FB group that collects cartridge information for Switch games, to document if there's revisions with all updates included.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEABCBrPv1tWf89hSZqUunK0JW-sQo8XpxuvZhdtHQs/edit#gid=0
8It’s good that people are worrying about this. Although, I haven’t heard of any disc game not being able to be played. I guess it would only happen if Sony/Microsoft go bankrupt or decide to close PlayStation/Xbox game updates servers.
It ain’t likely to happen but it’s important to be able to preserve games for the future as they are part of history just like paintings.
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Xbox "backwards compatibility" already works that way. It doesn't run the code from the disc, it downloads a compatible digital version.
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I've been a user of GOG for a while principally because of the no-drm ability to download a copy of what you bought. When the library starts getting past a certain size though you start to wonder about those things like what if the producer has a falling out and wants to yank it from the platform, does it vanish from my library then too? Are there contracts that say 'forever' when they offer it? Would love to find some 'download all' option to take a full copy offline of the bought items at once but it'd probably overrun the monthly ISP limits even if they had one.
Seen too many things on Netflix or Spotify that I liked vanish because 'fuck off, we can' and although I never anticipated it being 'bought' in those cases it does give a lot of justification to find alternate means to reestablish that access.
17Yeah, if it's in "The Cloud" it's NOT yours and it can disappear or be modified without your knowledge or consent at any time.
Buy some external storage and keep copies of everything you care about.
11Is there a good way to pay for a download of movies or TV, or should I go back to buying physical and ripping?
8Real debrid?
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Yeah that's why I buy DVDs if it's something that I actually want to keep. I don't mind streaming as long as you understand that you own nothing.
7Yup, it's a great way to fill that "I want to watch something" need.
I buy and rip DVDs/Blu-rays that I want to keep, and then stream the rips from my NAS. It works pretty well.
3This article isn't about streaming like Hulu or Netflix.
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Yeah, got rid of all my CDs a few years ago and now I'm buying them back a bit at the time because of all the stuff that is going out of print and you can no longer stream.
Should have just stored everything.
7This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We’ve partnered with Fetch as our new entertainment platform and the vast majority of movies or shows customers have bought on their Telstra TV Box Office can be migrated across,” the spokesperson said.
Now firmly in the streaming age, ownership is largely subject to the terms and conditions people often do not read, a lecturer in computing and information systems at Melbourne University, Shaanan Cohney, said.
“It is not reasonable to expect consumers to read these terms and conditions [but] in the case of Telstra TV box office, they had a whole section on how they were able to withdraw content.”
Cohney said there is a strong moral argument – but not a legal one – to explain why people resort to downloading copyright-infringing content via torrent websites.
Users now need to use a virtual private network connection to access these sites, and rights holders argue this hurdle has substantially reduced piracy in Australia.
“It’s having mandatory rules around what kinds of things can be in the terms of conditions … If a provider wants to offer content in a way that is in violation of those, there has to be some substantial indication that it’s in the interests of the consumer as well as very clear disclosure of that particular change.”
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