‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services

Piracy is only illegal because we made it so. We can change that.
- I think what we should do is to have better non-piracy ways of owning things instead of "making piracy legal" (what does that even mean?)
  
  I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making "piracy" legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn't be. Making "piracy" legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.
  
  what does that even mean?
  Something like this: https://www.eff.org/pages/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
  
  I want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work. Why do they get to still make money off their work 70 years after they died?
  Yes, it would probably mean that billion-dollar-movies aren't viable anymore, and most YouTubers couldn't live off their videos, but I see that as a good thing.
- How do you change that without completely stripping property rights away from artists though? Not just corporate IP, but all artists?
  
  Piracy doesn't take money from artists, just ask Cory Doctorow, a person making their living as a writer while uploading the torrents of his novels himself.
  Corporate consolidation is what kills the artists. The studios make less movies per year, so the a list actors go to television and take the roles Rob Morrow used to get.
  
  That's the neat part: you don't have to, because copyright was never a property right to begin with.
  First, not only are ideas not property, they're pretty much exactly the opposite of it. I'll let Thomas Jefferson himself explain this one:
  It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
  Second, a copyright isn't a right, either; it's a privilege. Consider the Copyright Clause: it is one of the enumerated powers of Congress, giving Congress the authority to issue temporary monopolies to creators, for the sole and express purpose "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Note that that's a power, not an obligation, and the purpose is not "because the creator is entitled to it" or anything similar to that.
  Besides, think of it this way: if copyright were actually a property right, the fact that it expires would be unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But it does expire, so it clearly isn't a property right.
- Also depends on the country. It isn't everywhere. Non-commercial file-sharing is legal in a number of European countries and I'm sure elsewhere.
  It could be taken as a sign of the health of the democracy's function and technically literacy of the population. In a society of tech heads with a highly functional democracy, it would be DRM measures that would be illegal.....

If buying isnt owning then piracy isnt stealing
- Piracy has never been theft, it has always been and still remain copyright infringement. That being said go ahead and pirate, I'm not your dad.
  
  You, you could be... If you wanted to.
  
  That being said go ahead and pirate, I’m not your dad
  What am I letters on a screen? I'm not going to stop you.
- When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
- And piracy isn't stealing anyway!
  But I still enjoy that phrase.
  
  Well, not digital piracy. Ye olde piracy absolutely was stealing, plus a medley of other crimes
- Sail the seas with I2P and anonymous torrents. They can't stop it.
  Anti Commercial-AI license

- Digital Restrictions Management

Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
- This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.
  
  Its happening for quite some time now. Recently sony did that on the playstation. Thats why we need to go back to self hosting the files (without drm).
- Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
  
  Probably has a future? It's already here.
  
  I dont think streams have a future either. Look at the amount of abuse potential by companies and how far enshittification already progressed. If you have prime, you now get ads in prime video. Its disgusting.
- What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
  Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
  
  I remember that time. I rented a couple of apple movies when netflix wasnt a thing.

She later said Telstra had contacted her and offered a free Fetch box, which she acknowledged was a “reasonable resolution”.
And we have learned exactly nothing here. See you in 2 years when Fetch closes down and you are not getting anything back because you actually did not "buy" those movies on Fetch but on the previous platform.
- Yep, assuming this new service lasts that long. Could be a year or less.
  
  Stop trying to make fetch happen!
- Well, that or go to court for a movie collection. I'd phrase my statement differently, but I can see the appeal of the settlement.

You will own nothing and be happy.
This is why sites like lemmy are important.
We need to put an end to corporate tyranny.
Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
- Corporations had already proven they cannot be trusted with any long-term leasing or subscription long before they started passing that phrase around.
  
  Corporations have also already proved very difficult to actually hold to account. They can basically do as they please, with relative disregard for any consumer protections that may already exist. It's not good, but it can get worse.
- You will own nothing and be happy.
  Unironically the future of capitalism, as it devolves into feudalism with more killer robots.
  You've got the CEO (Absolute Monarch) who owns all the shit and you work on it in exchange for not being killed or deported. Maybe you get some treats from time to time. More likely, you just get someone from the PMC to tell you to pray more.
  Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
  A handful of humans with the power to deliver unlimited genocide on their neighbors are hard to keep in check.
- Yep, we are what make these sites important.

More and more it is becoming a good idea to store things on your own private equipment. If we don't demand ownership of our own possessions we will soon own nothing
- Don't disagree but surely it's not impossible to add some regulations to protect the consumers here.
  
  Legislation is always years behind tech.
  
  While possible, by the time it comes around it'll be too late.

i tried to get into streaming but i grew increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever as titles appear and disappear at the whim of suits. how could that possibly be a pleasant UX for customers?
i'd take the hassle of having discs or managing a server any day of the week over paying these goons for access to their files which they happily negotiate away for financial reasons. it's just a disgusting paradigm. when netflix was starting streaming, i thought (i was like 15) we were emerging into a great new age, where every show you could ever want was on one beautiful service.
now they won't even let you share accounts or screenshot the fucking show (a pig-headed anti-piracy measure which is mind-blowingly stupid given every single show on there is available for free if you know where to look ANYWAY. what are they DOING.)
fuck streaming, fuck netflix, fuck spotify. crash and burn. topple like the house of cards you are.
- increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever
  And paying more and more as time goes on. The thing that shits me the most is the increased prices but decreased range/quality of content. That's clearly not a business model aimed at customer satisfaction.
  
  All business models are aimed at company profitability. Customer satisfaction is an expensive early necessity which you can largely do away with as you become entrenched.
- Streaming was great when it was just Netflix and had a ton of content. Now it is just cable TV on demand.
- I never watch the same movie/TV show more than once, so I don't see a point in hording this data. So for me the UX of streaming is most of the time preferrable than having a physical media which I need to carry to the new appartment every time I move.
  This is different with music, where I listen to the same Albums hundrets of times. There I can deal with vinyl and many files on my computer.
- Streaming in general is great. Streaming services are a mixed bag of results, but overall our options are excellent at this point in time. You can have streaming services with no contract, pay for one month and abandon it if you don't like it. There are also numerous FREE streaming services with lots of great content.
  It's important to understand the above in the context of how it used to be before Streaming was an option. There was basically only the option to have a cable or satellite TV on contract, or use OTA antenna TV, or watch everything on disc / tape. So yeah I think streaming is great.
  Having said all that, I buy anything I want to keep perpetually on disc. 4k Blu-ray for movies and CDs for music (I bought 3 albums on CD over the last couple weeks). Games don't fit on discs anymore so I try to get stuff on GOG when it works out.

I download or capture everything I pay for. I paid for it, it's mine.
- I need to look into capturing. Feels like a nice middle ground.
- same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can't, I reconsider how much I need it. I'll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won't boot? switched.

What would it take to get a "Steam but TV/movies instead of games"? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn't be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
- I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
  
  Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can't take that away.
  But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
  
  They've said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven't said what it is, but my guess is some kind of "you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM".
- Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn't last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
  
  Why is licensing so easy with games though? It really seems like there's this arbitrary difference in how the video games and streaming industries work.
  
  Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
  That, right there, is how you can tell the entire premise itself is ridiculous nonsense: if you buy something, there's nothing to maintain because every right associated with the purchase is transferred in perpetuity. There is no licensor left to need to maintain an ongoing relationship with.
  If Steam "needs" a "license" to continue to host the files its customers have purchased on their behalf, it means somebody fucked up.
- @SorteKanin @thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
  
  rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games
  Any idea why there is this discrepancy between TV and games?
- The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they'd put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
- But.. do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn't anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
  No. That's why.

"buy"
- "own"
  
  "piracy"
  ... Wait, no. Piracy is the answer!

it feels good to host a media server.
It's also a fucking nightmare when shit explodes, but damn do i feel good in every other instance.

The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to "follow the rules" unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn't make anything that isn't designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they're also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don't.
The whole thing needs to go, all of it.
- The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face
  We're surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.
  It's less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it's difficult to chart a path through the racket.
  You're bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.
- Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.
  Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?
  Unlikely.
  I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.
  The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn't want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

If purchasing isn't ownership, piracy isn't stealing.

You don't own anything that is not on your own system and/or without any DRM.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.
All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.
Some reasonable things that could be done:
Money back requirements
Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.
These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.
As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.
All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).
- Another thing to add - these services can’t use the word ‘buy’ because that implies ownership. They should be forced to use a word like ‘rent’.
  
  I always thought it should be "unlock", because that's more what is happening. you're not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action.. they've had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you're not allowed to see it until you pony up. it's locked away.
  
  Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

*Arr Suite, QBT, and a Jellyfin Server. Done and done. There are scripts to set it all up in less than 30 seconds...
- Don't use scripts unless you know how it works otherwise you will have trouble troubleshooting when something doesn't work. But by the time you read and understand how the script works, you already learn how to deploy it manually.
  
  This!
- Where, I'd like to know where there are trusted scripts.
  
  A simple web search reveals 3 such open-source scripts as the first results. Here's one: https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts
- No scripts and it was more like 30 hours on my side, but its worth!
- Which scripts?
  
  Here's a sample, but there are numerous open source scripts, depending on what you want, on git: https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts

Leopards ate my face.
- I never DREAMED Amazon would take away my content I bought! Just because they erased the novel 1984 off of everyone’s Kindles a few years back doesn’t mean leopards would eat MY face.
  
  🏅

They could offer a way to download a copy and steganographically tag it to hell with your id so that they know if you distribute it. You can "loan it out" by letting friends stream off your Plex or whatever. If you start selling that streaming service or it shows up in torrents, it has your ID on it.
Boom, you own it forever and you're incentivized not to over share.
Or you know sell DRM free versions and let people do whatever, but that probably has a snowballs chance in hell.
- If somebody gets access to your system, they could use that to blackmail you, and/or frame you for distributing said media.
  "Give us $X, or we leak and distribute Y media on your behalf, and you will get sued by the corporate goons for shit loads of money"
  The only real solution is to completely overhaul IP law, and/or nationalizing funding for the arts. If we're gonna keep corps that own/produce media, then they should have a very short and limited amount of time to distribute it before it becomes common property of the people.
- Your first proposal still falls victim to the fact that screen recording exists.
  
  I literally watch TV through a capture card right now out of stubbornness and principle. Anything I want to record, I can just hit a button and safely keep. No DRM preventing me from taking screenshots, I can manipulate the picture to hide obnoxious graphics or ads (great for sports); the sense of control is extremely gratifying.
  
  The fingerprinting I'm talking about gets encoded in the screen recording too. Subtle pixel changes here or there over the entire length of the video. It'll be lossy when it's transcoded, but over the whole video it's there enough times it won't matter. Even scaling to lower quality won't fix it and then it'll also be lower quality.
  It'll be like DRM, there will be people trying to remove it like anything else. They'll break one thing and another will come along. There would still be a black market, but most people can get an unrestricted copy in exchange for money so there's one less reason to pirate.
  Unless you're actually pointing a camera at the screen, then OK, you do you.
  
  Like every system? What's the actual distinction you're trying to point out?
- I mean Amazon did this for their mp3s. It was literally just an id3 tag with a unique identifier. Not hard to remove but “good enough” to keep regular people from overly distributing it. You’ll never win against the real Pirate community no matter what you do, so just give people real incentive to buy and actually own.

Just another victim of WEF.

I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.
If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.
- MakeMKV and Handbrake are godsends.
  MakeMKV hasn't failed to rip a DVD to MKV for me yet. I have hundreds of videos from DVDs.
  Most I convert to MP4 using Handbrake to save space and for compatibility.
  As for playing, look into running something like a NUC (small PC about 2x the size of Apple TV), with Kodi on it. It can play your entire library either stored on it or on a NAS or practically from any storage on your network, and connect to your TV via HDMI. It's effectively a local streaming box.
  
  For DVDs, I’ve never had an issue. They just amplified the BS on BluRays tenfold.
- I don't like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you're into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.
- I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
  What? Where are you seeing this issue?
  I grabbed a Panasonic UHD player and it's been a dream. Zero ads, HDMI control so I can use the same remote that works with my TV and receiver, it has full Atmos and Dolby Vision support so the quality is amazing... truly the whole package. And it's available everywhere you'd expect.

Consumers are getting fucked. Media companies will continue to make it worse while trying to improve their bottom line. How long until it is all pay per view at sky high prices that only keep going up?
I try to own my media in physical form as much as possible. But I don't think it will be long until physical is not an available format. Or unaffordable, like vinyl is now.
We should have resisted and stopped the DMCA. We should stop all media being rental only. But we do not resist, we comply. We bend over and get fucked like the sheeple we are.
Until consumers take control of their government they will continue to take it up the ass from corporations. They count on you to comply.

I understand that things don't last forever. But and it sounds selfish to say and maybe people might agree, I'd like for these things to last as long as I'm alive to view them whenever I please.
Though I'm really sick of this god damn hot potato shit with the content that's spread across several streaming platforms. As well as unstable services. "Oh, we've shut this down, fuck your purchases" "Oh, we couldn't sustain this platform, go elsewhere".
It means a lot to the customer. Doesn't mean dick to these services.

That's why I'm always interested in self-hosting. I have my own Plex and Jellyfin seedbox server for the private trackers I'm in, with a VPS hosting an OpenVPN to make it look like I'm in a different country, just to make it that much safer. It works damn well.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
Plex	Brand of media server package
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #746 for this sub, first seen 14th May 2024, 01:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

You will own nothing and ~~like it~~ have no recourse.

My whole library is wipped out
I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.

My library almost got wiped out when my backup HDD started to fail. Managed to duplicate it onto a new SSD, now I'm fine.
Don't trust services, trust yourself.
- If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.
  
  Yeah archive then

I'm just confused about why people are so mad about it. In other cases where you rent space to put physical things you own so you can still access them later this happens too. Let's get into an example, and you guys tell me if I'm misunderstanding something:
If you have a car and have to change between summer and winter tires and you don't have space at home to store the winter tires during the summer, you can go to a tire-hotel and they will 1. Sell you new tires, 2. switch your tires - a service you pay for - and 3. store the tires for you until next winter - a service you pay for too. Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don't. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.
Isn't it the same with the movies you buy and store at a place where you then rent storage to keep them there? As long as they allow you to download your purchases I see no difference. You can't make someone else to keep working the same job until the heat death of the universe.
- But in this case, as per op, you would never own the tires. Just rent them so then when the tire hotel closes you never can collect the tires that you thought you bought.
  The streaming websites|apps don't allow you to download the purchased movies or shows so no files to keep.
- Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.
  That's where there's no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying "Just so you know, we're burning your tires next week. No, you can't come and get them."
- No, that's not how it works.
  With streaming, you're licensing the use of the media, but only until said media is no longer licensed to the streaming service by the media copyright holders.
  I'm guessing you haven't seen shows fall off your streaming service? Hell, Netflix warns you of things dropping off. Doesn't sound like ownership.
  
  But Netflix never let me buy a movie or TV show. They just sell me access to their library for a limited time.
  I bought some music from Apple, DRM free and I downloaded it and have it on my own hard drive, and share it between all my devices.
  Apple also sells you access to their library for a limited time like Netflix, but then you're not buying the songs, you're buying access to them for a limited time.

"I grew my garden on my neighbor's lawn, and he mowed it over! I bought those plants!"

I'm finding it hard to feel any kind of sympathy for someone who thinks they have rights to permanent access on any sort of streaming service.
I say that fully cognisant normies don't spend much time thinking about where there data is and who has the right to it. I just don't think many people would think of movies they've watched on their "telstra TV Box Office" as being in "their' library.
That said, self hosting movies isn't for me. For many people it might be. In my case it just doesn't make any sense to have a server with all the tb. I was catch & release torrenting for several years but more recently stremio. Without any doubt stremio has been the most convenient.
- Iew, using the word normies seriously makes you sound like an incel.
  
  Calling people incels makes you sound childish.
  Don't make me tell your mother what you said.