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?
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.
If they’re saying “own” on their advertisements then they should be required to refund you when they eventually have to take it away. I’m pretty sure “ownership” has a legal definition and it’s probably not too ambiguous.
It should at least be considered false advertising if they can’t guarantee access permanently.
Oh, whoops. I read it as them explicitly telling me to pirate it. Yeah of course they aren’t going to let you actually own it. That doesn’t come close to making sense.
I wonder if that would hold in court. They could simply use “rent” or “lease” in their ads, but they purposely are trying to mislead to imply permanence.
Which is exactly like physical media. You never owned it you bought a license to view it on that particular disk. But it also had limitations put on it.
If license ownership rights with digital custodians were as good as they are with discs, there would be no conversation happening right now. The difference now is that custodians will occasionally snap a finger and disappear your stuff, and you have no recourse.
It’s not “exactly like” physical media. The license portion is a similar concept. But the difference is that the variables that determine whether I can keep watching the content whenever I want, in perpetuity, lie solely with me as the person who physically possesses the media. The corporation from which I purchased the license can’t unilaterally decide to revoke my access to the content.
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.
This sort of blatant violation of the First Sale Doctrine shouldn’t even require a lawsuit to stop; the FTC should prosecute companies for it proactively. We need to demand our government start doing its goddamn job again.
“I’m getting a lot of multi-page emails about possible legal proceedings and dozens of people claiming they have receipts,” Ross says. “I do want to emphasize that if I don’t get the help I need, then there will be no fundraiser, there will be no lawsuit, and this practice will continue unchallenged, at least in the US.”
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.
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.
They didn’t cut her out, but her role is greatly diminished compared to the first movie. It’s really a buddy comedy between Aquaman and Orm where one is almost literally a fish out of water
Still has her in it though. After what Hollywood did to Johnny based on hearsay and seeing them barely do half that when it was demonstrated that she’s a crazy liar, nope.
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!!
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