Piracy is only illegal because we made it so. We can change that.

If buying isnt owning then piracy isnt stealing

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I download or capture everything I pay for. I paid for it, it's mine.

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?

"buy"

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.

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).

*Arr Suite, QBT, and a Jellyfin Server. Done and done. There are scripts to set it all up in less than 30 seconds...

Leopards ate 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.