> you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content
This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed? I think that's the definition of stealing.
Good thing we still have torrents.
FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level; this is easily circumvented with a VPN, but it's also easy to bypass using DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox [0].
Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading. If I purchase a dvd I can lend it to my family, I can pass it on free to a friend to watch, or I can sell it second hand. If I don't dispose of it, it's mine for life.
That just doesn't apply to these digital acquisitions which are tied to the account and which the terms do allow to be revoked.
They aren't purchases but more like very long term rentals. Of course fewer people would spend money if they were told the truth so the media companies misleadingly say "purchase". (And since they all say purchase it would be very hard for one to break rank).
It's why something like Netflix of Kindle Unlimited can work well, at least you know you are spending an amount each month for basically unlimited access to the catalog.
I recently noticed the small print on event tickets I purchase from Ticketmaster make it clear that I am actually purchasing a "license" to access the event. The ticket does not guarantee entry and the license is non-transferable, revocable without refund, etc.
Unfortunately this is a phenomenon that extends beyond digital media.
That's too bad for Ticketmaster because the large print calls them a "purchase". How are consumers supposed to know which parts of their business communications are lies and which are truth? Or rather, why should Ticketmaster get to choose which of their words count and which are just decoration?
More like, that's too bad for consumers! In my experience, Ticketmaster doesn't care one bit.
When I was 17, I purchased tickets to an all-ages show via Ticketmaster's location in my local mall. At some point in time between my purchase and the event, it apparently became age-restricted. (It was an electronic music event, and this was at the peak of tv-news-driven anti-"rave" hysteria.)
I arrived at the venue on the night of the show, and they wouldn't let me in, despite my ticket clearly saying "all ages". The promoters blamed the venue for the age restriction change, I believe truthfully. But the venue box office wouldn't give me a refund since my tickets were from Ticketmaster.
So I called Ticketmaster the next day. They claimed all events are wiped from their system after the event ends, and no amount of escalation can possibly result in a refund for a prior event. Naturally they gave me the runaround and said to take it up with the venue box office :/
My takeaway was never trust Ticketmaster, they simply don't honor their own large print on their tickets.
IANAAL, but I thought there was a legal principle that ambiguities in a contract would resolve in favor of the party that didn't write the contract. In all probability, the verbiage of the contract is all licensing and it is only marketing copy that is ambiguous.
we live in a society where we give too much credit for law system which does not work.
you can say anything in font 150 and add a 4px height text that flashes for couple of seconds in a TV add and it is fine.
you can say purchase and change the definition of purchase elsewhere and whenever you want.
remember that these contracts reserve the right to be self driven and changed.
I have no doubt a small claim would result in a judgement made against Sony for the original purchase price of the item. Hopefully citizens will exert the right to do so.
To be clear I agree with you. However I am, only very slightly, sympathetic to these companies as is always the case one company doesn't want to stand out in a bad way by renaming!
> Unfortunately the term purchase for digital acquisitions is misleading.
This is why I will only purchase things I can actually keep, like CDs, DVDs, paper books and so on. It seems old fashioned, until you have a few "purchases" wiped out by some policy change out of your control.
Anything that has the word "purchase" in it should be legally mandated that there be a way for users to access it indefinitely: in this case, perhaps making it possible to download with some sort of offline DRM. (You can do this, say, with Audible books that you buy.)
Anything which is cloud-only and may disappear at any time should be labelled something else, like "lease".
Sure, they always argue that you are only "renting" them for a one-time-fee, and that the rent agreement could end at any time for any reason.
But them using the word "purchased" in this very announcement (not a mistranslation btw) gives weight to the argument that this is intentional deception of the customer. An even easier case in Germany, where courts acknowledge that customers don't read the terms of service, so any "surprising" terms hidden in the TOS aren't legally binding.
Not so fast. Every contract must be balanced, otherwise it can be challenged (and likely overruled) in courts.
If they have the right to terminate your license and withdraw access to the content, you should also have the right to terminate the contract and withdraw your money.
It cannot work just for one side without any practical reason.
Not in France, at least not immediately. The antipiracy authority first sends you an email (1st warning), then an IRL letter (2nd warning). When you receive the IRL letter, THEN you should VPN (or SOCKS or whatever) for one year, then you can go turn it off until you receive your 2nd warning again, if that happens.
I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years. I only received my first 2nd warning this year. I configured a systemd service `ssh -D myvps` and configured deluged to use this SOCKS5 proxy. Waiting for next April to turn it off...
Because I don't care? What worse can happen to me?
I firmly believe that sharing "cultural products" (sic) between individuals not seeking profit should not be illegal, and that any attempt to restrict this is vain at best, and most likely counter-productive for society as a whole.
> I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years.
Out of curiosity, how has this changed over years? Are they getting worse or better? My feeling is that they are completely ineffective. Anecdotically, none of my friends living in France mentioned getting emails, and some of them do torrent with abandon.
Well I was surprised to receive the "lettre avec accusé de réception" recently. So HADOPI's not dead yet, unfortunately...
Ineffective to prevent torrenting, they definitely are. But I think they are winning on the ideas front unfortunately. The idea that 'pirating' is immoral has made its way to the general public. I wonder if I'll see the time where everyone is convinced that you're stealing something when you lend a book to a friend, or when you play music in your house and some people that aren't spotify subscribers can hear it.
Sure they exist, does anybody actually use them? We're talking about the average user, not someone who is so in the scene they have multiple private tracker accounts.
Bittorrent, by definition at the protocol, includes sharing all pieces you have downloaded as soon as the piece is completed and finished its hash check[1]. The fact that there are nonstandard workarounds for this changes nothing for the broadly shared default that almost nobody is going to go out of their way to change, especially if it means using a specialized client.
It's just the same technicality as if you said "due to the way how video streaming works, downloading is inherently distributing". It just isn't. You can do it (videoconferencing has this as a default), but it's irrelevant.
Because not everyone lives in the UK? And even if you do, ISPs can store data long-term, waiting for the laws to change and then retroactively find which customers they should keep a closer eye on.
Not to mention the non-ISP groups which also monitors the DHT for who downloads content they "own", ready to serve the data to governments at request.
Me as well. But unfortunately there is a trade off. For example I buy most my Nintendo Switch games in the physical form so my kids can trade them back and forth. But there have been times when my case full of games has gone missing and I panic about $600 in games last. Thankfully I have always found my games but I could see how easy it could be to lose a lot of money fast. With digital I just download the game any time I want even if I lose my switch just sign into the account on a new switch and get my stuff.
Have you ever considered adding a gps tracker to it? They are tiny, cheap and I think exceptionally well suited for the particular usecase of always finding a half grand in nintendo cartrides.
This is why I actually own all our movies on Blu-ray. These days they are cheap online and locally (I averaged $6 per movie with the most common ones being cheapest and rare ones the most expensive - $8 for the entire original Star Wars trilogy in Good box condition, and players are $7 on average at Goodwill), they are easily ripped if that is your thing into 1080p streams that still look better in some circumstances than highly compressed 4K streams, and they can be resold later and never taken away.
Even though it cost quite a bit to get the collection - after you do the math of the cost of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and [insert typical random streaming service here]... it might pay off in only a few years while retaining some resale value. It is also super fun to go bargain hunting - $2.99 for the first 4 Pirates of the Caribbean movies [literally, for me at a thrift shop]? Score!
> FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level
And some of those now resolve the IP addresses of popular torrent sites, and block their IP addresses -- or rather, redirect connection attempts to a local anti-piracy page.
I know this to be the case for at least one ISP, but it's the biggest one in the country, and needless to say they have a video on demand business as well.
Isn’t that a transaction between the user and Studiocanal that Sony just mediated? The right to view the content should still be valid through a different platform.
> This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed?
This is relatively common and has been since before you were born
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> I think that's the definition of stealing.
It's not. This is, though:
> Good thing we still have torrents.
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I don't like what Sony is doing here, but it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
> it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
That's likely because you're viewing it through a different lens than the person you're replying to. Try to look at it this way...
- Company sold ownership of an item to individual. This is what "purchase" means to most people.
- Company then decided that individual should no longer have access to item, so takes it away.
- Individual knows that company has no (moral) right to take away item, so takes it back.
From a moral view, if you agree on what purchase means, the individual is completely in the right. If you don't agree on what purchase means, then the individual is not in the right. There are a lot of people that do not believe that companies should be able to use a word and just define it as meaning something totally different in their specific case ("purchase" when they mean rent, "unlimited data" when they mean limited, etc); and that when a company uses a word, they are morally bound to its common definition. For such a person, the OP's statements are internally consistent.
> That's likely because you're viewing it through a different lens than the person you're replying to
Is that lens "being a creator and wanting my copyrights to be honored too?"
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> From a moral view, if you agree on what purchase means
There's no need to "agree" on what purchase means. It just has a meaning. That meaning doesn't come from either of us. If you disagree, you're simply wrong. The law and the definitions of words are not a matter of being negotiated in online comments, even though online comments misunderstanding descriptivism might have told you that they were.
This is really just a bunch of self serving word salad, redefining words so that you can steal things and pretend you're somehow fighting back against Elsevier, who is in no way involved in this
If you've gotten to the point of trying to argue by framing everything in terms of whether someone agrees with an obviously incorrect definition of a word, then I'm not sure why you spent the time.
You seem to have lost track of the story, besides. The discussion wasn't actually about pirating what was already paid for. That's obviously fine, and something I myself have had to do. The story was "the reason I pirate is that in theory this could happen." Those two positions are leagues apart.
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> There are a lot of people that do not believe that companies should be able to use a word and just define it as meaning something totally different in their specific case
Literally what you're doing in your comment, mister "if you agree on what means," but okay
Anyway, companies actually cannot do this, and if you believe that they can, try asking a lawyer about it. I'd ask you to show me a single case in American history where big-spooky-they've done this, but I know you can't, so I'm not going to waste the time. If you offer something for free then redefine free to mean "costs $100," then the court will just say you don't get your $100, and get a fine for false advertising. I have no idea why you thought this was a thing.
You spend an awful lot of time attempting to use what generic people believe as a way to argue.
Generic people believe in homeopathy, chiropracty, and astrology, too. Belief isn't a valid foundation for a discussion of this form, even if you had evidence of it, which you do not.
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> For such a person, the OP's statements are internally consistent.
Manson was internally consistent too. Who cares? Internal consistency was never challenged and isn't relevant. (This seems like pleading for intellectual authority, frankly.)
This is simple.
1. Parent poster is trying to justify taking things that aren't free without paying for them, by pointing fingers at other groups and saying "well this one non-music publishing entity did something bad first, so the whole music purchasing system should be refused"
2. You've confused that with recovering things you paid for and can no longer access through one authority, which is actually not piracy or even illegal at all under American law, obviously not immoral, and something I would never bother arguing against (something I can't imagine anyone ever arguing against)
3. You need to explain to me that there's nothing wrong with the thing that is very obviously not what I was talking about
I feel like you didn't even read what I read. I was arguing that, once I've purchased a copy of something, I have a moral right to that copy. I was not talking about downloading a copy of something I did not purchase, which is what you _appear_ to be indignant about.
> There's no need to "agree" on what purchase means. It just has a meaning. That meaning doesn't come from either of us.
Correct. And the online store told me I "purchased" the item. Then they decided that "purchase" doesn't mean what everyone (see your comment above "It just has a meaning") agrees it means, and they took it away from me.
> You seem to have lost track of the story, besides. The discussion wasn't actually about pirating what was already paid for. That's obviously fine
No, it wasn't. Specifically, the thread I was replying to looks like this...
> > > you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content
> > This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed? I think that's the definition of stealing.... Good thing we still have torrents
> it's really weird for you to try to hold the moral high ground while also announcing that you do something much worse than they did.
There was nothing in the response indicating they went out and downloaded the content _instead_ of buying it. My read was "They purchased it from company, company decided to take it away from them, good thing they can take it back (via torrent)".
If you're going to jump down someone's throat and rant about how they don't understand or are playing word games, at least take the time to see if there is a reading that is consistent with what they are saying.
You sold someone a copy; they end up with a copy. Your copyright was honored.
You don't have a moral right to take away the copy you sold just because you managed to bait-and-switch them with a TOS that says you can take it back whenever you want.
>There's no need to "agree" on what purchase means. It just has a meaning. That meaning doesn't come from either of us. If you disagree, you're simply wrong. The law and the definitions of words are not a matter of being negotiated in online comments, even though online comments misunderstanding descriptivism might have told you that they were.
We quite literally change the meaning of what words mean through common parlance, that includes online 'negotiation'. We constantly 'negotiate' the meaning of words as a society. Literally now literally means literally *and* figuratively.
For normal people 'purchase' doesn't mean rent indefinitely. There have also been tons of class-action law suits that have been settled over disputes of the meaning of the contract or that the contract is partially invalid as it would break the law. The meaning of the contract is quite literally what the words used actually mean.
If I purchase or already have a legal copy of a game, am I then morally wrong (and culpable) for downloading a copy of the internet? You seem to say that's not the case, but you can absolutely read the original comment in that way, as well as the way you're implying.
Wow. You call copyright infringement "stealing" (which it is not) but give the company a pass for removing the content they paid for (which is much closer to "stealing").
No, the US government calls it "copyright infringement". If it was called "stealing", it would fall under the general theft laws. Instead, it has its own body of law.
Regular color tv broadcasts didn't start until the mid 50s (at least in North America), and even then it wasn't widespread for a number of years. I would expect there are quite a few HN users who grew up without color tv.
Edit: As far as I heard it is valid for anything delivered after Jan 1st 2022, which includes continuation of exiting indefinite contracts from before that date and the continuation of them. Correct me if I'm wrong/misinformed though.
The whole reason laws exist is because we recognise not everyone can be trusted to act in a decent manner. The law gives us a way to codify what "decent" means and to explain to folks what we expect of them (as well as consequences for when folks step outside those boundaries).
What I'm trying to say is that no, it is not silly. In fact the entire civilised world is built on the premise that laws are required.
Fundamentally businesses have no morals, and everything is just an equation based on profits. If it makes economical sense to do this, many a business would be inclined to do it.
Not saying that it’s right, but it’s definitely completely understandable why we need laws to protect consumers.
The movie still exists. The license should just be transferred to another platform, or DRM should be removed so you don't need the platform to see it anymore.
If companies fail to comply with this, maybe we'll need laws forbidding "selling" with DRM or something like that.
> it’s definitely completely understandable why we need laws to protect consumers.
Do we really? Rutracker has everything that was mentioned as removed. And much more. These “consumer protecting” laws are actually a patch on business protecting laws, increasing a bit their survivability.
Humans have no morals too, and everything they do is for personal profit.
If I sell you a car, and decide I want it back, without a refund (if I even want to sell it back to you), and if take it back - that it's called stealing your car. Same should be done with Sony and courts should punish them enough, so that they won't even think about doing that again, and neither will the other companies.
It's silly that anyone buys from Sony with their track record.
Auto installing rootkit on music CDs, Dropping the promised Linux support for PS3, putting out bad marvel movies, I'm sure there's others but those three are enough for me.
Judging movies based solely on trailers seems pretty poor form. Hell, the people who make the trailers often have no relationship to the people making the movie.
Their exclusive games (The Last of Us, God of War, Returnal, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, etc) are pretty incredible. This is pretty concerning, but few remember the 17 year old rootkit scandal or that they discontinued PS3 support for Linux 12 years ago.
When it comes to theft or murder there are broad laws. There isn't one law to say that you can't murder using a gun, another to say that you can't murder using a knife, and so on.
In this case, it seems there's a less broad law that applies, where it feels as though a much broader law should apply.
Consumers rarely don't get what they paid for. In these situations it's just often that the merchants bury the fact that they can revoke access to your purchases at any point, and if you don't like it, you can go pound sand. Hence the need to write laws that don't fuck over consumers.
The right to get what you paid for is explicitly granted by law. Before that you’d need to have a bigger stick than the seller to make sure they don’t just run with your money.
Also, money is only valuable because we all agree to pretend it is, because pretending makes it useful.
It's as old as law itself, isn't it? From the Code of Hammurabi (translation from wikipedia):
> If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.
Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.
You are powerless to accomplish anything in an adverserial situation unless you can mobilize men with weapons to do your bidding. These days it is the court systems that authorize and compel the restoration of your property with the threat of depravation of liberty or purchasing power of the defendant.
This can be summarized as appealing to a higher power — your example is the courts, an alternative is the public reputation / free market. Without a 3rd party institution to appeal to, the parties must reconcile between themselves in a conflict e.g. violence. Same principle applies often in macro/micro contexts.
Even the public reputation and free market system reduces ultimately to threat of violence, due to the fact that bank balances are maintained by state-licensed entities. It's just one more level of abstraction from state violence, but it is still always there.
Whether it’s bank balances or pitchforks, the result is a conflict. Whether both parties are able to delegate judgement to a higher power determines the type of resolution. In the case where parties recognize a higher power it can be resolved without true violence (bloodshed)
There's no technical or legal reason that the word "purchase" doesn't imply an irrevocable, transferable license (for one person at a time), as well as the requirement that the "seller" makes the licensed good indefinitely available to license holders (for a fee appropriate to cost of doing so).
If they don't like that, don't call it a purchase. Anything less is just eroding the meaning of the word.
I suppose I could have put ‘sales’ in quotes. And it’s not how I think things should be. It’s how they are. Read the terms next time you ‘buy’ a digital product.
It was very scammy and weasely of execs to ever label those as “purchases” - I guess “sine die merchant-revokable rental” didn’t sound as good. Glad the EU did something about it though.
> Sony discontinued global sales of movie and TV content in August 2021, but at the time, it was promised that content already purchased would remain accessible in future.
> As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
I had a Sony Bravia TV for several years, and bought it because it came with a "Netflix compatible" sticker.
Netflix however wasn't really compatible from the get-go, and they promised it would work in the next upgrade. I wasn't in US/EU so simply returning it wasn't possible.
They kept promising it would work in the next upgrade, and I would upgrade, even though each time it was making the TV incredibly sluggish.
Eventually five or six years passed and the TV stopped receiving upgrades and it never had Netflix.
Older Sony Bravia TVs that just barely met the specs for streaming applications had to go through such roundabout ways to actually stream the content. They did not support the latest streaming standards (DASH/HLS) and basically had to stream raw MP4 files. They were a very exceptional case device at least at Prime Video. Newer devices obviously supported the regular streaming standards.
At this point (and even 5 years ago), getting a little streaming HDMI stick will provide an infinitely better customer experience for a ~$35 investment. Most smart TVs just don't have a great user experience compared to the devices designed around that.
Doesn't your country have laws against false advertisement? Such bullshit would have gotten them a (not huge, but still, it's a Matt of principle) fine in the EU.
Seems like they should have agreed on better licensing agreements.
I see the point for subscription based services, but in this case they should have an agreement to continue streaming for those who have purchased it. The content provider has been paid for it too, right?
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think licensing agreements like this is not enough in a consumer court. When you purchase something, the consumer expects to be able to access it for as long as the distributor exists.
The services use the term "Purchase" or "Buy". If that is not actually the case, they should call it something else. Otherwise it is misleading the consumers, no matter where they hide the small print in the license agreement.
At a minimum I would expect a refund, as they are no longer providing the service that was paid for.
If complaining and asking for a refund doesn't yield a result, you will have a very hard time finding a lawyer to get this through the courts, given the rather marginal value of the content that you "purchased".
Legal repurcussions differ. IMO it comes down to: what’s the likelihood someone pursues me, and will I survive the expected cost of my defense. Nobody likes love letters anyway.
Individuals may have a lower risk, but the cost is high if someone decides to come after you. Large corporations can take the legal costs far more easily.
There's ways to reduce your risk in this sort of thing. The reason why people come after individuals is because BitTorrent is an insanely risky system. The achilles heel of P2P is that it has no privacy whatsoever, so whoever wants to extort[0] individual pirates can do so.
However, direct-download sites generally do not confer risk onto their users in the same way. Even if the site gets taken down or sued, copyright owners generally don't care about following their logs to find individual downloaders. While they still probably can be sued[1], there's no reason for a legitimate party to do so. At that point the copyright holder got what they wanted, and marching down to everyone in the server logs' house to make sure they delete their infringing movies is absolutely stupid.
For the same reason I've never liked the idea of "P2P YouTube alternatives". People rightfully complain about how they mishandle anything related to copyright, and they do, but the alternative is having every copyright holder with a chip on their shoulder financially cripple anyone who watched a video they didn't like.
[0] Legal scholars will probably object to my use of the word "extort". Yes, if you have a legal claim for relief then threatening to sue for it is not extortion, it's just the law. However, the only way to actually make antipiracy enforcement at an individual level not financially crippling is to cross the line into actual extortion. The Prenda Law and Strike 3 Holdings incidents are good examples of how easy it is to do so.
[1] The law is actually somewhat ambiguous on where the infringement actually is when you download something. I used to think "uploading equals infringement", but there's been some court opinions arguing that either both uploading and downloading are infringements, or that they infringe different parts of copyright. Nobody's bothered to prosecute a direct-download pirate to the point where this matters.
Of course there's also Japan which has a law that explicitly makes mere downloading infringing. There be dragons.
I generally agree with you. I’d rather not play the odds on exposing my identifiers anyway, whether p2p or direct. Might as well go the extra mile and make sure whatever IP is non associated with me, so direct download over tor or whatever — you get the idea. Why give someone the chance?
It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
Paying for DRMed media is for chumps. While I agree with you overall in spirit, lets not forget that there are in fact 100% DRM free quality stores out there. And for music and games not minor ones either, in music in fact humanity outright won that war and DRM free is the standard for purchases not the exception. Even for games the selection at stores like GOG is in no way minor with lots of full AAA titles. Lots of DRM free places for ebooks too, though admittedly that one for some reason is less extensive.
But it's movies and TV shows that are the real odd ones out. That industry has always been some of the worst, and unfortunately they seem to have watched what happened with music and learned all the wrong lessons plus had the opportunity to stop the particular path towards DRM free music took from happening to them. Things are a complete mess a true perversion of the point of copyright. I hope this sort of thing eventually prompts backlash that results in legal changes.
1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.
2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.
Sadly, the lessons that businesses learn from this is "we should have better DRM so users have no alternative" and not "we should have less user hostile business models"
Having less control, having less hostile business practices, is leaving money on the table. And leaving money on the table is heresy to modern businesspeople.
Consumer rights only matter to these people if they are codified in a law and the consequences have teeth.
Which is interesting, considering most businesspeople would support spending money on advertisement. Many are even into "guerilla advertisement," where an ad company tries to fake organic, word-of-mouth popularity. You know, the exact kind of popularity that piracy tends to induce.
I tend to feel the same. Something like I understand their legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem. Silly things like why can't I watch HBO max in Germany?
Even sillier, why are there subtitles for languages available in some countries, but not in others, even on the same service? If I'm in Brazil watching a Netflix show (even some Netflix originals), I don't see the same amount of subtitle options if I was in India. Absolutely bonkers.
AFAIK this happens when the subtitles are not made by the same company, for example old Disney movies are translated in each region, but not by Disney itself, so they don't own the subtitles.
For Netflix originals I have no explanation, I though they do it all themselves.
Chances are the cut you get in India isn't the same as the one you get in Brazil. Wouldn't be surprised if the subtitle translation were made on region cut level, and not on source level so that they could be simply passed on with whatever subset of the audio track viewers get to see (hear)
> legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem.
and in essence, a made up problem. The owners of those licenses simply wants to increase profits by price segmentation - that's why media is restricted in some countries from being viewed from other countries etc.
So i have absolutely zero qualms about piracy when such practices exists.
In case of HBO Max it's probably because they licensed most of their content to Sky. I'm sure once that agreement runs out we will see HBO Max in Germany. And Sky will be even more worthless to non-sport audiences.
At least with streaming services you know that it's only temporary. Often Netflix is just more convenient than searching for torrents, setting up a device with a hard disk/NAS to play offline content etc.
There are (non-trivial) ways of making back-up copies of your purchased digital material, just as there were for Blu-Ray and DVD purchases in the past; so the choice isn't solely between piracy and purchasing.
So, with a movie, who is the "creator"? The studio? But those folks are the source of the problem with their licensing deals. The director? The screen writer? Camera crews? Actors? Props?
It's easier with books, or music (with different degrees of truth, a single singer-songwriter would be a lot easier to pay directly than a symphonic orchestra...), but involved products are not easy to finance individually - or pay individually - that's the exact reason right-management studios exist to begin with.
Even as an absolute worst case there is always point camera at screen and record. HDMI splitters/cheap HDMI capture cards will often ignore HDCP too allowing you to record content. Not really convenient to do it real time, and there generally is some quality loss but it is doable.
Wrong mindset. You still need to support the developers somehow. I still bought games/movies but get the non-DRM version just for the convenience i.e. not having to start launcher for playing games.
If the developers make the game/movie available in a reasonable way (e.g. DRM-free download). If they want to control what you do after the transaction then that's their problem and I see no problem with piracy.
Yup. If you disagree with the distribution method, then you don't get the media.
There is no right that grants you the ability to take the product of another's time and effort because you didn't like their terms. In fact, there's a corresponding negative right - you have the right to possess the product of your work and prevent others from taking it away from you unless you transact it away on your own terms.
Piracy is theft, and even if you could make arguments that it's "justified" theft in the case of taking something like insulin to save your life, there is no justification whatsoever for works of entertainment.
I would be surprised if it's really THAT easy to find any arbitrary movie ripped in full Blu/UHD quality without any transcoding, dowloadable within 30-45 minutes (average rip time). New Hollywood releases, sure I can buy that, back catalog stuff that's even the slightest bit obscure? I doubt it, simply because how many people are currently torrenting e.g., a full bitrate UHD copy of Django (1966)?
I've heard it repeated many times over the years that movie torrent sites are a magical one-stop shop where every movie in the history of cinema is available instantly and in full quality, but I've just never seen it except for new release stuff. Now perhaps the story changes a little with private trackers, but in order to use those you have to be an active seeder. Now you've moved from a simple DMCA bypass to actively distributing pirated content. Thanks, but I think I'd rather rip purchased movies onto my Plex server.
USENET solves most of the drawbacks to Torrenting. Occasionally I can't get something but that's highly unlikely to be a studio film that has been published on Blu-ray.
For science it took me 10:57 to locate, download, and extract a 45,215MB remux of Django (1966) from USENET.
So that's a pretty good result for something relatively obscure!
But there must be some sort of re-encoding going on there. Because the copy of Django I ripped myself is 61.5GB, and it's only video and one DTS audio track. So I would put money on the copy you found being re-encoded somehow.
You can get pretty much any movie in a variety of encoded and untouched formats - full blurays, reasonably compressed rips, 2160p HDR, 1080p, 720p, you name it. It's all there.
> simply because how many people are currently torrenting e.g., a full bitrate UHD copy of Django (1966)?
On the most popular Russian public torrent tracker, there are 22 results for that right now, and even though none of them are UHD, top two of the highest-bitrate 1080p BDRip torrents do have active seeders.
Maybe because quality doesn't matter to me as much?
And, movies this old in 4k HDR, that's a thing? I can understand the 4k part, that at least can be done by scanning the original film at a higher resolution, but HDR? Doesn't it need to be shot in HDR to begin with?
> I would be surprised if it's really THAT easy to find any arbitrary movie ripped in full Blu/UHD quality without any transcoding, dowloadable within 30-45 minutes (average rip time).
I'd be surprised if more than 3% of the viewing population cared about this much resolution. You also can't torrent a reel of film, so dudes with private film screening rooms are screwed.
No good option for 720p TV series though that never got a blu ray release. DVDs with horrible interlacing are usually a pretty big downgrade compared to the source material and what is available for streaming and rips thereof.
I feel lucky that I don't feel the need to "own" any particular movie. I'm content enough to rent it. I rarely want to watch the same movie again more than once every few years. In my case, it's much cheaper to rent on demand than to digitally "buy" it.
Of course, some movies exist exclusively on platforms like Netflix. If I want to watch something bad enough, then I'll go ahead and pay for one month, which is again cheaper than buying outright. And then I'll usually suck up all the other exclusive content that month, so it doesn't feel too much like a rip off. It's still annoying though.
This is the reason I've given up on "owning" digital content on online platforms. At this point I will not purchase movies or tv-shows, only stream them on streaming platforms. Studios are shooting themselves in both feet by making it impossible to truly own content. By implementing customer hostile licensing models for digital purchases people will move towards streaming instead which generate far less income than selling the content à la carte.
It's been the same idiocy for more than 2 decades now. It always has to be some convoluted contribution model designed to frustrate the customer. Just fucking sell the movie in a free, standardized format with no strings attached.
So then it'll be possible to copy it but copying is illegal.
Well guess what ... The only difference now is that the pirate is better off and the customer is a chump.
I agree. I think Bandcamp is a shining example of how digital sales could be handled. They provide DRM free open format files that you can re-download whenever you want to. No-one is going to take away the files you've already downloaded and saved on some disk. Bandcamp might go out of business and in such a case you'd lose access to any content you have not saved. But that is a fair trade-off.
But the movie industry believes DRM free formats would undercut their region based business model and allow rampant piracy. Like people haven't been cracking DRM-locked content for ages already. And they might be right about increased copyright infringement, but dismantling the whole notion of ownership is not the solution.
I feel the need to give a shout out to Bandcamp who, upon purchase of digital music media, allow immediate download of said media in various formats, including FLAC.
It's not just Bandcamp though - DRM-free files are the default in the music industry and they can be bought from various stores, including lossless formats.
> Practically speaking, digital is far more durable in the balance.
It is, until it’s not. You wouldn’t loose an entire part of your physical collection because some company on the other side of globe decided you shouldn’t be able to use it. But that happens all the time with DRM content. If you only lost 1 album, you are lucky. Past performance is not is not indicative of future results.
Things don't lack durability simply because you speculate that one day something might go badly.
Past performance is, as an issue of fact, the single best indicator of future events.
You say "it happens all the time with DRM content," but I just asked a Discord with 12,000 people, and of the roughly 60 people who responded saying "I buy music online," zero of them have had it happen to them either
Anyway, as a nuclear power fan, I hard reject anyone saying "ignore the statistics and make decisions based on my spooky stories about the future."
I actually have lost large parts of my physical collection several times, due to theft.
It's really boring hearing "the things that have happened to you would never happen, and you should fear a thing that I claim is really common, even though it's never happened to anyone you've asked."
If it's so frequent, can you name a single album that's been taken down from Amazon without running to a search engine for help?
Dude strawmanning and shit talking all day from you in this thread is pretty pathetic. I've yet to see a single cogent argument from you yet other than 'I disagree with you so you're wrong'.
Those physical copies could have been ripped and stored/copied as many of us did.
You could also lend out and re-sell those physical copies. Stop trying to compare digital to physical. Companies can't just snap their fingers and take away a physical copy I paid for.
You cry about music but this very thread is about people buying and losing access to a huge movie catalog.
The problem is the bait-and-switch. All the really good stuff is behind a second paywall. The movies you really want to watch cost extra money to rent and "more" extra money to "buy." I'm paying for the cake, but then getting charged extra for the icing. It's really starting to irritate me.
Croatian Telekom recently removed certain Cinemax channels from the premium package and are now asking for additional compensation if you'd still like to view them, in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
Imagine someone changing the contract's contents one sided.
They argue they sent an SMS so it's all fine.
Well I don't think so.
That leads me to another case, Daybreak Games Company and Everquest 2.
They run those TLEs aka nostalgia servers every few years. In the past incarnations you could earn certain vouchers by completing "heritage quests", long winded quests which take some group effort to complete and lots of running around and whatnot. With those vouchers you could "buy" weaker version of those heritage items, on live servers (aka non-nostalgia).
They have recently removed the vendors where you can buy those items from, an awful breach of trust and something you have worked hard for simply removed because they felt like it.
> in the literal middle of the 2 year binding contract.
I don't know about Croatia, but usually such a change in service allows you to break the contract on your end without any penalty (as in, end subscription right there and not pay the rest of the 2 years).
It might be hidden in the fine print though and they probably don't want you to know that option exists legally.
Depends on the contract. My cable changed ~10 years ago to stipulate ">200 channels, changing depending on licensing and availability" after first round of national regulator forcing them to allow early cancellation.
Yes, but in the meantime you risk losing your phone line for at least some days (“if you do not pay…”) and that is a risk that nobody wants to assume nowadays (for good reasons).
For those people that wonder why consumers still torrent movies and TV series, here's your reason. And while media companies continue this behaviour, piracy will continue unabated.
Things like subtitles and even audio tracks has to be the laziest mistakes by these companies. How hard can it be to copy all subtitle files to all folder in the CDN? (I know, it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but it can't be much).
If an movie doesn't even have the original audio track, it'll just lead me to unsubscribe faster.
Subtitles have copyright. Therefore, subtitles need to be licensed. Licensing is a shitshow, ergo Netflix does not have a license for EN subtitles in Japan, and does not care enough about its experience to reproduce English subtitles.
You do not own most forms of content/entertainment you consume. Maybe the only exception is what you created yourself and haven't sold the rights of.
This applies to all forms of content/entertainment consumers would like to enjoy in perpetuity. It's a tale as old as money. People will try to find new ways to generate money from creating things (example: NFT) and other people will try to find new ways to circumvent paying for it (bad example: take a screenshot of said NFT).
Most consumers might pay for 'fair' agreements, but don't like it when the agreement is altered. And when the consumer complains about that, the creator/company quotes Darth Vader that they should pray they won't alter it any further.
I do not disagree with both sides. I understand making money is important. I can also understand that stripping away those initial rights of the license is not fair.
The problem with copyright is that it's enforced by governments — who have monopoly on the use of force. NFTs are not enforced by governments, so they're just this funny cringy thing some people engage in, and that some other people, like me, make fun of.
It’s time for a law that gives you the right to keep pirated copies if you own (as in press the buy button, even if it’s an indefinite rental) the original.
Movies, like a lot of music, should just be downloadable DRM-free when you purchase it. This would probably increase my spending on movies and series instead of ripping BluRays or finding the right linux iso.
The law could just be that piracy is not considered "piracy" if you otherwise have a license for the content you're pirating. So it would make it legal to use piracy for format-shifting or working around situations like this one.
I'm not sure if that would apply to torrents, as you are also effectively sharing content with others while downloading.
It would be better that the law would require to make the content available for a download, using DRM / encryption that can work offline without any connections to a DRM server. Maybe using a personal encryption key.
Private copy levy alows private copies of content.
"A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
"Privatkopieringsersättning"
EU version
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
"(38) Member States should be allowed to provide for an exception or limitation to the reproduction right for certain types of reproduction of audio, visual and audio-visual material for private use, accompanied by fair compensation. This may include the introduction or continuation of remuneration schemes to compensate for the prejudice to rightholders."
> Sweden has such a private copy law. You pay a tax fee on USB and other storage media such as hard disks but the fee includes the right to make private copies.
I'm not sure what your view on this law is, but I might add that it's a terrible idea, badly implemented.
For those of us who use hard disks for data backups, our own music, or large image files (I backup scans of large-format film photographs which can be almost 1GB each), the law taxes us unjustly, and also the distribution of the proceeds is inequitable and doesn't benefit artists or creators, but rather the bureaucracies that administer it.
In order to reduce health issues cause by over-consumption of sugary drinks, I propose a levy on aluminium because Coca Cola is commonly distributed in aluminium cans.
The private copy law does not permit you to obtain copies from elsewhere, make copies from a source that was not legally obtained, or to bypass a technical protection measure to make such copies.
Czech republic has such a law! You are allowed to create a personal copy of copyrighted media you purchased. IDK if pirating is "making a copy", but it doesn't really matter in Czech republic since piracy is not prosecuted anyways.
As far as I know, Belgium has such a law that you can take a backup copy of the original. That would have been my argument when being sued: "Those are all backups of the original. I lost all the originals, so good thing I took a backup." ;)
Strictly speaking the backup must be based on what you actually have bought (i.e. if you strip the DRM from your purchase and store that, that's fine). That means you cannot download essentially an identical copy, that's still naughty. I know this is idiotic, but apparently whoever writes laws doesn't know this.
There are also some other subtleties. E.g. I recently stumbled across the fact that in Germany apparently complete books (as opposed to excerpts) are specifically exempted from the right for private copies unless
- you either transcribe them completely manually, or else
- the book has been out of print for at least two years.
This law probably stems from the widespread introduction of photocopiers, but now that e-books are a thing, too, it has the somewhat absurd consequence that whereas it's perfectly legal to copy music I have purchased across my various devices and their backups, technically I'm not allowed to do the same thing for e-books (i.e. for example keeping an e-book both on my computer and my phone and in their respective backups, too).
The blackmail done by a "private rogue lawyers", has a judge signature to authorize the ISP to give my personal information based on the IP that they supposedly got doing the infringement.
This is always done in courts in Bavaria that are very copyright-owners friendly.
Furthermore, around 1 year after I "Lawyered up", I still got a official Court order to show up in court, that's when I decided to fold and pay the 1000€.
I received those letters 2 times.
I have never responded to them.
There was a "Gerichtlicher Mahnbescheid" once which is just [x] denied.
The rogue lawyer continued to harrass me asking why I denied their claim.
I didn't respond to that either.
In the end nothing happened.
They use scare tactics.
That was before the mess the EU created 2-3 years ago with the reforms. So idk what the status is like now.
But ignorance is bliss. The big players do it all the same. They ignore you until they really have to deal with you.
Personally, I think this sort of timed thing (regardless of which law or debt is being collected) should be pro-rated, at least if it is against a human on behalf of a corporation or the government.
If there's a 100 day time limit for the lawyer, and they take 99 days to get back to you, the first 99% of the value should be forfeited (perhaps with like a week or two grace period). Clearly they are not that in need of the money, and professional bureaucracy dealers should not be able to simply drag things out against people who simply wish to live their lives.
Inevitable. If you truly want to own your content, you either need to purchase physical media or visit TPB.
Having expectations that a corporation is going to uphold some prior agreement is a fun joke. Especially, when you’ve already given them your money.
The only way to fix the behavior is to fix the consumer, but most people don’t have the patience to manage terabytes of on-site media in such a way that it can be reliably accessed by mobile devices.
I think we will get there sooner than later. Solid state storage is progressing in capacity pretty swiftly. 100 and 200tb SSDs already exist. They are just super pricey.
Home file servers/media servers would likely become more popular if you could just plug a small low power device into the wall.
Something like this already exists (one/two-bay NASes with HDDs) but it's pastime sysadmin hell to make those work well as a cloud replacement without compromising security in a big way. Someone would have to pour a huge amount of work into making watching a movie on one of those really simple and convenient even while on the go; like, Netflix simple. I have a Synology and it's a long long way from that, I can't even show photos from there on the Apple TV and their cloud features aren't compatible with my carrier's CGNAT, and their app for watching video on tvOS is kinda brittle. All of that's already way past the point most people would have sent the device back. I mean, it's not impossible, but I don't see a declouding on the horizon at all.
And then, where would people get their content from? TPB etc. isn't really a solution for the masses, for obvious reasons.
> I can't even show photos from there on the Apple TV
BUG to apple!
I have an ancient laptop running linux serving usb disks using samba. Kodi works just fine for my mp4 rips of my dvd collection. Kodi works just fine to show photos. Works just fine as a mythtv frontend!
Kodi on a pine64 single board tv box, kodi on a droid smart tv, kodi on any laptop or desktop on the local network of which there are a few.
For the apple tv to view the served content it actually works best to use vlc browsing the share of the smb as served by the pine64 box which is low enough power to just leave on. It's garbage.
The kodi devs are of course far too stupid to make their software that works on everything I've heard of with enough cpu power also work on an appletv - no wait - of course they can. Apple banned them for $reasons. Apparently there is some gutted version of kodi you can pay for in the apple store that probably works (scripting removed, re-skinned, claiming to be original, looks like a pretty shifty move) but I don't vouch for it at all.
Apple are exactly what you know they are. Let's think on that time apple destroyed the record collection of every non-geek you know stored on their ipod with a beautiful "sync". Every non-geek old enough to own an ipod has that story, you can check! The KINGS of user-friendly right there. You can really see why Microsoft want to copy them so badly. "Apple get away with wha..? Ok we can beat that!"
>Someone would have to pour a huge amount of work into making watching a movie on one of those really simple and convenient even while on the go; like, Netflix simple.
It already exists. Plex is excellent. There is also Emby and Jellyfish which are both open source.
The other part of that statement was 'easily accessed by a mobile device'. That's a much bigger problem, since now you're running a server, and you've got to secure a server.
To a point, yes, but we are already well past the point of diminishing returns with resolution. You need a rather large tv to reap any benefits from 4k. I still watch most stuff on my big, 1080p tv and have seen little reason to upgrade.
Even if you trust the contracts, I do not get why you would want to own anything DRMed. That ties you to a platform and a technology at a given time. You may want to move away from this platform and the technology may not be playable in the future.
And the encrypted data (decrypted by said license) shared in a distributed public swarm, crowdsourcing the responsibility to keep it in existence and accessible.
That protocol can be exercised by you to take personal responsibility for your own content, or you can yolo that responsibility onto the network and hope enough other people share your particular interests.
Smart contracts cannot hold secrets, as they are executed by hundreds or thousands of nodes. If your license holds the key and it is on a blockchain, the decryption key is public, alongside the ciphertext.
If this sort of activity continues, I can only see it decreasing the effective value of good ‘purchased’ through these online stores. People will only pay similar prices to physical goods for digital goods if they behave similarly, if they do not, the price must surely come down to reflect this.
This can be easily fixed by exclusivity deals, cancellation of "unsecure" physical copies and the fact that none of modern media display devices even feature physical media drives.
You can't vote with your wallet if they kill all the alternatives with the help of IP law ;)
Most probably that will force most of the people to stick to using more TikTok (or whatever video platform will be popular at a future time) and less feature movies. Which I find a real shame, because I personally love movies, but imo that's the direction things are going.
There are videogame streamers and YouTubers who easily provide over 4 hours of content on a regular basis, mostly for free. It's going to be either making subscriptions as content rich and cheap as possible or hoping to get a renaissance of movie nuts culture.
Stop buying a digital product on a locked ecosystem.
Frankly this is the same as 1984 on the Kindle. Those who have the common sense to steer clear are laughing whilst these companies engage in borderline illegal activities.
Even when the billionaires and gigacorporations own every physical asset on the planet, surely they can still let the little people ‘own’ some digital assets?
Isn’t the ideal to have us all continue our excessive mindless consumption within virtual spaces, maximum profit for minimum environmental cost?
Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion but I do think there is merit in considering new economic models that disrupt current platforms.
Not a new model where access to the media is restricted only to the purchaser - and corporations fight to maintain DRM and inevitably become gatekeepers of popular culture. Instead, a model where creator revenue is not tied to media access. See [1] and [2].
NFTs are just a few bytes in a distributed database, they absolutely do not solve these issues. The PlayStation store would still do content delivery and could simply refuse to do so, NFT or no NFT.
You could do content delivery in a decentralized manner (like, say, through IPFS) but then how do you enforce than only the NFT owners can watch the movie? The database is public, anybody can just look up the NFT and find what URL it points towards. You could "right click" the movie, so to speak.
NFTs are a really, really, really dumb concept, even by cryptocurrency/blockchain standards. Any use of NFTs for right management would require a proprietary, trusted, black-box player to enforce the DRM. If you use a proprietary, trusted, black-box player what's the point of using an NFT in the first place?
I don't think you understood my post. I am not proposing a way to replicate PlayStation store with NFTs - and restrict access to the media files based on who purchases the NFT. I am proposing a new model that does not rely on limiting access in order to fund the production of artistic media.
I suggest you read the two posts in full that I linked, as it might make this a little clearer.
There is no need to hold secrets - the economic model is not based on restricting access to media.
The songs are distributed DRM-free on IPFS which is peer-to-peer[1]. It remains to be seen how well Camp Chaos and its fans are able to host and pin this into the future as the media storage requirements are heavy - but that is an economic rather than technical discussion.
If the songs are publicly distributed DRM-free, then the whole licensing scheme is superfluous. The discussion is about media that is not distributed for free.
The discussion stems from my original post [1] presenting the idea of a new economic model for media that is free - production and distribution isn’t reliant on restricting access to only purchasers.
Oh yeah I just latched onto a portion of your comment that was suitable for my soapboxing, I didn't mean to sound adversarial.
But more generally I don't think there's a good technical solution to this problem. You'll never "own" Iron Man, Star Wars or The Godfather in a true sense, only a license which gives you some rights. Even when you bought physical media you weren't allowed to do many things, such as public viewings for instance. Not because of a technical issue, but a legal one.
I don't think there is a "true sense" of ownership - the term is contextual. You can purchase and "own" an art print, vinyl record, or book even though you don't own the intellectual property rights of that copyrighted material. In the context of blockchains - ownership means having the private key to a public address associated with a token ID.
Camp Chaos and various creative-commons NFT projects are interesting because they generate revenue on the work without having to enforce strict licensing and IP agreements. Users are not buying these tokens to claim "licensing ownership" but "blockchain ownership."
It sounds like you're suggesting using and nft as an access token or proof of purchase.
As the previous person said, even if a platform is a distribution point the content still needs to be hosted somewhere and that costs money for storage and transfer.
Who pays for that?
Studios won't, so then you might think everything would need to be centralised, but then the legal elements would prevent that being created easily, licencing, trust and security would be an issue etc.
Creative content like a film, regardless of who created it, generally gets distributed and adapted for a market at a territorial level with fees being paid to the owner by the local distributor.
Nft is a idealistic idea but too removed from reality to be workable.
I am not suggesting a model where revenue is built on restricting access to media. I will just link to Camp Chaos article again[1] which is free to listen to[2].
You're asking for the complete end to the economic artistic system. Who would impose the end of that system, since corporations will naturally steer toward the most profitable distribution system, which is inconceivable to be what you're proposing unless there is muscled intervention to force everyone to switch to it.
What? This isn’t ending the system - it is proposing a new model that some creators and consumers can use to avoid some of the problems in current model.
DRM is a centralized proprietary thing by definition. It's nonsense to have open distributed NFT database for DRM. Why don't break the DRM if it's open?
I have no opinion for/against NFTs for various use cases, but I will say this:
If you don't understand what something is ("I'm not sure what they are"), then I don't think you can go around telling people what they do/don't solve ("they definitely don't solve this").
We'd be better off sharing opinions about things we do have knowledge about, rather than guessing. And if we do guess, make it clear it's just a guess.
I know how NFTs work, I know how people use them, I don't think it's useful for the things people use it for and I don't know what it might be useful for, though I don't reject the idea it might be useful for something.
NFT is not a donation or swag. It may be closer to a stock option or share in an organization or idea.
None of this is likely to sway massive Hollywood studios. But it may present a new economic model for some independent creators to get paid directly by consumers and fans to produce and distribute work - musicians, artists, filmmakers. See Camp Chaos example. Another example: the filmmakers behind sci-fi film Prospect (2018 - budget of $4M) are now exploring NFT and web3 models for their next production, we will see how successful it is when or if it is finished in a couple years.
> It may be closer to a stock option or share in an organization or idea.
It has nothing in common with either of those. It is am ownable token with some data, usually a URL, attached
It it doesn't give you any sort of ownership of the underlying work unless actual legal contracts, licenses, etc, exist to grant those rights to the holder. It absolutely is nothing at all like owning a stock option, share or idea.
So a NTF would not have allowed you to do anything here. Sony would still be required to remove movies from the URLs your NTFs point to and you would be the proud owner of worthless NFTs.
The needed change is legal, not technical. We need laws that protect consumers.
> Another commenter mentioned “NFT” and got downvoted to oblivion
It’s rather extreme; mention anything cryptocurrency related in a not negative way, and it gets downvoted. Making a neutral observation tends to be neutral.
Because as it was presented it solved the wrong problem: "how to prove you purchased the movie". But the problem is: the vendor doesn't dispute your purchase, but they define that purchase as being of an arbitarily revocable access right. So your NFT proves for all time that you own the equivalent of a broken link - how exactly does this help?
There is a unique downside to NFTs, I just realised.
In order for it to mean anything, the NFT blockchain cannot be managed by just one server. And further, not by the entity which sold you the thing.
So we need maybe all streaming services to each have multiple blockchain servers, all supporting the same chain. Then we know one org cannot play games (rollback the chain, try to take back purchases).
We'd need all studios/media producers to agree that this meant "sold" too.
And lastly, we'd need to separate "sold" fees from "streaming" fees, so one could buy, but streaming services could get paid for front end support/platform/ongoing streaming costs.
And naturally, in this world, you could download any copy of this media.. and store locally, and forgo streaming costs.
But for all of that to work, you'd need something else. Laws stating that, basically, if the NFT servers were ever discontinued, a static copy would be provided, and all would gave ownership validated forever ... or the content creator would give up all copyright on the media.
In other words, you sell without physical media, you must use a blockchain, and once you do that you must always provide servers to verify, or you lose all copyright.
That last bit is important. It puts the burden on the content creator. Sell digitally, and you must make sure it's a real sale, or else.
Anyhow, my point in all of this is the immense downside.
A public copy of everything you watch, listen, read, tied to your public ID.
There is no other reality. Schemes of non-ID based authentication are blather, because to truly claim ownership, your identity must be known. And even if some method to separate ID from chain ownership are hatched, it a hack a day world, your ID->chain ID will get out.
There is no anonymity in this.
Which means everything you watch, read, view, would be public knowledge. The chain, by its very nature, must be viewable by everyone, all the time.
Right now, this info is very dispersed, spread over providers and sellers. And if you have any doubt of the value of this information, to profilers, the government, note that post 9/11, there was an immense fever raised by librarians, for the US government wanted a record of all books to be kept, and who checked them out.
So any NFT/chain plan, means all your ownership data, ready to be used by the government for profiling you, by banks to profile you to determine risk, by political opponents to discredit you, and more.
Content producers get to decide the economic model. They effectively have a monopoly on content people want to watch. And they've decided that Widevine/PlayReady/FairPlay DRM is what's required. And all of those require by design an online server to enable access to the media.
All of those services will one day deprecate/retire their servers, and all paid content downloaded to your devices today will become unplayable. Your granddaughter won't be able to watch any films she finds on your old iPad she finds in the attic 100 years from now.
Unless you can convince studio execs that they will earn more money with your new economic model, it's going nowhere.
> Content producers get to decide the economic model.
Only insofar as we keep paying them, and ceding control of our media to them. The Camp Chaos example has no content producers dictating an economic model - because consumers and fans are paying the artists directly.
The model for media already transitioned from the consumer owning the content (CDs, DVDs,...) to the consumer having a permission to consume the content.
The industry deliberately drove this transition so they can earn from each consumption and break the reselling-market.
The fact that they also wanted to DIRECTLY replace the CD/DVD by showing a "Buy Movie" button, but actually using the same licensing model, the same infrastructure and the same utterly careless approach on content-management:
For this we don't need a new economic model. The industry WANTED this model, and executed it without the connected responsibilities.
A court should have already found this practice to be illegal years ago, either the careless handling of sold property, or the explicitly misleading sales of VOD with the claim that the customer will actually OWN a copy of the content.
I don't see a technical problem that if the content I purchased at some point is no longer economic for the seller to host on his platform, that he is required to allow me to download it or send me a USB-stick with the content...
> the content I purchased [...] is required to allow me to download it
This would work if laws mandate that media like movies, eBooks, music must be downloadable DRM-free by purchasers, which will probably never happen as the entire industry is built against peer-to-peer file sharing and media piracy.
The industry likes this model but the consumers do not. They like the convenience of having all their media in a single nice UX like Netflix, PlayStation store, or Spotify. They do not like that profits are usually directed away from creators, and that "ownership" in these stores is more like temporary licensing of DRM content. This is where a new economic model could be introduced to fund some media production and distribution - for those creators and consumers willing to embrace it.
I don't think the law needs to mandate DRM-free purchases at all.
If a company wants to operate a model where they sell you something but they will store/"maintain" it for you to use at any time, they are free to do so under the conditions that they define.
But if they decide at one point that it's no longer economic for them to store/"maintain" your goods, they should be required to return them to you.
Right now, they simply inform you that the goods you purchased are no longer available to you as it no longer fits their interest to maintain them. And that's something that should be legally challenged in my opinion.
There's no model here. A band sold merch. If they had sold a branded beanie baby during beanie baby mania (and had been a band that appeals to suburban mothers), the same thing would have happened.
So how long will this mania last? They were sold during a bear market and at one of the lowest points of NFT market volume, but still did pretty well. If NFTs continue to be seen as tulips or beanie babies* for the next several years, and wildly outperform regular band merch sold through a distributor, maybe it’s worth considering as a new model for artists and creators. If NFTs crash to zero next month and artists stop earning from them, then I will agree with you.
* by you, I should add. Others see it as a digital object worth owning that is not tied to a single speculative bubble.
In case somebody forgot: you never purchase a digital copy, you only purchase a license to exclusively watch a movie anytime you like using the vendors consumer platform. Anyone ever read the license agreements when "purchasing a movie" online?
This is the reason I do not buy movies any longer; 1 streaming account on Netflix is enough for me, I do not care about anything else anymore. May they rot in consumer hell.
Streaming services have no pretense of ownership. You can watch whatever they happen to have as long as you keep paying.
When you buy a title on Amazon, Apple, etc., the digital services are selling you on "ownership". In theory, this will be in your account forever (without any money changing hands after the initial transaction). The reality is obviously not so simple.
When Steam stops selling a game because of licensing issues and you bought it before, you still have it in your library and can download it from their servers. How and why is selling movies more complicated?
One reason I think steam has done as well as they have is that they have not fucked up(yet).
Every once in a while I think a little too much about how most of my games only run due to the benevolence of a company, and I start researching what it would take to run without steam. but in the end, steam is is such a quality of life improvement that I accept their solid track record of not fucking up and keep buying games there.
I think the proper paranoid way to buy games on steam would be to use a separate account for each one. then you could treat them as a sellable item.... which would be such a huge pain in the neck their would be no point of using steam in the first point(except, perhaps that it is the only place the game is sold.)
Its trivial to bypass any region locking, reverse any PAL speedup, and upscale during playback - and the sound quality is already generally excellent. Unlike several generations of hard drives which I've lost completely, all of the DVDs I've ever owned still work just fine.
If space is a concern, buy some file binders and some paper disc sleeves and store your discs and covers in them.
If convenience is a concern, fair enough - but I find the experience of going to thrift shops and markets to find gems to be a fun and cheap hobby.
I have nothing against installing firmware cracks/torrenting replacements. I'm just stating that games on physical media are the only thing that it's relatively safe to pay Sony for.
With the Playstation Plus changes they have made, they are making Microsoft Game Pass look better and better.
They keep acting like they have a massively dominant position instead of having a competitor with deeper pockets who is willing to take losses to undercut them in close proximity
Buying digital licences is for suckers. Piracy is forever, plus you learn practical skills like redundant data storage and offsite backup methodologies.
Seriously, the 'value' related criticisms of cryptocurrencies have come true, but for digital licensing.
This has happened a few times (e.g Deadpool), in those cases the game has still remained available for users who had already purchased it, just unavailable for new purchases.
Valve rarely has to pull games in this case, the agreements they have with developers seem to protect them. I can't remember the last time a game was removed from people's Steam libraries.
However, developers do have the ability to replace games in your library, so often an original game will be replaced with a low-quality remaster.
I suspect this won't happen, and that Valve have contingencies in contracts to ensure this never happens. You might no longer get updates to a game, but that would likely be it.
Why? How is this different to films?
Games are what Steam does. Films are not really what the Playstation Store does. Sure you can buy them, but who does? Not enough to cause irreparable reputational damage would be my guess. Also, the Playstation Store has far less negotiating power with film distributors than Valve/Steam does with game publishers, so the contract terms aren't likely to include contingencies for this sort of situation.
It's more that no supplier can credibly claim that they can deliver it. If there's a rights dispute about a piece of underlying code for example, the terms can say what they like but they can't override it not being that entity's code to licence.
Valve certainly try and insert a presumption they can leave the title up, but it's not a given, and there's also not much to stop a developer from "updating" the title to a barely working basic binary.
That's also a risk with most other purchases, including purchases of physical goods. If the seller got the goods from an entity that did not have the right to transfer ownership or possession of that good, then the seller is not going to be able to transfer legal ownership or possession to you.
That's not what is going on in most of these cases though. In most of these cases the entity that provided the digital goods to the seller did have the rights to do so, but those rights weren't perpetual, so the seller could not sell the consumer perpetual rights.
Valve could protect against that by dealing only with developers who do have the ability to transfer perpetual licenses and requiring them to do so in their contracts. That wouldn't completely eliminate the risk because the developer might be mistaken or even lying but it could greatly reduce it if they are careful about choosing developers.
NFTs don't let you include the movie itself as a payload, so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system. In this case, there is no disagreement that the consumer purchased the movie, just a refusal to honor that purchase. An NFT that said you bought a movie is meaningless if the system streaming the movie to you to stops honoring it. It's no different than what is happening here.
> so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system.
Yes, but that's exactly what you don't get with a central database. There is no way to use your Sony-database-entry to access the movie from whoever holds the rights right now. Companies also go out of business or change plans, so that central database will cease to exist in the future anyway.
With an NFTs you have a proof of ownership. You still would need a service to honor your NFT token, but NFT usage would be the very thing that makes those services possible to exist in the first place.
We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services. With movies that doesn't work, as companies don't even give you a raw file of a movie, but they might be willing giving you NFTs, as those don't circumvent the DRM measures they have in place.
Either way, NFT are of course only a small piece of the puzzle here, there is a lot of supporting infrastructure that would need to be build and that nobody is building right now. And given the energy usage and cost of blockchains, it's not really usable for your $3 movie anyway. So it's not a workable solution at the moment. But even with all it's faults, it's still the closest thing to a possible solution for digital ownership that we have.
> We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services.
In the early 2010s or so, companies like Amazon, Google Play Music, etc briefly offered the ability to scan your MP3 collection to instantly get access to your music via their library as a way to suck you into your ecosystem.
It was neat, but all of these services have since switched off because it was just a means to get you hooked on their platform. It all went away because there was no on-going business case to support it . Now all that remains are a few scattered "digital locker" services where you are just streaming your own files back to yourself instead of using them to unlock a music library. Otherwise, you are locked into replacement streaming platforms with the same limitations as before.
The point is that NFTs solve a problem that already has other solutions - keeping track of who paid for something is relatively easy. The hard part is actually providing the product that was purchased in perpetuity. NFTs don't yet have an answer to the harder part of the problem that is profitable for a business.
The beauty of NFTs is that that doesn't matter. You just go to another provider that still accepts your NFTs. NFTs are a proof of ownership, not a right for getting free downloads from Sony forever.
The only thing you have to be careful about is what ownership the NFT grands you in the first place. An NFT to a public link to a monkey picture is of courses quite useless, just as an NFT for items in MMORPG that will stop functioning when the servers are switched off. But with static data like books, movies or single-player games, you can very much make an NFT that gives you the rights to that digital thing.
"Yeah, we can see that you paid someone else for this content, so we'll pay the bandwidth and any licensing fees needed for you to stream/download it from us.".
You pay for the bandwidth, either directly via a subscription fee to the service (Prime, iCloud, etc.) or indirectly by using the service, e.g. Steam lets you import CD-keys for free too, since they value you more as customer than they care about the money lost for downloading games for free.
Also there would be no licensing fees. People paid those when they bought the games. Companies providing those games after an NFT-check would just be a digital storage lockers, not a movie/game/book seller. Content companies don't get to double dip:
The only reason why they get away with that right now is because there is no concept of "digital ownership". Everything in that space operates in a legal gray area. NFTs have the potential to change that and put digital goods an a solid legal ground, as most of the same rules we have for physical goods could be applied to digital ones.
HN hates NFTs because of 'self evident' statements like this, it's seen as little more than micro-hype statements to up the value of something seen as useless.
NFTs do not solve this problem, the content has been removed. If you feel they do, feel free to explain how it would have helped in this situation.
Only in theory - multiple streaming services would have to be licensed rights to the movie, so that if PlayStation revoked your right to watch it, you could use the NFT in another service like Netflix. This is unlikely to happen with big Hollywood movies cause of their tight IP laws.
NFT could be applied to movies in new ways[1], but probably not in the way of limiting access to the file.
Verifying ownership is kinda useless when the distributor no longer distributes, though.
You can prove you own a copy. Congrats. So can everyone else with a receipt. However, that doesn't somehow coerce Sony into continuing to provide access.
Libraries exist. You don't need Sony when you can proof ownership. Getting a hold of a movie has never been the problem, redistributing it legally is and NFTs make that possible, even without Sony's approval.
This is part of why distribution platforms all have their own cut. You don't own a copy of the movie. You own a copy of a _specific_ movie that was carried by Sony's streaming service and not a library.
If the distributor isn't distributing, then there's no legal way to get it. And NFTs don't contain the item purchased. It changes exactly nothing about the situation.
NFT provide you with a transferable proof of ownership. That's a pretty ginormous piece of the puzzle that is missing right now when it comes to digital content. How to download a copy is quite a trivial problem by comparison.
Unlike a normal receipt, a well built NFT is virtually unforgeable and uncloneable, even by the receipt-issuing entity.
This changes the trust model significantly, so that different legal principles can be applied. So the download access from the "legally acceptable archive for proven owners" could be automatic, fast and secure, without depending on a single company (eg Visa or Sony) to uphold their side in perpetuity, and allowing multiple download services to be legally in the clear, because they are enforcing contractually agreed checks.
No human in the loop to check your receipt (which costs), cheap automatic fast and secure service, no single company database that has to be trusted to authorise your access once you have obtained the receipt, and (if the rules are so designed) no further access once you have settled a transfer to another person.
For technical reasons that automation can distributed so that it is highly available, decentralised so that download and effective ownership is not managed by one company that might backpedal. And because of the changed legal relationship (ie no court would consider it piracy if legit terms are agreed in the contract) it could, potentially, be legally safe to operate high quality service.
There would still be risk of fraud (you transfer your receipt because someone tricked you), and some people will be disappointed m that DRM would be technically possible even when decntralised (the guaranteed access might be access to something you can stream but not save).
I am not particularly a crypto enthusiast (despite working in the field, currently zk-EVM if anyone's interested) but I think this idea of NFT-guaranteed access to data which is authorised by conventional consumer contracts has a lot going for it. It would solve the Sony problem.
It solves what part of Sony saying they are aware that people have bought things, but that they will no longer distribute those things?
There is no archive where you get to download the things. Sony is the sole distributor of the purchase. They've said they will no longer provide access. Fin. End of story.
> It solves what part of Sony saying they are aware that people have bought things, but that they will no longer distribute those things?
Yes, in the model I and others have described.
> There is no archive where you get to download the things
Currently there is not. The idea is that in future, consumer contracts may adopt terms that say if a person has a suitable kind of proof of purchase (such as an uncloneable NFT) then "the storage net" (third party services) may provide the purchased file or stream under that entitlement. Those services would be "legal" rather than "pirate" services because the contract permits them.
By itself that doesn't solve the current Sony problem: Sony doesn't offer those terms of purchase at the point of sale.
But if the technology becomes common and easy to the point of becoming a "new normal" consumer expectation, it will increase the pressure on companies who offer "purchase" and "rent" buttons to associate "purchase" with "you are purchasing the right to 'have' this item via the storage net" contractual terms. Or, if they don't, to prominently display a notice that you are not being offered a perpetual access right and it may be rescinded later without notice or refund - I could imagine that notice making its way into consumer law eventually, if its absence is found to be seriously misleading consumers without a good reason.
It's because it will become possible and well known to be able to offer perpetual access to things like movies "as if" an actual file or physical object had been transferred, even while still complying with upstream studio's licensing and region locking demands that are designed to ensure most people pay, that some companies may start to use this approach profitably, and then cultural expectations may follow so that other companies have to do the same.
In a sense, the artificial scarcity of NFTs may help bridge the tension between file producers' desire to control access to pressure most people into paying, and consumers' desire that when you've "purchased" something it behaves a bit more like a physical object in your possession.
So it helps, but only in an idealistic world where data centres and the siloing of data no longer exist as a concept. It's precipitated on major changes to how business and regulation works, happening. That the current competitive advantage that is ruthlessly enforced by all companies becomes regulated out of existence. Something that cannot happen in the current environment. In short - it requires naivety to think that it _might_ help in the future.
The lack of enforcement for digital goods is largely the result of there being no technology to proof ownership in a digital world. Hard to force companies to adopt a thing that doesn't exist. That's exactly the hole that NFT could fill.
> The lack of enforcement for digital goods is largely the result of there being no technology to proof ownership in a digital world. Hard to force companies to adopt a thing that doesn't exist. That's exactly the hole that NFT could fill.
The real world actually doesn't run with needs so hard and firm. A stat dec is nothing more than a signed sheet, and can "prove" any statement in a court of law. This isn't a case of the technology lacking in proving ownership. We already have all of that, legally speaking.
The reason this idealistic world does not exist, is simply because the distributors do not wish it to. In digital distribution, you don't distribute an existing item, you copy it. Thus, first sale which transfers something, cannot be enforced. They control distribution, they prevent undue proliferation.
Proving that you own something is not the problem at hand. DRM is not integrated into all of these platforms to prove ownership of an item. They are to prevent someone else becoming the distributor.
Which means that... Coming all the way back to square one... When the distributor doesn't distribute... You can't do anything. Sony have already acknowledged that they are cutting off owners. They are aware of ownership. NFTs don't add or take from that, they serve to fill a purpose that is already filled. Owners are acknowledged. Owners access is being removed.
> The reason this idealistic world does not exist, is simply because the distributors do not wish it to.
Companies can only do what the laws allows them to do, and as I already linked, laws exists to prevent companies from double-dipping when it comes to physical IP goods. Once the thing is sold, it's out of their control and people can resell it as much as they want. Apply the same principles to digital goods and the problem is solved. But to do so you need a technical framework for digital good ownership to work in a similar fashion to physical goods, which NFTs could do.
> Sony have already acknowledged that they are cutting off owners. They are aware of ownership.
It's not "ownership" when Sony has full and exclusive controller over it and can terminate it at any time for whatever reason they chose. That's clear violation of First-sale doctrine. Especially since they love to pretend that you "Buy" the things in their digital stores, without clearly labeling that it's actually a "Rent for an arbitrary and limited time".
> When the distributor doesn't distribute... You can't do anything.
Piracy exists. Companies don't have to play nice to allow any of this, the law just needs to scale back a little in protecting them.
NFTs are transferable and service-independent. Meaning you can trade used digital media and they will continue working even when Sony goes out of business, just like physical media would. Another big advantage is that they are generic, they are just abstract "ownership", you can use them for books, games, monkey pictures or concert tickets. Any normal commercial alternative would almost certainly be locked to a specific type of media and to a set of companies, along with strict rules to follow, if they allow any outsiders to participate at all. NFTs are an open system where everybody can build something with them.
That said, this is all very theoretical. Blockchain needs to get fast and cheap before any of this makes sense.
Where do you stash your receipts? Somewhere you'll find them in two years time when challenged to prove you paid for something? Think that solution scales through the entirety of society?
Sony could make a blockchain/NFT solution to their problem and everyone would be happy - it'd be future-proof, licenses would be in-perpetuity, and nobody would have to pay much for the effort. Heck, it'd even give pirates a way to become legitimate service providers.
Sony et al., are not doing this, because of antiquated business ideas that serve more as dark patterns than anything else.
>It does when I need to get a repair for something I bought that is still under warranty.
This simply doesn't scale through the entirety of society, because its only relevant to you and your relationship with the content provider.
If I'm being challenged on the ownership of movies on my personal laptop - having a publicly accessible register of my purchase of those movies is entirely more useful to me - and society at large - than the "private receipts stashed in a drawer" model you propose is superior to NFT's.
>Also: does keeping a cryptographic key safe scale through the entirety of society?
Yes. I can depend on it if I need to defend myself against claims of piracy and theft of intellectual property, no matter where I am in the world.. Having a globally-accessible register of my licenses is quite a bit more useful than if those receipts are stashed in a paper file somewhere remote.
> the "private receipts stashed in a drawer" model you propose is superior to NFT's.
I've never said it's "superior". I simply mean it's good enough. I should probably have been more clear on that.
Also:
> This [physical/digital receipt] simply doesn't scale through the entirety of society, because its only relevant to you and your relationship with the content provider.
But then
> I can depend on it [NFT/public ledger] if I need to defend myself against claims of piracy and theft of intellectual property, no matter where I am in the world
Sorry but I find this contradictory. Can you please explain why the receipt is only relevant me and the content provider but a public ledger isn't? You mean "relevant" as in "there are more actors that can give a 'truth value' to the transaction"?
The paper receipt is in your drawer somewhere, you cannot provide it when you're crossing a border and need to convince the security thug that you do in fact own all those movies.
An NFT, on the other hand, can be looked up by anyone, anywhere.
I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. The NFT receipt solves a lot of problems that a paper receipt simply makes worse.
There's nothing hard to understand. I'm simply wondering whether these use cases ("crossing a border and need to convince the security thug that you do in fact own all those movies") are really so pressing AND don't depend on other problems being solved first.
It's already been brought up by many others, but proof of purchase is not the issue here, right? It's the right to access the content. NFTs don't force Sony to give you your content if they're not legally obliged to.
How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.
Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?
Please don't take HN threads into hellish generic flamewars. We've been through this a thousand times already. Pouring out a whole bunch more gasoline and setting it on fire is exactly what you should not be doing here. We want curious conversation.
Personal attack is also completely off limits, and you did it more than once in this thread. No more of this, please.
Edit: it turns out that you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly that I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. Among other things, that means no more comments remotely like these:
I can't believe I'm going to defend NFTs, but ... _if_ copyright law were satisfied that you aren't infringing if you purchased perpetual access to a copy--digital or otherwise--then "a glorified receipt" could be all that was needed _if_ the system honoured users with a right to access, on any system on which it was available, for cost, a work that has been legally purchased.
In USA, I can't see why proof of purchase and TPB wouldn't be enough. Platform issues don't negate the rights you purchased.
When you buy stuff on these digital stores, you agree to pay for an indefinite license to the content. So it can be pulled at any time.
Why would these stores use NFTs attached to ownership licenses when they could just reword their ToS to include ownership. They don’t want to sell ownership to begin with so they would never use NFTs either.
As usual, Crypto shills push these extremely complicated technical solutions to problems which have very simple economic/legal solutions. The problem here is that companies are not selling ownership. NFTs do nothing for this because companies are still not selling ownership.
You could even have the content shared over public BitTorrent networks, encrypted with a symmetric key and then store a personalised asymmetric decryption key (the symmetric key encrypted using the owner wallets public key, ensuring only the current owner can derive it from the public NFT data) in the NFT. You would re-compute this asymmetric key for the new owner during the TransferNFT function and store it in the contract.
Yeah, the symmetric key would probably leak quickly, and the content decrypted and shared, the point here is to make the system so convenient and simple that it discourages piracy, which you can never fully beat anyway.
Yugalabs[0] assign copyright license to whoever owns the NFT on the chain forever.
So if someone mints a NFT, they get a perpetual license to use it however they like. The downside is if they lose the NFT for any reason such as theft, they lose the license as well.
Other NFT projects of yugalabs store data on chain or use a separate storage chain built for permanence. This basically means they cannot take the content down once they have uploaded it and attached it to a NFT.
However this doesn't solve anything unless corporations are forced to accept it as the only way to sell content.
One big problem it may solve for corporations is uniqueness and validation of all license in existence through a ledger. If a company sells their content exclusively via NFT, they can take advantage of immutable receipt system and built in programming capabilities to embed royalties on transfer. This would make it hard for people to sell their copies without giving companies a cut. Legally, that is. Nothing stops them from ripping off a copy and selling it but it would be easy to prove it is invalid and enforce via legal system.
0] Yugalabs is a big NFT IP company valued at 4 billion. They are behind monkey jpegs which are called BAYC.
And I want to know what drives a person like you to post toxic comments like this.
Why not just say "An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with a regular receipt." without the rude and spiteful attitude?
This can't be real. It reads like a joke. Something users purchased can no longer be accessed? I think that's the definition of stealing.
Good thing we still have torrents.
FYI: Some torrent search engines are blocked by ISPs in Europe, at the DNS level; this is easily circumvented with a VPN, but it's also easy to bypass using DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox [0].
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https