I don’t use these services, but after learning a bit about them I have to say I’d rather pay an honest thief than one who lies about ownership ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That completely depends where you go. Some places will block it, others won’t. My company allows VPN connections but limits them to such extremely low bandwidth connections that it’s unusable. Others will straight up block it.
I wouldn’t recommend using any public connections without a secure connection.
I used to buy movies on Amazon, assuming it worked like Steam does, where if Steam loses the license to sell it, you still have the ability to play it even if Steam isn’t allowed to sell it.
Hell I still have access to the stuff I got back when Steam still sold movies (I honestly miss Steam movies…)
When people started telling me their copies of things they owned were no longer usable once Amazon stopped selling it, I stopped buying.
I had an Oculus account. I bought games for Oculus. Facebook forced me to link my Facebook account to it. Facebook removed Oculus accounts so it was all under Facebook accounts. Facebook deleted my account. I no longer owned the games I bought. I deleted the Facebook app.
I haven’t ran into a situation where any of the digital copies of things I bought have been pulled. So I can’t speak to what happened with your friends. But I will say that if you have any purchased digital copies of movies, you should at least setup Movies Anywhere and link all accounts you have. It isn’t like how Steam will still allow you to download a pulled game. But it does give you copies of things on multiple sources once linked. So if you got something on Amazon, it would also be linked as “purchased” on other services like Vudu, YouTube/Play Movies, Apple, etc… It won’t apply to everything you have got but would likely cover most big name items.
It used to be marked with the old “Ultraviolet” branding, but when that was shutdown the basic underlying service was transferred to Movies Anywhere. Most of the time you can see which things would count because they have the MA logo. Not great for smaller releases and most shows won’t be part of it (atm at least). Though some shows might also show up, as I have seen things from HBO and some other ones.
All that being said. You are very much correct about “buying isn’t owning” these days. And even when there is something like MA, there are still thousands of movies and shows that will only ever get a digital “release” from torrents/P2P. Sad that some cool shit will never get a real HD re-master for Blu-ray (let alone streaming). I very much feel that studios should have at best a 10 year window to make whatever sales before the masters should be copied to public archives. If the studios won’t do it, then there are more than plenty of people out there that would do the job for the love of keeping old media preserved and accessible. Also bullshit when I try to go the “legal” route and find a show on one service in HD but only in SD on others. It is pretty infuriating to see that in some cases I can only get like season 2 of something on say Vudu for example, but season 1 is seemingly exclusive to Amazon. And one is in HD and the other is only SD.
You’re not allowed to buy the content anyways. You’re only allowed to pay for the illusion of ownership, until they decide they don’t want to host it anymore, and then you lose it. They’re such bullshit artists that they redefine common words like “buy” and “own” in their ToS.
I believe their justification would be that you aquiring the media is a definite loss of sale vs you not subbing/buying the media is a potential sale in the future.
Edit: Not my opinion. Just imagining how they would justify it before court should it come to it.
I gotta say I love this meme. I think about it every time a tech company does something really scummy to take away features and products that people have purchased (and not rented/leased).
Lots of people are. Real Debrid is the shit! It’s about $2.80 per month for the ability to stream pretty much everything. But ads? Nah, man. There are ads on the torrent sites, but none on streaming. Pirates are pretty ad-adverse.
Huh, never heard of that, it sounds pretty cool since it covers not just streaming movies, but downloads of games as well. I can definitely see the appeal.
Check out Stremio+Real-Debrid+Torrentio. It’s honestly better than any paid subscription you can get from the studios. Install it on something like a Chromecast 4k, or a Shield TV device, hook it up to your home entertainment system, and you’ve got yourself a bonafide real solution.
If you’re paying for it, then you could argue that you aren’t “stealing” it. How are you (or at least the average person) suppose to know that the steaming service you used got their content illegally? This way, all of the liability falls on the streamer rather than the consumer.
I don’t have time to fuck with managing a seedbox to make ratios and community participation bullshit (looking at you, abt). I don’t even have time to fight incompletes on a usenet block. Let me drop a Benjamin in your “donation” box every couple of years and I’ll cover part of the server as long as I can find what I need, when I want it, in the quality I’m looking for.
I have subscriptions to a few of the big boys through legal cross-marketing deals; it’s still better to know that my shows will be waiting for me on my server if and when I ever get around to watching them.
I just do the morally correct thing. Buy it, then pirate it so I really do own it forever. Inconvenient from a data storage perspective but the only simple solution I have on hand.
Depends on what it is. I’ll freeboot full priced games by well known companies that I don’t want to support but smaller games from studios trying their heart out? I’m a sucker for chucking money at them.
I don’t agree that it is ‘morally correct’ to pay $20 for a shitty movie that cost over $100 million to make when that money could have gone to fund 5 much smaller, much better movies just so the studio could shovel money into their Scrooge McDuck moneybin with yet another multimedia tie-in.
Mmm… Sure. I think it’s morally correct for yourself. But the copyright people? They’ll argue all day that you shouldn’t be allowed to pirate it even after ownership. You need to buy the same movie on, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, purple-ray, AND omni-ray when it comes out. After all, there’s money to be made.
I don’t know about the laws where you live. But here it is legal to make ‘security copies’ of any medium you bought. If you have to crack some kind of protection, that is an inconvenience.
You are just not allowed to distribute any copies without the proper license.
It’s amazon. They pay actors and writers pennies and funding Amazon is itself completely immoral by any means. Even after the “fix” of the recent agreement.
Don’t get me wrong. I do it because Prime has shit I can’t get elsewhere. So I have to on some levels. But I don’t unless I have to to get what I need to do what I do.
Doesn’t matter. We’re all gonna die in that decade we’re now well into my original prediction of. Baking the planet, inventing viruses bro-/tech-/etc.-, Closed Source AI, etc. etc.
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