‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services ( www.theguardian.com )

*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. *

JoMiran ,
@JoMiran@lemmy.ml avatar

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/8bc5bc1c-5020-4ace-974f-1961cf5935c3.jpeg

Emerald ,

Digital Restrictions Management

chronicledmonocle ,

If purchasing isn't ownership, piracy isn't stealing.

9488fcea02a9 ,

If buying isnt owning then piracy isnt stealing

BearOfaTime ,

And piracy isn't stealing anyway!

But I still enjoy that phrase.

mnemonicmonkeys ,

Well, not digital piracy. Ye olde piracy absolutely was stealing, plus a medley of other crimes

Emerald ,

I'm sure some digital piracy involves stealing. Someone has to have taken some floppy disk software from a store and walked out without paying for it, then made pirated copies of that disk

evidences ,

Piracy has never been theft, it has always been and still remain copyright infringement. That being said go ahead and pirate, I'm not your dad.

TropicalDingdong ,

That being said go ahead and pirate, I’m not your dad

What am I letters on a screen? I'm not going to stop you.

Lexam ,

You, you could be... If you wanted to.

ShepherdPie ,

You just gotta show up.

evidences ,

Thanks for believing in me child.

_number8_ ,

When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.

onlinepersona ,

Sail the seas with I2P and anonymous torrents. They can't stop it.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Decronym Bot , (edited )

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)

[Thread for this sub, first seen 14th May 2024, 01:15]
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designatedhacker ,

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.

tkk13909 ,
@tkk13909@sopuli.xyz avatar

Your first proposal still falls victim to the fact that screen recording exists.

ElderWendigo ,
@ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works avatar

Like every system? What's the actual distinction you're trying to point out?

masterbaexunn ,

Guy clearly never recorded music of off the RADIO!

lost_faith ,

Oh, the memories... but we were paying a slight copyright fee on every blank disk and tape purchased in those days, regardless of use.

_number8_ ,

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.

ExcessShiv , (edited )

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?

lost_faith ,

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

designatedhacker ,

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.

Olgratin_Magmatoe ,

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.

fitgse ,

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.

otacon239 ,

I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.

I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.

If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.

BearOfaTime ,

MakeMKV and Handbrake are godsends.

MakeMKV hasn't failed to rip a DVD to MKV for me yet. I have hundreds of videos from DVDs.

Most I convert to MP4 using Handbrake to save space and for compatibility.

As for playing, look into running something like a NUC (small PC about 2x the size of Apple TV), with Kodi on it. It can play your entire library either stored on it or on a NAS or practically from any storage on your network, and connect to your TV via HDMI. It's effectively a local streaming box.

otacon239 ,

For DVDs, I’ve never had an issue. They just amplified the BS on BluRays tenfold.

Prox ,

I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.

What? Where are you seeing this issue?

I grabbed a Panasonic UHD player and it's been a dream. Zero ads, HDMI control so I can use the same remote that works with my TV and receiver, it has full Atmos and Dolby Vision support so the quality is amazing... truly the whole package. And it's available everywhere you'd expect.

EngineerGaming ,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

I don't like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you're into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.

mister_monster ,

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.

floofloof ,

If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.

mister_monster ,

Yeah archive then

guyrocket ,
@guyrocket@kbin.social avatar

Consumers are getting fucked. Media companies will continue to make it worse while trying to improve their bottom line. How long until it is all pay per view at sky high prices that only keep going up?

I try to own my media in physical form as much as possible. But I don't think it will be long until physical is not an available format. Or unaffordable, like vinyl is now.

We should have resisted and stopped the DMCA. We should stop all media being rental only. But we do not resist, we comply. We bend over and get fucked like the sheeple we are.

Until consumers take control of their government they will continue to take it up the ass from corporations. They count on you to comply.

NaibofTabr ,

You will own nothing and like it have no recourse.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@discuss.online avatar

img

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

  • Money back requirements
  • Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
  • Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
  • If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

skittlebrau ,

Another thing to add - these services can’t use the word ‘buy’ because that implies ownership. They should be forced to use a word like ‘rent’.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

experbia ,
@experbia@lemmy.world avatar

I always thought it should be "unlock", because that's more what is happening. you're not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action.. they've had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you're not allowed to see it until you pony up. it's locked away.

jeena ,
@jeena@jemmy.jeena.net avatar

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.

be_gt ,

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.

BearOfaTime ,

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.

jeena ,
@jeena@jemmy.jeena.net avatar

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.

floofloof ,

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."

snownyte ,
@snownyte@kbin.social avatar

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.

solrize ,

Leopards ate my face.

beefbot ,

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.

AtariDump ,

🏅

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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?

snownyte ,
@snownyte@kbin.social avatar

Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn't last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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.

Dave ,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

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).

Kernal64 ,

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Convincing analysis. I guess the question is, if we assume this is the case, will the industry ever heal?

Kernal64 ,

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.

grue ,

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.

Backspacecentury ,

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.

it_is_soup_time ,
@it_is_soup_time@techhub.social avatar

@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.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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?

mbirth ,

Money. It's much better if you can sell the same thing over and over again.

Bizarroland ,

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.

blargerer ,

Other comments are wrong, its complicated residual structures on tv/movies.

Bookmeat ,

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.

originalfrozenbanana ,

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

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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.

originalfrozenbanana ,

Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership

ElectroVagrant ,

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.

catloaf ,

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".

originalfrozenbanana ,

Yeah I don’t trust the good will of corporations, even the ones I personally like

floofloof ,

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.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

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.

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

snownyte ,
@snownyte@kbin.social avatar

Probably has a future? It's already here.

ada ,
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

"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"

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

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.

cmnybo ,

This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

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).

ch00f ,

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.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

I remember that time. I rented a couple of apple movies when netflix wasnt a thing.

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