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?
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.That’s the best part
They redefine “own” and “buy” in their TOS
And so do many many other online retailers that sell digital goods
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.
The people who can afford to fight this kind of court case have no interest in doing so.
Don’t you have customer protection NGOs in the USA?
We have corporate protections in the USA.
I can’t believe you were able to ask that with a straight face
The consumer isn’t the last rung on the ladder. We’re on the fuckin ground. With footprints on our faces and medical bills to prove it.
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try google
to give an actual answer instead of jaded teenage bullshit:
Don’t expect any actual info from people around here. something tells me the comment section isn’t up for a fair analysis at where these things have failed us. it’ll be all soapbox, zero fact. I’m pretty baffled at how many people just told you No
Of that list, BBB is apparently more of a business extortion scene. But consumer reports seems cool, I’ve used their site a few times.
The rest, I’ve never heard of
I don’t even know what that stands for
NGO is non government organization
Why would they endanger the ability to sell the same movie dozens of times over?
Who tf is going to buy Aquaman 2 dozens of times? What’s wrong with them?😭
We should start a gofundme then to get the funds needed to afford such a fight. Id throw in 100$. Might take a few thousands of me, and a lot of time, but it should start somewhere.
Or join the EFF which already does great work in this area. They don’t always succeed, but I doubt a GoFundMe could do better.
Anything holds in court when you have more money than several small nations combined.
Or “watch”. That way they don’t have to make it obvious that their customers won’t own it but still don’t straight up lie.
Then it’s not binding and they’re just waiting for the class action. Which will win, but they’ll still be richer in the end.
This is modern alchemy trying to turn lead into gold. Just change the meaning of the magic words et voilá you make gold while the other party is robbed blind and can’t do anything about it after the fact.
And of course, it’s totally legal and totally cool.
They actually never mention the idea of you owning content in their tos https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=content-only
It’s “purchased digital content”
(iii) purchase Digital Content for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time (“Purchased Digital Content”)
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.
ok that makes me sick
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Refunding the sale price is still theft. If it was only worth that much to me (zero surplus), then I wouldn’t have bothered with the trade in the first place. The only things worth buying are worth more to you than the sale price.
Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That’s a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you’re putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money… meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.
You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I’m off to read about economics 🤓
Refunding the sale price is still theft.
What did you lose in this theft?
You got back everything you paid and you still got to enjoy the movie.
The way I see it you benefited from this transaction.
A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 1 year
It’s called the Discounted Value Of Money in Finance.
As in, the future money returned by an investment is converted to today’s money by using a risk free investment - say US Treasuries - as baseline to convert that future money to today’s money.
Maybe an example helps: if I have a $1000 investment I can make today that returns $1050 in 2 years time, the way to check if it’s worth it and by how much is by comparing it with how much would $1000 put today in, for example, US Treasuries return in 2 years time and if it’s more than $1050 then that investment isn’t worth it because I could make more from those $1000 in 2 years with no risk.
You could say that the baseline, no-risk, future value of today’s money is how much it will turn into by that future time if I kept it in a risk free investment from today until then, and you can also do the operation in reverse, Discounting the Value Of Money in the Future to a Present Day value.
PS: There is also another concept which applies here which is to do with having your money lock-into something called Opportunity Cost. Simply it’s trying to have a value for the investment opportunities you might miss if you money is already lock-in for a certain time frame in something. Back in the example above, if those $1000 are put in our example investment for 2 years, they can’t be used if a better opportunity appear in the meanwhile.
This actually applies to regular people all the time: for example, if you don’t have time to play a game, why buy it now if you can instead buy it later when you do have time to play it, it might be cheaper and you even have the option to change your mind in the meanwhile and get something else you enjoy more with that game.
Yes but the movie will have lost its value over time so you could probably find it for much cheaper.
But you’ve already spent your dollar… That only proves my point. Both the dollar and the media both decrease in value, for separate reasons.
You lost the ability to enjoy it forever, and that’s what the language at time of sale said you’d have.
You buy it again then?
It’s probably much cheaper by the time it’s deleted anyways.
You’ve gone from asking what was lost to insisting that they took it in order to give us a discount.
No, I just think that everyone here is over reacting like always
So you moved the goalposts?
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Refunding the sale price is still theft.
What did you lose in this theft?
Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?
Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.
Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise “pay this price and own this movie” rather than “pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time”.
Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?
Well of course, but I wouldn’t care much about movies or media. Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.
Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.
Except when they aren’t. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.
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.
“rent a license for 15 years”
Did you click on it? Maybe it links to a torrent :D
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.
IF BUYING ISN’T OWNING PIRACY ISN’T STEALING!
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 looked at Movies Anywhere and
- US only
- Movies bought only (no series, does not support rentals)
- sounds like they offer a unified interface to multiple providers - but you’re saying it unlocks the bought movies on the other platforms? - if it’s only a frontend it’d not help in keeping access
I did fail to mention it is US only (my bad in that). Though it could get expanded if it is popular enough and it can be pointed to as “reducing piracy.” But international laws being complicated from nation to nation is also an issue, or at least something they might say. I haven’t been out of the country since setting it up, so I am curious if I would need a VPN to access my licensed stuff. Maybe would work for folks that have made accounts in the past with VPN? Idk.
It does work with some very limited sets of shows. But like I said, they aren’t really about that and the shows tend to be from studios like HBO. But not helpful for most anything other than movies.
It is a unified interface, but if I buy a MA labeled movie from say Vudu. It will also show-up in my iTunes, Microsoft, YouTube/Google Movies, Amazon, and of course MA. They have some additional connected services via Direct TV and Verizon, but I don’t use those. But the point is that if I get it on one of the services I connected, they become available on all of them. Even when the UltraViolet service went down, I didn’t lose the things I had bought. Though I think that Disney must have bought their connections and the UV stuff was migrated. Though I am not sure of those details. Either way it didn’t lead to me losing anything.
It also does require that you periodically sign back into their site to re-connect each provider similar to how you have to sign back into other sites. But again, I at no point have lost access to what was in my account if I haven’t signed in to re-verify. It isn’t as cut and dry as having the physical discs or a torrented copy on a NAS. But it is still worth knowing about if you have “legit” copies. I really wish that there were a way to link my Plex account and be able to watch them in the same front-end as my local stuff though. But no way that is going to happen unless Plex completely stops supporting the Plex Server and works out deals to use APIs of stuff like Vudu, Amazon, iTunes, etc…
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 thought the facebook account requirement was removed
It may have been, but I wouldn’t know. I’m never going back on that platform again. They stole a couple hundred dollars worth of games from me.
I am on the belief that once I buy something, let’s say Spiderman No Way Home, on streaming services, I am entitled to download it offline from anywhere for my own Jellyfin.
No one, or even biggest corp, can change my view.
Downloading stuff like this for personal use is in fact perfectly legal in many countries
If only they allowed you to do it easily…
Well it is easy.
It’s just they don’t allow it.
One out of two ain’t bad.
Laughs in screen record
Even if you don’t pay for it?
In Switzerland it technically is legal. Only hosting for others is illegal.
Depends on the country
They said buy, which means paying.
In some countries making a private copy isn’t legal if copy protections are in place. Even if those copy protections are useless.
Nobody with enough money has sued… Yet…
I mean, you can “buy” stuff in Amazon Prime Video off service. Unlike Netflix or other platforms, they will let you “buy or rent” streaming movies, which is the same as finding the movie on the Amazon storefront and buying the digital copy instead of a physical copy.
Now, does that mean they won’t yank it? Not really. A digital license is a license, not a purchase. Is the word “buy” or “own” inaccurate? I’m hoping not, because like the Sony thing showed, platforms are desperate to not have the courts improvise what rights they owe the buyers on digital purchases.
I’m still buying my movies in 4K BluRay, though. And working on ripping all of them for streaming at home, now that I finally have the space.
A digital license is a license, not a purchase.
Stop repeating copyright cartel propaganda.
If buying isn’t owning, then you are being scammed.
If they have access to remove the media from your library on their end, then it’s a license and not a purchase.
That doesn’t mean they don’t owe you access to it, though. The fact that there isn’t a word for “I’ve acquired perpetual access even if I can’t back up the file itself” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to continue to access the media. Or to demand that right to be upheld in court, for that matter.
It’s not digital though. When you bought any physical media you purchased a license to view the content. You never owned the media on the disk cause that is the studios IP.
This is like saying I don’t own my car because it’s the manufacturer’s IP.
You have always owned your individual copy of the media on the disk!
Again, quit falling for the propaganda.
How are you digitizing BluRays? I’ve not found a way yet due to the DRM on those fuckers.
Look into MakeMKV. It’s “free” while in beta (in practice you need to input a new license key from their forums occasionally, so inconvenient unless you buy a real license) and can rip Blu-Rays with no issue. For ripping 4K, though, you’ll need a drive that supports LibreDrive which bypasses all of the drive’s built-in DRM. I personally use an LG BU40N in a Vantec external enclosure.
Awesome, thanks for the pointers! I’ll look into it.
This basically, which at that point rolls all the way back around to piracy, so hey, if you find an easier way to access a comparable file maybe it’s all shades of grey anyway.
That’s very interesting. But do you always have to buy Blu-ray just to get digital copies? I wonder if there is other options to actually own the movies without the licensing bullshit.
So far I don’t know of any services that will just hand you a digital file of a movie outside of physical media.
I say that’s a damn fine business opportunity, because I’d be all over it, but hey.
That sounds more like what class action lawsuit is supposed to be for.
Damn straight. I want my $7.50!
Those are more to punish companies and change their behavior, which I think is what was desired here.
Of course they are a gold mine if you are a lawyer.
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms is planning a lawsuit for something similar https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-crew/servers-shutdown-lawsuit
“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.”
Ross needs your help, lawyers!
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 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.
Or don’t buy it, then pirate it.
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.
Or don’t buy it and don’t pirate it either. Fuck em. This shit isn’t even worth pirating.
Wouldn’t call that piracy.
100%. That’s a backup.
Sometimes I do what I call “time travelling” where I pirate first with the intention to buy later when it’s cheaper.
I do that too but I call it a “forced demo”
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.
Format shifting is legal in the U.S.
It’s distribution that’s an issue.
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.
Won’t someone think of the shareholders!
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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.
2030: We’re all gonna die.
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.
This is the answer.
All fed regulatory agencies are captured at this point.
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.
This would be illegal in most EU countries.
This SHOULD be illegal in EVERY country.
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!!
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.
they can get away apparently because of this very small print.
yarr-har-fiddle-dee-dee/ if you love to sail the seeries of tubes
plenty of room on that ad to replace ‘own it now’ with ‘rent it until the studio deletes it or we quit paying for its rights’
yes. kinda sucks.
I believe there was a couple of attempts that tried to complain but got dismissed because the defense mentioned the complainant didn’t read the TOS.
You just can’t see the microscopic “for” in “OWN IT ^for NOW”
So you refund me if you take it away?
this is why i still buy cds and dvds
Yep. I still like owning Blu-ray’s for this reason. When I tell people I have a Blu-ray collection they make fun of me.
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.
Do they at least come with cool bonus features?
Head by the dollar store sometime, Blu-Rays on crazy discount these days.
Clearly they don’t own a nuclear bunker
Telling you have CDs collection of music is giving even more weird reactions.
I definitely do not value having lifetime access to 99.999% of the media I consume enough to have to deal with hoarding physical copies.
The full context of the quote is, while yes, the prospect of the complete elimination of private property is terrifying for some people (even socialists), the idea is that in the future, you won’t need to own anything and your life will be simpler and theoretically more fulfilling if we’re not preoccupied with owning things and keeping up with the Joneses.
but you’ll notice that it doesn’t say “we’ll own nothing and be happy”. they’re not willing to take the medicine they prescribe for you. they’re part of the class that’s destined to own everything.
“I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it further”
