And you wonder why people pirate ?
You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't
Remember when you decided to buy, rather than rent, that movie online? We have some bad news for you – you didn't. Biologist Anders Gonçalves da Silva was surprised this week to find three movies he had purchased through iTunes simply disappeared one day from his library. So he contacted Apple to find out what had happened. …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 22:13 GMT Oh Homer
Do the right thing
I don't exactly consider myself a career criminal or a cheapskate - I spend vast amounts on tech - but at the end of the day when the industry at large is screwing you, it's hard to have any qualms about screwing it back.
So my attitude is that, as far as I'm concerned, I'll only pay for Content® (love how they capitalise that, BTW) that I feel really deserves it, and "pirate" everything else, basically on a try-before-I-buy basis.
Let's be honest, 99% of the Content® out there is utter garbage anyway, entirely unworthy of your hard-earned readies, and even the remaining 1% is grossly overvalued IMO.
But no matter what I buy or how I obtain it, I always make sure I have a DRM-free local copy to keep and use forever, and frankly to hell with anyone who objects to that. It's hard to have any sympathy for a bunch of billionaire con artists who rip you off with bait-and-switch and double - nay multiple - dipping scams, where they gleefully take your money over and over again for exactly the same Content®, but leave you holding a big bag o' nothing.
Under the circumstance, my conscience is clear.
I look forward to the day that the likes of the Federation Against Copyright Theft add these bait-and-switch Content® stories to its propaganda material - you know, for balance.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 07:07 GMT Dave K
Re: Do the right thing
Have to admit to doing the same. New games? I'll often pirate a copy initially to see what I think. Is the game enjoyable, available with no DRM (ideally) or at least none-intrusive DRM? Does it allow me to skip those infuriating into logos after the first run? Does it have a proper save-game system (no god-awful "Checkpoint only" system) If so, I will pull out my wallet and will buy a copy to support the developer.
Of course, if it is only available with some draconian always-online DRM crap, forces a dozen unskippable into logos down your throat every time you launch it and has a lazy and console-derived Checkpoint system, I'll usually keep my money in my pocket and will send the game to Davy-Jones locker courtesy of the Uninstall option.
The ball is in the developers court here. If you make a good game and do your best to make an enjoyable experience for the gamer, I will reward you by buying your game. If however you make every possible attempt to piss off and irritate your customers, I'll vote with my feet.
Unfortunately, finding out how the dev had approached the game does necessitate trying the game first, and it's amazing how few demos exist these days...
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Thursday 13th September 2018 08:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Do the right thing
I generally try to pay for content where I can, including a voluntary subscription to the digital version of a newspaper I read. As someone opposed to constant tracking and ads, I think it's important.
I also try to go outside the normal tech titans where possible. So when I first started streaming movies I signed up to Blinkbox, which I believe was owned by Tesco. I 'bought' access to films rather than pirated them. Tesco sell to TalkTalk.
Then I go on holiday and find that the local version films I've downloaded 'expire' and I can't stream from another country because the movie studios expect me to pay again, depending on where I am.
Then TalkTalk, recently, decided to sell to Rakuten. My account was, apparently, sold along with it. Good news they said, most of the content you 'bought' will be available on that service. All I had to do was agree to the transfer, sign up to the new terms and conditions and they'll tell me which content is available and which isn't. I email to say this is unacceptable and I want to know what content will be available and what won't be - since I 'bought' it all, will they be sending me a DVD of the stuff I can't watch? 'Of course not', they said 'now f off'.
I used to spend maybe £10 -30 a month on films but I won't be paying for those films again, nor will I be wasting my money on new ones except on DVD, which I will rip and copy to my heart's content.
I've also cancelled my digital subscription on the basis that the tracking and ads aren't turned off if I pay, meaning the paper expects me to pay twice. It is Noscript all the way.
If the content providers won't let me pay to buy their content, I'm not going to give the slightest care to people who don't pay.
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Friday 14th September 2018 18:18 GMT pjrichert
Re: Do the right thing
Not an apt analogy, the more apt one would be, You're shown all the cars on the lot, and told that you can keep driving them till they take them away, or simply take one home to keep. If you just go to the lot to keep getting your car, but never take it home, can't control when they just pack them all up one day.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 19:37 GMT billdehaan
Re: Obligatory xkcd
And the equally obligatory Oatmeal:
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Thursday 13th September 2018 07:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: wonder why people pirate ?
>More like, most people wonder who the real pirates are.
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 20:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
not yours
i seem to recall - i'll have to read all those terms again - that even purchased discs dont give you the right...all you own is the plastic disc - the right to actually watch that movie can be revoked - the DRM in BluRay can be revoked (eg key rejected) - tricks that cant be done with non connected VHS players - so get porting to analogue forms ASAP! ;-)
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 23:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: not yours
DRM in blurays and HCP in HDMI thanks to Sony....us tin foil hat wearers have been screaming for years about the further control the copyright cartels have been forcing on people along with their brought politicians, I mean lobbying governments to get laws changed throughout the world.
As a previous poster said, people pirate and don't feel one bit of remorse. They can make claims about all the people involved in production going hungry while laughing at the all the tax saved because their Hollywood accounting says they made no profit.
The same licencing and DRM problem that stops games working when companies go bust or stop supplying the server needed for the game to run.
It's time everyone stopped giving the media companies money by boycotting watching their movies on any platform or at the cinema. Hurting their pocket is the only way they way stop screwing people and not caring one bit
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Thursday 13th September 2018 01:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: not yours
Having a legitimate disk copy of a given movie would seem to be a pretty good license to freely download a working copy from the Internet, in the event that the rights holder somehow revoked the functionality of the physical disk.
It would certainly be a case of go ahead, and if they argue the point then 'see you in court'.
The less likely that this approach is considered to be acceptable, then the more likely that you live in a country where the supremacy of common law has been replaced with lobbyists. Which would be "sad".
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Thursday 13th September 2018 02:23 GMT veti
Re: not yours
Having a legitimate disk copy of a given movie would seem to be a pretty good license to freely download a working copy from the Internet, in the event that the rights holder somehow revoked the functionality of the physical disk.
You're not a lawyer, are you?
You can certainly argue that having a legit disc copy gives you the right to do whatever you like with that disc, within reason - including, for instance, putting it into any kind of disc reader of your choice. But to claim that it gives you the right to make another copy of whatever work happens to be on that disc - is pretty much the opposite of how copyright works.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 04:49 GMT Grikath
Re: not yours
Actually, at least here in Europe, you can legally make copies for private use.....
Not that the copyright hounds like that law and try everything they can to erode that right, or try and make you believe you're having kittens for breakfast if you dare to...
But yes, you can, at least here in Flatland.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 08:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: not yours
"I just downloaded a very very very very long number your Honour. It just so happens, it was extremely similar to the one on that bluray.
Oh, and I amended a 4 to the end of that very very very very long number. Who would have thought those 2 numbers translated exactly to The Last Jedi!"
"To prison with you, for 1000 years for watching that movie!"
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Thursday 13th September 2018 08:38 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: not yours
It's not quite an absolute right though - it's as long as you don't circumvent any copy-protection technology in doing so.
That's where it starts to get tricky but at least in Germany you can. But basically, as long as you're not distributing, the point is moot.
And, again, the market is moving on with Netflix's streaming model proving remarkably successful, and more worringly for the copyright owners, its massive move into content creation.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 21:15 GMT xanda
Re: not yours
"It's not quite an absolute right though - it's as long as you don't circumvent any copy-protection technology in doing so."
Yeah it is. Granted there may not be a statute on the books that codifies this, but the general principle is thus: you bought it, you own it and therefore you have the right to protect it. This is a time honoured principle of western democracies.
That makes circumventing the copy protection for content you already own no more criminal than locking your front door at night...
To our knowledge though this has never been tested in court. This is probably because it falls into the same grey wilderness as all those EULAs for software i.e. the small print may say one thing but its interpretation by the judiciary is quite another; whoever is first to argue the point (from the likes of the big bad studios) will likely get egg on their face.
And rightly so...
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Thursday 13th September 2018 08:23 GMT Mage
Re: not yours
Also DO NOT download direct to DRM enabled devices. DRM actually is contrary to the principle of copyright and doesn't stop commercial pirates.
Buy discs.
If getting eBooks, buy from Smashwords (legal and no DRM and all devices), or if Amazon, NEVER direct to Kindle or Kindle App. Select Transfer via USB and download to Mac, Windows or Linux. Make backups. Remove DRM if you are outside USA.
Do not EVER rely on Cloud storage.
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Friday 14th September 2018 16:53 GMT Graham 32
Re: not yours
> Actually, at least here in Europe, you can legally make copies for private use.....
Not in the UK. We did have a "fair use" style law introduced a few years ago but it was overturned on some technicality. I doubt it let you copy anything with copy protection like DVDs, but you could legally rip your CDs.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 18:21 GMT kain preacher
Re: not yours
"You can certainly argue that having a legit disc copy gives you the right to do whatever you like with that disc, within reason - including, for instance, putting it into any kind of disc reader of your choice. But to claim that it gives you the right to make another copy of whatever work happens to be on that disc - is pretty much the opposite of how copyright works."
Veti in the US you have the right to make up a back up copy. section 117 of the Copyright Act.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 21:05 GMT xanda
Re: not yours
"...But to claim that it gives you the right to make another copy of whatever work happens to be on that disc - is pretty much the opposite of how copyright works."
How so?
Or rather: if an owner of physical media loses that media and its associated backups accidentally e.g. tidal wave, volcano eruption and the like, then why shouldn't they be at liberty to download what they can of it?
Or even if the owner still has the original media intact, downloading it again from the interwebs is hardly copyright theft.
After all, it's not like they haven't paid (enough) already...
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Thursday 13th September 2018 22:23 GMT Oh Homer
Re: "BluRay player is not connected to the Internet"
The Blu-Ray standard mandates that players must support key revocation from disc, and new movies not only add new keys but revoke old ones ... automatically and without recourse. So even if your machine never connects to the internet, you can lose the ability to play older titles, unless you avoid ever playing any new titles.
A safer bet is to always rip your Blu-Rays with something like AnyDVD HD, then store the rips on a media server like Kodi, thus avoiding the whole DRM debacle altogether.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 14:21 GMT RobThBay
Re: not yours
That's happened to me.
I've got a blu-ray box set of the original Planet of The Apes movies that became unviewable after I updated the firmware on my blu-ray player.
It was the only movie in my collection that was affected. I didn't update the firmware in our other blu-ray player and the movies are still viewable on that unit.
My Toshiba laptop that has an internal blu-ray won't play any blu-ray movies anymore either.
DRM is a disaster.
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 20:22 GMT David 132
File sizes
"A DVD quality movie will typically run to around 4GB, and a Blu-ray movie to 7 or 8GB..."
You're using the wrong codecs then. DVD-quality local rips^H^H^H^Hcopies are around 700MB, and 1080p quality runs around 2-4GB.
Although a few extra bytes are taken up by having ".x265.BDRip-YIFY.EngSubs" and suchlike appended to the filename.
...Or so I've heard.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 17:26 GMT J. Cook
Re: File sizes
Word of advice: use a pre-paid visa/mastercard/etc. when purchasing MakeMKV; I suspect that their payment processor might have gotten loose with card numbers, as about a month after I purchased it, there was a fradulent charge on that card I used to purchase my copy with.
Otherwise, it's a fantastic application for ripping Blu-rays.
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Friday 14th September 2018 06:12 GMT Piro
Re: File sizes
You have a very low bar for quality, I guess you don't rip your own discs, because comparing such a tiny rip and the original would reveal a pretty horrendous difference.
Rips that size also will almost certainly not include good quality multi-channel audio, which I use on both my HTPC setup (5.1) and my regular desktop setup (4.0).
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 20:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yet Another Wake Up Call
Streamed-Access and Subscription-Models? I avoid them like the plague!
They tend to leave you more exposed to Financial-fraud / Identity-theft too.
Plus with the spread of Social-Credit-Score, the less data online the better:
________
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-12/american-ownership-society-is-changing-thanks-to-technology
________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
________
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 20:30 GMT karlkarl
So Apple basically told him that he should have downloaded the films to his disk when he had the chance. But does the DRM not prevent this? Only streaming is allowed right? It is a lose-lose for the guy in the case study.
For the record, I purchase and then *always* torrent a backup copy so this will never affect me. I also have very little respect for those naive people who do not. However I still find it interesting to see how much content providers will push clients until they reject them completely.
If the DRM was not there to prevent a local download, then I blame the guy for being stupid. If there was DRM preventing this then I blame Apple for being criminals (and the guy for being a mug).
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 23:04 GMT Tessier-Ashpool
@karlkarl
No, Apple let you download a purchased movie from iTunes to an arbitrary disk drive of your choice. Said file will only be playable via iTunes on an authorised device, however. i.e. one that is associated with your iTunes account.
But, I have to say, gee-fucking-wizz. If Apple want their 30% cut on movie sales, they should simply say to the licence holder "If you sell your content on our site, you agree that the purchaser can stream it as often and whenever he chooses".
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Friday 14th September 2018 16:31 GMT jelabarre59
Re: @karlkarl
No, Apple let you download a purchased movie from iTunes to an arbitrary disk drive of your choice. Said file will only be playable via iTunes on an authorised device, however. i.e. one that is associated with your iTunes account.
And fuck-all use that is to me if I'm not using an iTunes-compatible platform (Linux, Android). I have a test-machine that happens to have a redmond-flavored OS on it, which can be used for downloading music to play on the aforementioned Linux and Android devices (and converted to MP3 to play in my car), but I'm not going to be watching movies on it. So no movie sales to me. I'll stick with DVD for purchases, and streaming for everything else.
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Thursday 13th September 2018 22:11 GMT gnasher729
"So Apple basically told him that he should have downloaded the films to his disk when he had the chance. But does the DRM not prevent this? Only streaming is allowed right? It is a lose-lose for the guy in the case study."
You were always allowed and able to download Apple movies to your disk and keep them there permanently. "Only streaming is allowed right?" Wrong. Every single movie that I purchased this way (and it's not many, most come from DVDs) is downloaded, and backed up twice. As long as my computer and my backups don't break down at the same time, I've got these movies forever.
What the guy missed: The first download gets you the purchased movie. After that, you can download again as a convenience, for example on another device, but only as a convenience and only as long as Apple has the rights. He purchased the movie, downloaded it, _threw it away_ and now he can't get a new copy. Worlds smallest violin plays the worlds saddest song.
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 20:31 GMT Ole Juul
It's a good idea to take things home with you when you buy them.
While I agree that Apple is being deceptive and deserves no respect in regard to their way of doing business, I still think that the gentleman in question is also being deceptive in his story. If I go to a store to buy something, I make sure to take it home with me. I don't leave it there and expect it to be there every time I want to go back and use it. The store could go out of business, for that matter. This gentleman is being naive if he thinks that the Apple store works differently from any brick and mortar store.
Personally, I won't have anything to do with Apple on any level. Hopefully this gentleman will adopt this same stance from now on.
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Wednesday 12th September 2018 21:32 GMT Dan 55
Re: It's a good idea to take things home with you when you buy them.
On devices within limited storage (why would we need more, it's all available in the cloud!), we are encouraged to buy, download, watch/listen/read/play, wipe, and repeat, with a UI that gives the impression these shiny trinkets which we believe we have purchased will always be there for us.
And DRM stops us from making a backup copy of what we believe we've purchased.
I guess this is commonly known as a scam.
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