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Yeaaa. This bothers me, too, on a conceptual level, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a NAS and doing the whole Plex thing. But on a practical level, I’ve

Yeaaa. This bothers me, too, on a conceptual level, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a NAS and doing the whole Plex thing. But on a practical level, I’ve “owned” movies and tv shows on (the service formerly known as) iTunes for like 15 years without issue. I question whether, on average, I’d be able to do as good a job, and how much effort it’d take.

jonhohle 3y ago
If you start and aren’t happy with it, at least you learned something along the way. Time and format shifting are allowed acts under copyright law (though possibly not DMCA), so I’d consider it a great way to backup the things you bought.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Obligatory IANAL. Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on. If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    Also, NAL, but unfortunately, with the exception of Red Book CDs and ROM-Data, archiving commercially published optical media requires circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Unfortunately, "space-shifting" was considered and explicitly not added to the list of recommended exceptions to that rule by the Librarian of Congress[0]. It seems like no one appeared to defend this position, and it is not one of the exemptions allowed for circumventing copy-protected works. 0 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
jerf 3y ago
One of the patterns I've personally really been noticing over the past couple of years (not related to any big events in those years, just the time period I happened to notice them in) is that a lot of theses situations are a bona fide slippery slope. The further in you get, the harder it is to leave. The sooner you bail out, the less it impacts your life at all. I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it. By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them. Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits. More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.) I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle. Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!" This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found. Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.

jonhohle 3y ago

If you start and aren’t happy with it, at least you learned something along the way. Time and format shifting are allowed acts under copyright law (though possibly not DMCA), so I’d consider it a great way to backup the things you bought.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Obligatory IANAL. Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on. If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Also, NAL, but unfortunately, with the exception of Red Book CDs and ROM-Data, archiving commercially published optical media requires circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Unfortunately, "space-shifting" was considered and explicitly not added to the list of recommended exceptions to that rule by the Librarian of Congress[0]. It seems like no one appeared to defend this position, and it is not one of the exemptions allowed for circumventing copy-protected works. 0 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...

jerf 3y ago

One of the patterns I've personally really been noticing over the past couple of years (not related to any big events in those years, just the time period I happened to notice them in) is that a lot of theses situations are a bona fide slippery slope. The further in you get, the harder it is to leave. The sooner you bail out, the less it impacts your life at all. I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it. By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them. Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits. More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.) I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle. Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!" This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found. Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.