$25 to rent the movie, one watch within max 24 hours after you start watching it… Or $5 more to own it. Scammers.
No you are mistaken with “Or $5 mire to own it”. You own a license to watch for the amount of time the platforms decides to keep it up.
Then, when they remove it, they offer you a measly $5 gift card only redeemable on their platform.
On that last post where someone got a refund they gave a full refund as a gift card and an additional 5 euro gift card.
(Not saying it’s an okay think to do, just in case you’re referencing it.)
A gift card isn’t a refund
It also doesn’t change the false implication they would “own” the digital copy
It’s a refund in the sense that you can exchange it for an item of equal value. A real refund would be more appropriate, I agree.
Equal value to the store != equal value to actual people.
The store has a profit margin, so the store values the item significantly less than the sticker price.
The store has a profit margin, so the store values the item significantly less than the sticker price.
I totally get that, but it is what you paid for it. As long as it is greater than your original payment adjusted for inflation it’s fair enough. It sucks, I think there should be some sort of penalty for not getting proper licensing to let people use it forever (until your company shuts down).
No, it’s what you paid for one specific digital item that was valuable enough to you to be worth paying for. That doesn’t mean that anything else they have to offer would have enough value to cover the value of the item you’ve been deprived of.
Usually if you complain you can get a real refund. The other post was Amazon and they usually bend over backwards to make customers happy. Still pretty shitty that you have to jump through some hoops, though.
Who does that??
And people will go ‘you didn’t buy it!’ like it doesn’t say “Buy” right fuckin’ there.
True, but it just says “buy 4k” which for all we know could mean “buy a temporary license to watch the 4k movie”.
AAAAAUUUGHHHHH!!!
“Own” it.
Spending $30 to own a brand new movie that just came out is not something I have a problem with.
However, not being able to download a copy of the movie you purchased is where I take issue.
$30 to own the movie is valid, but for $5 less, you’re only allowed 1 watch within 24 hours of starting. Something like that shouldn’t be basically the same price as the movie. With pricing like this, they basically force you to spend the extra $5. There isn’t even a point to rent the movie and they know that.
Hmmm… The region-free blu-ray
iswill be cheaper than this. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Barbie-Blu-ray-Region-Margot-Robbie/dp/B0BGY6PRK5When you said “cheaper” I was not expecting like NEARLY HALF THE PRICE
Yeah. I’m back to buying discs for the movies I want to support. Then I can always hang on to a copy no matter where it might live on streaming apps.
I absolutely agree! Renting a movie should cost nowhere near as much as purchasing the movie.
If you don’t get a physical piece of media that can be viewed offline indefinitely, you don’t own anything, you’re just renting. Services revoking even bought and paid for content is not unheard of, digital purchasing gives every streaming company the ability to do that.
If you don’t get a physical piece of media
It doesn’t have to be physical
/pendantic
Would be rad if a service actually let you download a movie you purchased as an mkv file or something. Can’t see it happening though
Yep companies love DRM!
They are legally entitled to do so, sure.
Doesn’t make up for the false implication that you are “purchasing” the movie in any commonly understood meaning of the word. And if there was any alternative where you own a full res digital format, maybe the outrage could be said to be misplaced, but there isnt, and it’s not.
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After the first few times I had apple remove a book from my library, and the only explanation they ever gave me was “sometimes books change, and when books change they are a new book,” I just went back to DRM free. If I have to jump through hoops, and still can’t keep the content I legally purchased, why would I legally purchase the content?
When Amazon removed 1984 from Kindle, I thought that’s it I’m done. That is too ironic, DRM free for me. Nobody’s going to remove my books
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989048
I believe it was Sea of Sorrows for me. The first time I contacted them asking what was up, since I wanted to read the book I had purchased earlier that year. They “gave” it to me as a “one time exception.”
I never purchased a digital book again. Though I did still contact them again later that year, asking why it was gone yet again.
They tried to give me a “this may be an updated version” and I was like “no, this is a fucking novel based on a video game, they aren’t releasing new versions every few months like textbooks.”
Ironic but “Fahrenheit 451” being destroyed from Kindle would have been even more perfectly on the nose.
True. But 1984 is still pretty strong, memory holes, double think, denying reality. Fascist organizations dictating what people can know, say, think, remember.
That’s very much on the nose. But regardless, huge massive red flag, you don’t own something that you have in your library unless it’s physical and can’t be removed at a whim.
Wow I have this book on kindle …I’ll check if its still there
wait till yall hear about how college text books work now
Oh, dude. I never even bought mine. None of my professors even used the ones the schools said we needed.
Do you have a good place to buy DRM free books?
I can’t recommend myanonamouse because although Dorm-free books are available, they are not for sale.
Honestly, I havent bought a digital book since. You can read between the lines there.
I don’t actually believe there will be a place to purchase DRM free books. Most of the ones I am seeing from a cursory search are for copyright free books.
You can buy DRM free books @ your local book store.
I mean, yes. But also no because we were talking about digital copies.
kobo.com sells books without DRM (under eBook details they tell you the exact format). For example, the murderbot chronicles are sold without. Sadly they don’t have everything like amazon does, especially for niche authors that only publish digitally.
Oh nice, I’ll keep that in mind for the future! Thank you!
Man, I spent 15 bucks to watch it at the movie theatre. Why is the rent option more expensive than that? Even with the popcorn and drink I stayed below that.
My only argument I can come up with is that other people have friends, so $25 will be less than going to the cinema because they don’t have to pay that price for each person watching. It’s still ridiculously expensive though.
This is the logic publishers apply to libraries when they charge them more for books than general retail price.
They do ? I assumed they get better deals as they buy shit in bulk.
Mainly relates to eBooks now;
Edit; found a good summary.
Libraries pay more for books than a customer would at retail.
There are different payment models libraries use. And not all options may be available to all authors.
The one-copy method pays for the book up front, while the cost-per-checkout method pays a small amount each time (and can be more profitable in the long run).
With the one-copy method, libraries often pay two or three times the retail cost of a print book—and sometimes even more than triple the retail price of an ebook.
With the pay-per-use model, a book makes an amount less than the retail cost—but each time it’s “checked out,” the author gets royalties. If a lot of people read your book, you win!
Don’t most friend groups pay for their own ticket?
Who out there paying for a ticket for all their friends? And are they really friends at that point?
Family sounds more likely in this case. Two adults and three kids could be like 50 euros for tickets unless the kids are small enough to sit in your lap.
I’m trying to imagine a Barbie watch party and I’m having trouble.
It’s less than 2 movie tickets and people usually don’t go to the theater alone.
Oh God just wait until they realize they can use cameras/IP geodata from your phone to determine how many people are in your house while you stream something so they start charging per person.
Wouldn’t work because if you live in an apartment, then your neighbors are going to skew the numbers. There’s no way for them to know if the guy who lives on the floor above you is in your apartment or theirs.
Cameras would work, as would AI to know which device identifiers tend to be close to one another. Besides, they wouldn’t need or want perfect accuracy. I’m picturing basically something like the British does with TV licenses where they more or less assume you’re guilty and then badger you into proving you’re not. You have some friends over for the game, then you get a bill in the mail that says something like “This address has been linked to a broadcast without express, written consent from the NFL. Please pay $5 or we shut your service off. If you believe this letter is in error feel free to hire an attorney, take a day or two off of work and drive hundreds hundreds of miles to the dispute resolution center you agreed to use for such purposes when you accepted our EULA. We pay them, but who knows? Maybe they’ll rule in your favor!”
You are exactly right. This whole thread is full of people complaining about the price, but it’s perfectly justifiable for this one reason. If you have a significant other then it’s actually cheaper to rent than it is to go to the theater. And big screen TVs are commonplace, so the experience is about the same (arguably better since you can pause if you have to go pee, can rewind if you missed something, can be as obnoxious as you want, don’t have to commute there, and don’t have to deal with sticky floors and overpriced popcorn).
I’m not saying the price is reasonable (it’s too high in my opinion) but people need to stop pretending like it makes no sense from a business perspective. It’s a no-brainer to the average non-pirating consumer: they are getting something better, for cheaper.
I love all the good and the bad of the movie theater experience, except the price. But having a young child now, it’s just not worth going most of the time. I am still an avid film viewer so it’s nice that I have an option to rent at home with only a slight delay behind the theatrical run. If I’m feeling really patient, I can usually wait a little longer and stream it for free. I recently did that with the TMNT movie.
“Owned” till we remove it from your library
You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy
“owned” til someone upstream squeezes us harder / we do stupid shit that loses us customers and we go out of business
Instead of giving your money to Amazon to rent this mediocre looking movie that I know nothing about (so this is not a promotion), why not watch it elsewhere (cough cough) and use the same 25 dollars of your hard earned money to support the people who actually worked on the movie and buy a shirt here instead?
https://www.sagaftra.org/official-sag-aftra-strike-swag-available
Thanks Barbie!
No, That’s “Thanks, esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie” to you!
Thanks, esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie!
💖💖
“Merchandising! Merchandising!” -Yogurt
Hey, it goes to help everyone get paid during the strike, so it’s for a good cause.
Are there any ways to support workers on a per-production scope?
That’s a great idea.
25 to lease it. You don’t ever really own it
Yeah, it’s more like “How long would you like to rent it for? 24 hours or until we decide to remove it from our servers?”
Yes, that is what “rent” means.
I think they were intending to bash the “buy” option.
I kind of get the feeling that CEOs and corporations see the writing on the wall in terms of the world, economy, and climate change. We’re headed for some really extreme times in history and I think these guys have the mindset to just go full balls and try to scam as much wealth out of humanity as possible before the shit hits the fan. The greed I see from companies these days is very blatant and in your face, they don’t try to hide it anymore, it’s all very “fuck you, pay me” and it’s virtually every company you can find these days, they’re all doing everything they can to fuck everyone out of one more penny.
It’s a full chain of events that one thing lead to another. People invest money into companies in order to make more money, but they don’t make more money just because the company had profit - it that was the case nobody would have sold it to them. For the investors to profit from owning part of a company, it needs to increase the amount of money it makes compared to when the investor jumped in. With the companies being negotiated at all times, it needs to increase its revenue at all times as well. So companies’ objectives are no longer to make money, but to increase the amount of money they make. There’s no stopping point, no “we’re at a real good spot here”. If some company managed to amass all the money in the world, it would be screwed because that would mean it can’t make more money. Some companies may make some nice products and become profitable and have happy users, but even if a company makes enough money to give all of its employees a very comfortable life, it can’t, because it needs to continue increasing its profits.
The greed is so apparent these days because too many companies have reached a point where there’s no more room for them to grow, but they still need to.
And it’ll only get worse.
There was a scene in the show Parks and Recreation that happens in some near future and that scene had an ad saying “Proud to be one of America’s eight companies”. That absolutely is the future we’re walking towards.
Movies have been very expensive in the short term period after theatrical release, that’s why blockbuster would charge $60 if you lost the tape, it’s how much they sold to rental stores for before wide release. This higher price is absurd to me but to the studios it’s a premium for all the hype they built up, the price will come down after a few months. They are still working out the new models and testing the waters to see what floats.
That’s $25 for a revocable license to watch it once and $5 more for a revocable license to watch it as many times as you want until the service folds or they decide to memory-hole it in order to get out of paying residuals to the cast and crew. The only way to own something is to steal it.
Piracy is not theft.
It’s weird how people were told it’s theft and they simply repeated it forever despite knowing exactly what theft is and knowing piracy is literally not the same thing.
Now apply this same reasoning to other life concepts we’ve been told, and welcome to enlightenment.
(Or black pilling, YMMV)
You need to get yawnpilled. Check it out: some of the things people commonly accept as true actually are true. Up your grind and get on my level
It’s not the same thing but that doesn’t mean it’s not theft, nonetheless.
It’s not the same thing but that doesn’t mean it’s not theft, nonetheless.
^ Would you really consider that comment stolen, rather than digitally copied?
Way to be dishonest. Comments do not make for people’s livelihoods. Piracy is theft of income from the creators. People here are dishonest and try to do all these mental gymnastics to justify their specific version of piracy. The only form of piracy that can be argued to be somewhat amoral is pirating media that is not available legally. Otherwise, no matter how you look at it, you are stealing an income or livelihood from whoever created it.
Please understand that copying intellectual property and theft are, legally speaking, two different things. If I build a machine that just makes endless copies of your intellectual property, just because I can, it doesn’t affect your income whatsoever. You don’t get more poor for each copy that’s made.
I agree with you about pirating media that’s not legally available. However, a lot of great content will become unavailable at some point in the future. Making a copy for the archives while it’s possible is a good idea for any media you care about, since there’s no guarantee that anyone else cares.
I want to steal their income they hate me and everything I stand for
It is. It’s just not theft of a good.
Buying the disk is still owning it (which is another $5 less on amazon BTW) though it is not out yet.
What’s the DRM like on a disc copy? I’ll admit that I’m not caught up, it’s been a long time since I bought physical media. Is it revocable?
Gray area at best.
It’s not even grey - in the US it is illegal under the DMCA.
I’m not up to date on ripping tools, though.
I know that in the EU, if you buy a video game and it runs poorly or not at all because of the DRM put in place by the publisher, you are allowed to use a crack. Dunno if it’s the same for a movie tho.
US allows you to have a personal backup copy.
The DMCA supersedes that - it’s still a crime to bypass copy protection mechanisms, and there are very few exceptions to that rule.
With a physical item, first sale doctrine clearly applies, so you can own the movie, and resell it to somebody else, or lend it to your friends, or give it to a library. None of which is possible with a digital DRMed "ownership "
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“own it” until we delete it from your account because reasons, but hey, we’ll give you a coupon!
$25 to rent and an extra $5 for the illusion you own it!
The physical Blu-Ray is $25* – then at least you own it, versus the $30 price here to “buy” but actually lease.
Absolutely ridiculous pricing across the board though.
Edit: $25 for 1080p Blu-Ray, $40 for 4k.
The worst part is that you might be better off with a pirated copy due to DRM on Blu-ray.
I mean, you can rip the Blu-Ray, but yeah, otherwise agreed.
But don’t Blu-Ray players have to be “updated” via the internet to get the latest decryption keys every now and then?
What. The. Fuck?
Technically yes, though in practice it depends on the disc. And also MakeMKV rips them reliably.
No damage on bluray.
This is not how you say „Keine Schade“ (or your language’s equivalent) in English. Did you mean “No problem”?
Physical 4K bluray retails at 39.99. The physical bluray comes with a digital code as well. Currently on sale at Amazon for 29.99.
Argh. Missed that it was 4k. $25 for 1080p. My bad. Edited above.
Correction, $5 more for a lifetime (or until the company decides to remove it) rental.
“Your receipt is inside this long block chain, beside the astro-doc monkey art.”
“own” it
Pipe dream, but I really wish we would make it illegal to use the terms “Buy” or “Own” for digital goods that can at some point not exist outside of your control.
I give you a dollar and get a DRM-free video file? That is buying.
I give you a dollar and can watch a video file an unlimited number of times in your app? That is not buying, and it should be fraud to claim that it is.
You don’t even own it when you buy it
