Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.
Aye-aye, Captain! 🫡
Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy
Well, copyright proponents succeeded in persuading the majority of people that buying something you can’t copy or share is still ownership, despite it being against human instincts.
Only instincts matter more, not less, than laws. Because instincts work first.
So in fact they persuaded us that it’s normal to own less, rent more, buy a cat in a bag, buy something without any guarantees, buy something with unclear obligations, because everybody around does that and it’s socially shameful otherwise.
Which is amusingly similar to what fraudsters do.
So the next stage is the amount of obvious fraud from those big copyright-reliant companies increasing. Good night, sweet prince.
Yes, I’d like one cat please. No, not that one…the dapper tabby gentleman in the back…yes, that’s the one. What’s that? No, no thank you, I don’t need a bag.
…on second thought, yeah, go ahead and give me the cat in a bag. What’s the damage?
You know what say: if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing.
Pirating isn’t stealing because it’s addition not subtraction. You’re creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don’t.
Here’s my risky comment of the day.
I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.
IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.
Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.
Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.
Piracy isn’t stealing, the same way riding the subway without a ticket isn’t stealing.
Riding the subway without a ticket would be called, in many jurisdictions, theft of services
It’s nice that they made the distinction between regular theft and theft of services. The harm associated with them isn’t the same, so it would make sense to treat them differently. However, I still think that describing free-riding as a theft of any kind is a bit too harsh.
Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with
Clearly, it’s rape and murder.
You are raping their digital bits by taking them without their consent.
And you are murdering the money they should have had.
Then again, it is traditional to hang pirates.
Source: Pirated pirate movies
It’s literally right in front of them. Why would they not make pirates walk the plank?
To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical
I get your point, especially when it concerns smaller/independent artists. But how would a “fair compensation” look like? Do top selling artists deserve the millions (or even billions) of dollars? Does someone even deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars? Does any artist deserve more money for doing something they love and where they can express themselves than a nurse working night shifts? Is it fair to keep earning money for some work that was done years ago? Does that mean a nurse should get a percentage of the income of every person’s life they helped save?
I think the only ethical thing to do is to decouple consumption and support. E.g. I might support some artist by buying their album (or going to their shows), because I think their voice is important, not because it’s an album I listen the most to. Or I might not pay artists at all and give money to political causes or other people that need support. Or I might support them in some other way etc.
This is a very tricky subject, because determining the value of entertainment is highly subjective. One song might be nothing more than background music to you, but it could be a life changing experience to someone else.
Performing music, theater, circus or something else is in the simpler end of the spectrum, but recordings changed everything. If I come up with a new song and perform it in a club, a one time compensation seems fair. If I record it, that’s when things get messy, and I don’t have a clean answer to those situations.
If I have to draw the line somewhere, I would say it’s fair that the artist gets compensated as long as they’re alive. It’s difficult to compare a recording to other types of transactions, because it’s just so different. Physical recordings are straightforward, but digital ones can get complicated due to how easy it is to copy them.
Nurses working night shifts is a good example of a situation where the compensation does not accurately reflect the importance of the work. How did we even end up in a situation like this? Maybe supply and demand just doesn’t always lead to a fair outcome, or maybe the government didn’t support the right parts of the economy. I really don’t know, but this situation needs to be fixed urgently.
Your idea of decoupling consumption and support is a really interesting one. It seems pretty good, but the more I think about it the more I feel like it might not be sustainable. Every time you watch your favorite movie, you’re getting some unquantifiable amount of entertainment out of it. As long as you feel like you’re getting something, shouldn’t you give something in return? If donations through Patreon were the only way for artists to get money, I don’t think we would have very many high quality movies, series, albums, paintings or sculptures.
How did we even end up in a situation like this?
Capitalism ;)
If donations through Patreon were the only way for artists to get money, I don’t think we would have very many high quality movies, series, albums, paintings or sculptures.
This sounds obvious, because if people don’t need to worry about money they can invest more time and effort into their art.
But a. this does not mean it’s fair. Not within the art scenes (because a lot of people are working hard but don’t have the luck for a breakthrough) and certainly not compared to other jobs.
And b. while a movie like Lord of the Rings or a series like the Sopranos do need a lot of money, many expensive movies are actually rather boring because they have to play it safe in order not to risk a fuckton of money. On the other hand, many great movies had a rather small budget. Avengers: Endgame could have paid for 100x Whiplash or Trainspotting, and I’d rather have more of those. And I think movies/series are the outlier - music is much cheaper to make.
But it’s hard to solve or even discuss all this in some lemmy comment ;-)
I feel like it might not be sustainable
The current system however is definitely not sustainable.
More like guidelines than actual rules
PaRleyyy!
I feel more and more justified about piracy every article I read about licensing and stuff just getting taken away after having paid good money for stuff
Especially since they suddenly become not so sure when talking about feeding things under IP to “AIs”. It seems that when some process is not too open, like dataset collection, people doing it get used to bending laws they themselves rely on.
Actually this should be leveraged.
One approach - IP is solid, so those big companies championing “AIs” will have to pay royalties for everything produced by an “AI” which had been fed something of that IP. That’s just logically a Gordian knot.
Another approach - IP is an artificial concept which is complete bullshit, then “digital piracy” is not a crime, and neither is commercialization of fan works over some IP without paying royalties.
Anything in between would mean that a company has more rights under the law than an individual. Would be a good analogy to cutting that knot IMHO, but a bad outcome.
if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.
They only took the digital copy though. Shitty move, but you still have a copy.
Pirating only takes a digital copy, they still have the physical ones.
I think many didn’t read the article. The only way to get a Funimation digital copy was by using a code that came with the physical copy.
Even if they’re taking away the digital copy, you still have the physical one.
If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.
But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code. Subscribers to the Funimation streaming service could add those digital codes to Funimation and then stream the content from the platform.
Okay, I honestly feel bad for anyone not old enough to remember the last few times big media firms pulled this kind of crap. This kind of thing is always a trap, or at best a temporary add-on to the media you purchased. If you buy a DVD or BluRay, anything other than the videos on the medium have a short shelf life. Plus, anything having to do with internet websites are considered disposable by big business*, but doubly so in this kind of scheme.
In the past we’ve had bolt-on features to media that have aged poorly. 1-800 support numbers for video games. Websites with supplementary media. Executable programs on disk that only work on Windows95 or MacOS 9. Console exclusive content. Extra media on disk in formats like Flash. Heck, there are even old cassettes and LPs that have C64 BASIC programs on them. Downloadable game content through redeemable codes. The end result is less a product value-add and more of a novelty.
Then there’s the litany of broken-by-design media, like DivX. And of course, let’s not forget about formats that have no modern release and are only viewable on players that haven’t been made in a dozen years or more.
Yes, Sony/Funimation should be taken to task for misleading advertising. But we should also be vigilant and look for the warning signs too.
(* - If that makes you uncomfortable about IoT devices, you’re paying attention.)
This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn’t be able to “sell” digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to “purchase” digital content, it must plainly tell you that you’re renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… It’s almost like companies don’t actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it’s infuriating that it’s literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
I want a lot of things from the US Congress, but platform planks like better consumer projection/rights just sound like easy votes for any candidate. I can’t wrap my head around why nobody is at least lying that they’ll address this.
They’re probably getting paid specifically to not address this is the issue.
Meanwhile, the EU is crafting all sorts of consumer protection laws just like the member countries have been doing long before even joining the union.
It’s entirely unreasonable to assume that the average person has the time or knowledge necessary to read, comprehend and agree to every terms of service agreement shoved in their face. Legislation should reflect this fact, and there should be something similar to game and movie ratings that give an easy to understand summary of the agreement.
Imagine if there was a law for making the contracts easier to understand.
- We’ll spy on you and sell your data to the highest bidder.
- When something goes wrong, it’s your fault.
- You can’t blame us.
- No money back.
- When in doubt, we do what Darth Vader would do.
Sign here: _______
Come to think of it, slot machines do tell you quite clearly how bad the odds really are, but people still dump their money on them. Why can’t we have similar honesty and clarity when it comes to contracts.
Yeah if I have to go all digital that’s the last console I get. At least with a PC I can get DRM free copies.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… […]
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it’s worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games – especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers’ right to the content they’ve purchased.
edit: Here, I’ll bold the important part.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays? Or is the reading part of using Blurays unnecessary in the first place because most of the game is loaded onto the console itself?
I imagine you could write-protect the SD cards the same way you do with Blurays, so if the question above is a non-issue, then that’d be quite a cool solution. SD cards pushing terabytes easily now, they’d be large enough for sure.
But then again, afaik, the discs are not really needed and don’t need to accommodate that much space in them except for licensing and DRM stuff, I think, since the majority of the game is downloaded regardless, right?
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays?
Disc speeds are notoriously slow. PS vs N64, Cartridge based systems were instant where as discs had to be loaded into a ram space/buffer and had terrible load times. The difference back then was that disc’s had a boatload more storage where cartridges were very expensive to get any significant capacity. That’s still kind of true today, but at scale not nearly as much as it used to be, and max capacity of sd cards are WAY bigger than discs overall.
6x Bluray drives (which is what is in the PS4 for example) read at about 27MB/s. I don’t know what speed the PS5 is, but bluray supports up to 72MB/s as a standard and has it’s highest capacity at ~100/128 GB.
Meanwhile… You can hop on amazon and buy 200MB/s sd cards no problem. I’ve seen them as “fast” as 300 MB/s, and as high capacity as 1TB. So easily 3x more bandwidth, and significantly more capacity. Usually costs more though. Some weird side-benefits though… You can actually update the game that lives on the card. You can leave some assets on the card that get called less often when you install to SSD to save space on internal storage. Or if you’re live loading assets from the sd card to an internal SSD, any load times will be significantly faster. You CANNOT do these things on spinning disc, it’s too slow.
The real difference here is latency though. A disc has to spin… You have a physical laser head that has to seek to a particular sector. That’s slow as hell and at the density of tracks that you have to do on BD-XL disks, you can actually overshoot tracks if they’re laid out poorly which increases the delay of getting the data. SD cards don’t care at all, everything is nearly instantly responsive.
So yes, sd cards are significantly faster than bluray discs in a number of ways.
Edit: Minor edit to make it more clear.
Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of interesting new information!
SD cards rule, then lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC–while it had questionable game performance for some folk–the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they’re more than 100GB, what’s stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can’t imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won’t allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.
I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.
A rent economy is toxic and rotten,
Not always. I would gladly pay to rent something I need only every now and then instead to buy it.
But that is the concept of renting rather than a rent economy.
An industry or economy based entirely around renting with 0 other options is almost always rotten to the core.
In other news, the only thing that has ever axed my library was a stray bolt of lightning
I wasnt so lucky…
The library in a nearby suburb i loved was replaced by a daycare, erm… I ment… place… with books and kids and overly protective adults that stare into your soul if your an “outsider”.
Laughs in 64TB Plex server
Sony won the case against Universal that allowed people to record TV shows with their VCR. I wonder how they’d feel if I pointed OBS at their streams.
Does OBS even work with all the DRM they’ve put on things? I thought that’s the whole point why it’s there, to keep people from screen capturing or restreaming videos
Probably not without some tinkering, but DRM can always be defeated.
It may not work directly, but there’s always a way to misdirect it, like a vm!
Android smart TV can use some foss screen capture apps while being undetected by PlayStation, of course there’s trouble with sound capture, but since tv is yours, it can be bypassed
This is nothing new. Buying digital and streaming only versions of media just means you are licensing it. If you care, either break the DRM and reencode, or just pirate it directly.
I’ve been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven’t regretted my decision yet.
I forgot about that whole thing. For those that need a reminder like me:
Damn i remember that shit.
I lost a very expensive (at the time) CD-RW to that shit.
How’d that happen?
He smashed it in a fit of rage
To shreds, you say?
Was its IDE port rent controlled?
To shreds you say?
Capitalists make a liar out of the promise of The Internet.
I think we should drag em through the streets four different ways at once over it.
Sony should be fined for each unit they delete.
