Amazon Argues Users Don't Actually Own Purchased Prime Video Content -

[ColtWalker1847]

Is that the same thing, though? If you still have the 8-track copy and an 8-track player, you should be able to listen to it. The same is true for anything on VHS/DVD/BluRay. If I bought a digital copy of some audio/video in the year 2000, I should still be able to watch it in 2020. No one (that I'm aware of) is suggesting that buying the VHS copy of some movie in the 80s entitles them to a digital copy of it today, but if they still have the VHS tape, and a VCR, they should be able to watch it.

Except in this case with streaming they own the "VHS player", not you (your device being the "TV" in the analogy). How long are they obligated to keep all of that infrastructure operational?

Eventually all of this is going to be as obsolete as RealPlayer so what is the cutoff here in them adapting it to new formats and all of that?

 

[derpherp2]

I love a well-drafted piece of contractual skulduggery as much as the next person, but Amazon is attempting to circumvent the plain meaning of the word 'buy' which they plaster across almost all of their Amazon Prime movies, distinct from 'rent', which is closer to what they are attempting to tell the court 'buy' means.

They're both rental agreements, only the termination clauses are different (fixed duration vs. whenever we feel like cutting you off).

Exactly, this is the fucking problem.

They want the "buy" price with the "rent" obligations. Is it really so hard to comprehend how fucktarded that is?

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Exactly, this is the fucking problem.

They want the "buy" price with the "rent" obligations. Is it really so hard to comprehend how fucktarded that is?

You are buying licensing rights for home use in limited circumstances. You always were. Those FBI warnings weren't there for no reason. What changed was the medium where they sold those rights to you.

Try setting up a drive-thru theater in your backyard with a projector and your old DVDs if you wanna know how that legal process works.

 

[Quijibo69]

Hard drives,tapes and DVDs are your friends.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

You are buying licensing rights for home use in limited circumstances. You always were. Those FBI warnings weren't there for no reason. What changed was the medium where they sold those rights to you.

Try setting up a drive-thru theater in your backyard with a projector and your old DVDs if you wanna know how that legal process works.

Also, it's movie night. Everybody should know by now when they are being pirates. Make witty comments so we can claim fair use.

 

[Marvin]

The problem I see here is that a bunch of people are being bad consumers. Really bad consumers. Ok, I see that suppliers have responsibilities too, but most of the people bitching in this thread are bad consumers who deserve to get dicked over. They can't think far ahead enough to realize: letting some random megacorp in California put content on your hard drive, without any plan for if they want to take it off your hard drive, is a bad idea.

Vote with your wallets. Don't go crying to the government if you're too dumb to do your homework.

Except for the NAS. A 12-bay unit and 12 14TB enterprise disks (never use consumer disks in NAS devices, trust me; especially never use disks "shucked" from external enclosures) cost me about $5k. FML. Thankfully I do use it for other purposes, so it's not like it was a total splurge just for media. And I know that if the internet falls over tomorrow I've already got enough shit stored locally to keep me entertained for thirty years and it'll be safe & sound even if two disks go tits up.

See, I'm building a NAS, but two issues with your plan: 1) I can't imagine soaking 140tb of storage (but maybe getting like half that in 30 years, considering my tv tuner) I'm aiming for like 16tb of storage; 2) I sweat bullets about replacing drives that big. Are you doing RAID6 or RAID7 (or the ZFS equivalent)?

For playback, I don't bother with transcoding. I just throw media at the player and let it sort it out. Ironically the cheapest/best device for use on TVs are the Amazon Fire TV 4K sticks or cheap 4K TVs with Fire TV built in. Not even kidding. Sideloading is easy and Kodi runs beautifully on them. They've played every format I've ever thrown at them without difficulty, up to 4K 60FPS h.265 10-bit encoding, which (to my knowledge) is the most CPU/GPU-intensive format to decode among the codecs available to the plebs like us. If the thought of giving Amazon money sickens you, next best bet is a bitty-board PC like a Raspberry Pi or ODROID. Still pretty easy to set up.

Oh this 100%.

I have some cheap, chinese android box. I installed kodi and hooked it up to my computer network drive.

Only issue is that my wifi is dogshit (and I guess the RAM is insufficient on this box). It streams most stuff well enough over wifi, but I had to run an ethernet cable for the beefier files.

But I do intend to run gigabit ethernet throughout my house at some point, so whichever. I hate wifi.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

They're both rental agreements, only the termination clauses are different (fixed duration vs. whenever we feel like cutting you off).

I missed this. It is right. It has always been right. Every technology has an expiration date. "Whenever we feel like it" has traditionally meant "when your old shit doesn't work anymore". Same here but they get to be slightly more in charge. Do you think those format changes were an accident? We could press records today and get near-as-much-as-makes-no-difference audio quality to our ears as the latest digital streaming whatever. The change was convenience of use. For the delivery method of that valuable IP noise to our ears/eyes in that format. You don't now own the noise itself and the ability to throw it wherever you want. This isn't China. We have IP laws.

Anyways, if you bought digital rights to home performances through one particular provider you should have fucking known it wasn't a forever deal. Especially now. We have done this digital dance before. RealNetworks. People paid money to "own" media on that network. Now it is dead. So, good for them. They now own 100% of 0.

It is a perception problem. People (boomers) want to hoard physical media and put it into piles like they own it because they threw money at it. IP and copyright doesn't work that way. It is ideas and creative thought that was being sold here, not the cassette LP VHS Laserdisc or whatever. You can't just copy and distribute that ilke it was all your own work and you are free to do whatever. The rules are very different.

 

[Belvedere]

I don't see why it's in the least unreasonable that you couldn't copy the VHS tape to your hard drive for personal use, either, but that's against the law. Not that anyone gives a flying fuck, they just do it anyway. I don't see why format shifting to use it in your car, or at home, or stream from your home server, is or should be any more illegal than time shifting by recording it on a Betamax tape, a la Sony v. Betamax.

Curiously enough making a copy for personal use or archival purposes of a piece of media you already bought is perfectly legal. It only becomes illegal when the purpose of the copy is for distribution. Say you own a large collection of NES games but because some of the components on the circuit board of the carts have gone bad (mainly games that used a battery for save files) and no longer functions you cannot play the game. But because you legally paid for that physical copy you could download or rip a ROM of that particular game and play it on an emulator and you are still within your legal rights to do so. What would be illegal is to download a ROM of a game you don't own.

The whole emulator scene has a lot of weird exceptions regarding what is legal and what is not. You can legally download a PS2 emulator but you cannot download PS2 firmware, instead the legal procedure is to make a copy of the firmware of the PS2 console you own and use that on the emulator because that is the copy of the firmware contained within the console you bought. ( Of course it goes without saying that going through those loops of ripping firmware and roms from real hardware is nonviable for most people so it is easier to just pirate it. )

 

[AnOminous]

Say you own a large collection of NES games but because some of the components on the circuit board of the carts have gone bad (mainly games that used a battery for save files) and no longer functions you cannot play the game. But because you legally paid for that physical copy you could download or rip a ROM of that particular game and play it on an emulator and you are still within your legal rights to do so.

A lot of EULAs purport to forbid this. And the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA also purport to forbid this with no particularly clear exception for circumvention for what would be legal purposes if there were no copy protection. While the actual code to DeCSS and similar circumvention software is apparently protected under free speech, whether it's actually legal to use it to convert formats for use on other platforms remains unclear. The media cartels continue to maintain it isn't, even though it probably is.

 

[moocow]

The problem I see here is that a bunch of people are being bad consumers. Really bad consumers. Ok, I see that suppliers have responsibilities too, but most of the people bitching in this thread are bad consumers who deserve to get dicked over. They can't think far ahead enough to realize: letting some random megacorp in California put content on your hard drive, without any plan for if they want to take it off your hard drive, is a bad idea.

Nah, as much as I agree with the idea that consumers should take the time to be informed and knowledgeable about the products they buy (a la caveat emptor), I do think there's chicanery going on here. As others have pointed out, Amazon (and pretty much every other service that "sells" digital goods, including Steam and friends) uses the word "Buy" very liberally throughout the storefronts. Yes, the fine print says "lol you're not actually buying anything and we can take away what we give you access to at any time," but the notion of "buying" something has had a very concrete and intuitive meaning for thousands of years.

It's probably more a matter of "false advertising" IMHO. They're intentionally using the word "buy" to describe a transaction they know isn't actually transferring ownership of a tangible good to the "buyer." They're relying on the consumer's assumptions about what buying something means and slipping the "gotcha" under the radar in the fine print. I think that's scummy, and they should probably be required to be more explicit and up-front about the real nature of the transaction.

I'd even go as far as saying if you've sold someone a license to access some specific piece of media you provide, and you stop providing it, you owe the licensee at least a partial refund. To Amazon's credit, in that infamous incident where they removed books from their storefront and actually rigged all their e-readers to explicitly delete them without user consent (or even knowledge), they did issue refunds. Even if the reason you have to take something down is some licensing dispute between you (the distributor) and the media's real owner (the studio, label, publisher, whatever), that's not the customer's problem and they shouldn't eat the loss on it.

Personally, I prefer educating people about this problem (and ways to work around it -- I've even taught my technophobe parents how to sail the high seas safely) rather than fight the media giants head on. They're just lusting for the day they can lock everyone into a pay-per-view model for all media content and this is one more step towards that goal. It's easier just to not participate at all. Don't feed the beast and just pirate whatever you have a burning need to watch/listen to.

See, I'm building a NAS, but two issues with your plan: 1) I can't imagine soaking 140tb of storage (but maybe getting like half that in 30 years, considering my tv tuner) I'm aiming for like 16tb of storage; 2) I sweat bullets about replacing drives that big. Are you doing RAID6 or RAID7 (or the ZFS equivalent)?

Spoiler: NAS sperging

I bought a Synology DiskStation DS2419+. I paid $1,600 for it (new). When I looked for it just now I was horrified to see it's gone up in price to $2k. Bleh. It's a good unit though. 12 bays, expandable memory (up to 32GB, which I did), and it provides a variety of RAID options, including their own flavor that allows you to use disks of different sizes efficiently, supports shrinking volumes (i.e. you can decide to permanently remove a disk entirely and it'll rebuild the volume for redundancy again using remaining disks, assuming you have enough free space on the volume after removing the disk to support the rebuild), and allows you to grow the volume over time by adding disks or replacing existing disks with bigger ones.

It's also got an expansion port that supports connecting another 12 bay enclosure for more storage. Apparently you can't create volumes that span between the unit's own disks and the enclosure's disks, but that's the only restriction; it just treats the additional enclosure as its own pool of disks, and all the system's features are available on it and performance is the same compared to the unit's own disks. It has 4 ethernet ports, supports bonding, and has a PCI-X expansion slot that can accommodate either a 10 gigabit adapter or a cache board that can carry two M.2 SSDs for a nice big flash-based cache for improved performance. This thing's pretty damned fast on its own, so I don't know what benefit you'd really get from that unless you have it running some disk-intensive stuff locally on it.

It'll run on as few as one disk, though obviously without any redundancy. It'll do mirroring (minimum 2 disks and in multiples of 2). RAID-5 (or equivalent) requires the usual minimum of 4 disks. And it goes from there. As I mentioned above, if you use their "flavor" of RAID you can just grow the volume later by adding disks and/or by replacing smaller disks with bigger ones as your budget permits.

With 12 14TB disks, mine is running their RAID flavor, basically equivalent to ZFS' RAIDZ2 (e.g. RAID6). Up to two disks can fail with no data loss. With disks this big, that's a must since rebuilding the volume on a new disk is a multiple-day operation. This is also why it's vital you use enterprise disks for this, not consumer disks. Enterprise disks come with 5 year warranties for a reason -- they're high-quality, specifically designed for intense 24/7 operation (and also lots of spin-ups), tough and built to last at least 5 years. Consumer disks are cheaper because they're shittier. They hate sustained high temperatures common inside a NAS, they can't handle nearly as many spin-up cycles, and if you read the fine print, they're not intended for 24/7 use (even though lots of people leave their desktops on 24/7).

So-called "shucked" disks, e.g. disks removed from those el-cheapo consumer external/portable disks, are the worst. They are literally the cheapest shit the disk makers can produce that still function at all. I tried using a pile of those 5TB Seagate 2.5" disks for my old HP ProLiant DS380 6th generation server (it holds up to 16 2.5" disks). I started with 7 running on ZFS' RAIDZ2. One disk failed after just one month. By the sixth month, three more of them died. That's with active (and very good) cooling and low utilization. I had the good sense to migrate that data off to an external enclosure using 3.5" disks before data was actually lost, but those fucking Seagates were utter garbage. When I read about how Backblaze brags about sending employees out to local shops to scarf up all the external disks they could find so they could shuck them for their servers, I laughed my ass off and wrote them off as a reasonable option for cloud backup. They probably eat dead disks at an absurd rate. I refuse to believe they save money compared to using enterprise disks given how quickly consumer disks die.

But I do intend to run gigabit ethernet throughout my house at some point, so whichever. I hate wifi.

My nigga. Running cat 6 wiring throughout my house is a long time dream of mine. Gigabit now, and future-proofed since it can also handle 10 gigabit ethernet. It really just comes down to figuring out how to get my big fat ass up into the attic safely so I can get it all run properly. Or swallowing my pride and just paying a company to come out and do it for me.

 

[Massa's Little Buckie]

Pirate everything and fuck everyone.

 

[AnOminous]

I'd even go as far as saying if you've sold someone a license to access some specific piece of media you provide, and you stop providing it, you owe the licensee at least a partial refund.

I'm not even sure the contract should be binding based on the lack of consideration. In return for your actual cold hard cash, Amazon promises jack fucking shit. It's like if you paid for a rental car for a month but the contract said they can just show up in the middle of the night and repo it for no reason at any time. They're not actually promising to do anything at all. They could just delete the content off your device tomorrow before you even watch it.

 

[Clockwork_PurBle]

I'm not even sure the contract should be binding based on the lack of consideration. In return for your actual cold hard cash, Amazon promises jack fucking shit. It's like if you paid for a rental car for a month but the contract said they can just show up in the middle of the night and repo it for no reason at any time. They're not actually promising to do anything at all. They could just delete the content off your device tomorrow before you even watch it.

Exactly.

If I pay for Netflix to get access to one specific show or movie of which physical media does not exist or is very rare/hard to get, and then Netflix decides to no longer carry it, then what?

 

[Aidan]

I'm surprised people are... surprised and upset about this. It was never a secret and is the same for all digital streaming platforms where you can "buy" your products. Mentioned earlier, Steam is the same way technically, though Gaben has said if anything major happened that they would remove the DRM for your "owned" items, but that's probably not true.

If you don't like this then stop buying shit that is tied to digital DRM and just buy it in a way where you don't need the internet to view it or pirate it. Stop buying on Steam. Stop paying to have access to stream content. Stop buying ebooks with drm.
What do you think you're buying? You don't even own your own access to the OS on your computer which is a much larger problem.

 

[Billy_Sama]

I am stuck with buying DVD/Bluray on the cheap or pirating just because I can't never find anything to enjoy on streaming services.

 

[derpherp2]

Pirate everything and fuck everyone.

Again, exactly.
I'm not going to argue fucking semantics with people, it's not my problem to solve, but all the "digital goods" people.

If they're going to make complex licenses, ToS, or some other shit to jew money out of me without actually giving me anything I'm not going to even bother.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

If it's in my RAM or on my hard drive I own it. I don't care how you feel about that.

 

[Turanist Shitposter]

You bought a license. Amazon can revoke your digital purchases at any time. Legally, sure.

This is why you should preserve physical media as much as you can.

https://youtu.be/Y_-1l_SlA7c?t=90

 

[Marissa Moira]

Hard drives,tapes and DVDs are your friends.

just had my media server hard drive crash on me and it went out with this awful grinding noise.

We're no longer friends.

 

[murdered meat bag]

See, I'm building a NAS, but two issues with your plan: 1) I can't imagine soaking 140tb of storage (but maybe getting like half that in 30 years, considering my tv tuner) I'm aiming for like 16tb of storage; 2) I sweat bullets about replacing drives that big. Are you doing RAID6 or RAID7 (or the ZFS equivalent)?

you can hit that easily if you download popular movie and tv show in 1080p + dd 5.1. if you're trying to archive older, niche tv shows and movies you'll have a harder time because there's going to be a lot of torrents with 0 seeders or usenet servers with not enough of blocks.