You all remember just a few weeks ago when Sony ripped away a bunch of movies and TV shows people “owned”? This ad is on Amazon. You can’t “own” it on Prime. You can just access it until they lose the license. How can they get away with lying like this?
Are people really out here buying a media that can only be viewed through an app? If it’s not a file that can be downloaded and viewed elsewhere then I’m definitely not going for it… Who am I kidding? The seas have always been the life for me landlubbers!!
It should be noted that Amazon was among the first to prove that buying isn’t owning a few years ago when a book that many people had legally bought was automatically scrubbed feom devices. The title had been removed from the catalog, and any kindle which held it automatically removed it without the users concent, and they were given amazon store credit in return.
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.
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.
1080p video streams are also much more compressed than BD. I can’t always tell, but when I can it’s because there are distracting artifacts on the stream.
Because they control the FTC and any other regulatory agencies. It’s called regulatory capture. The only other way they can be held accountable is through the pay to play court system which is biased towards them because they can drag it out until the other party gives up.
When you click “buy” or “purchase” on a video on Amazon Prime, you’re not actually coming into ownership of that movie of TV show. Instead, you’re merely paying for a limited license for “on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time", as warned in the very small print on the company’s website.
I feel like an outsider on these debates. I totally agree we should be able to own forever.
In my case I find there is so much new TV and movies I rarely go back to re-watch shows or movies so owning them isn’t on my radar. It’s a challenge just to watch a whole series I find.
I’m wondering how often do people beyond kids re-watch movies and TV shows? Kids seem to be able to rewatch the same movies several times a day…
For me it’s preparing for future nostalgia, I want to be able to just "have it’ to look back on. It may sound strange to some people I guess but I can’t properly get “invested” in a show/movie/game without the knowledge that I’ll be able to rewatch it again, maybe at some point when I’m in my 80s and feel nostalgic about it. It’s a major barrier to my enjoyment in the present. It’s like why people take photos of things. 99% of what I would torrent are things I have access to now, that I would happily pay through the nose for if I could just own it in a DRM-free format.
I rewatch movies ALL THE TIME, especially during Christmas and Halloween. There are a couple of other films that I put on consistently as a comfort watch (The Guest, Dread, etc.). I have watched entirely though all 3 Stargate Series at least 3 times each. My wife and I often rewatch Psych and The office. I have watched through all of the Star Trek series at least 4 times each. I am on my 5th or 6th time through Futurama. I have watched Fringe twice at least. Twice through X-Files. I don’t know how many times I have watched Firefly. My wife has been through Friends at least 5 times. And she has watched Murder She Wrote (the entire series) probably 30 times. I have watched Columbo in its entirely no less than 3 times.
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