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Fascinating how greed and the demand for ever increasing profits leads to these cycles of purchase and privacy. First we had physical DVDs but studios’ greed in
by uncomputation 5y ago
Fascinating how greed and the demand for ever increasing profits leads to these cycles of purchase and privacy. First we had physical DVDs but studios’ greed in extending the theater playtime as long as profitable resulted in bootleg recordings so people could watch at home. Then torrenting was the final nail to this physical media strategy. Netflix arose, consolidating content into an even easier experience than torrenting with none of the legal/ISP risks. Then Disney and Warner Bros and NBC caught on, got greedy, and now we’re back to torrenting seemingly because people don’t want to deal with country licensing, platform lock in, fragmentation, or price increases.
Anyone wanting a glimpse at this bill’s future can look at YouTube’s draconian copyright strike engine which ensures artists will live in fear of daring to use a 5 second sample of Major Music Label Intellectual Property.
Attempts to legislate this (rather than curbing corporate greed) will only create a new hydra, one providing ML-resistant protections for media against perceptual hashes, greater anonymity, and the fertile grounds for stronger piracy.
- uncomputation 5y agoAlso framing the discussion of whether or not you are entitled to view media or not is a dead end IMO. Rather than do the typical Western philosophy thing and try to define and rationalize “property” or “rights,” let’s look at the world as is, as a system of incentives and rational actors. If it is easy to watch $(UK-licensed TV show) from America, people will do it and then the production and distribution companies get exactly 0 dollars and in fact will lose money fighting a losing whack-a-mole war against torrents. If it is easy to log in to netflix dot com (NOTE: netflix, not (NFLX | DIS | HBO | AMZN | HULU | NBC)) to watch $(show), people will do that and you can let Netflix and production companies fight about the beans.
- heavyset_go 5y agoDon't forget when DVDs shipped with ads that your DVD player wouldn't let you skip.
- goosedragons 5y agoAnd when Blu-rays started wasting your bandwidth to show you ads you can't skip. Such progress.
- autoexec 5y agoThe increased DRM was a bit part of the push to get people to switch from DVD to Blu-ray. I've had phone calls with confused and frustrated relatives who wanted to know why it is they can't play the movie they just bought at the store. I had to tell them that it's because their blu-ray player needs to be connected to the internet in order to beg for permission to play the new movie. The player didn't support wireless, so the "easy" options for making it work were to either run a very very long ethernet cable up a set of stairs and through 5 rooms to let it connect, or to drag their blu-ray player as well as their huge TV into the basement every so often to connect it, or to buy an insanely overpriced wifi adapter made specifically for their player and wait for that to arrive by mail, or to simply pirate the movie and never have a single problem.
- heavyset_go 5y agoThis post makes me glad that I never invested in the Blu-ray ecosystem.
- mardifoufs 5y agoWait, Blu-ray disks can fetch ads from the internet?! Or are we talking about the disk IO bandwidth?
- goosedragons 5y agoYes, some Blu-rays when given an internet connection will fetch new trailers.
- autoexec 5y agoA once popular illustration of the issue: https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg