One under-appreciated limitation on digital movies is geographic restrictions. You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.
Unfortunately geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format. DVDs were regionally locked as well and even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM).
That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there from the movie industry, just not the capability until recently.
To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop including keys for certain defeated devices in new releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking stolen drive keys completely pointless. As the region lock is enforced by software only, an unofficial player like VLC does not need to pay the region lock any heed.
Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... Let's just say Blu-ray is stuck in an odd place where the underlying technology isn't really that defeated, even though hackers have made keeping up with their stolen device keys from hacked players very impractical for the Blu-ray Disc Association. (Revoking a drive key requires a 90-day heads up for manufacturers to roll out new keys for the effected model, which means that if hackers manage to steal 4 device keys per year... from over a decade and a half of different players, many not receiving updates anymore...)
> Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications...
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.
> It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray
format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the
interest of the buyer.
It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and
tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a
profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to
make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with
e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value
continues because we've normalised it.
> We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.
The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.
Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
> artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable
Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
> processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch
This is a better argument
> The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all
You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't double every year. I would say that's probably an interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
If binning of CPUs were disallowed, it would result in even more e-waste because any imperfect chips would have to be tossed out instead of sold with fewer cores enabled. Bad example.
> We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores.
Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.
I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.
Is it really the case that dies/packages are tested and batched
individually?
I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are
surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and
known to be good) devices are crippled.
That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.
Depends on the value. If you test half a dozen off a die and they're all sub-spec, they're all binned the same even if some are okay.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
>Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin.
It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall".
Consistency may be running out. It may be time to turn this elegant
observation (not immutable law) into an anti-pattern. As an optimist I
prefer "tendency of systems toward failure of innovation" (AKA sloth
of the entrenched incumbents). This is the last crisis. Because it's
not a crisis of capital, it's a crisis of the very substrate (the
planet) which allows for the possibility of capital. Schumpeter's
creative destruction is now literally environmental destruction. A new
broom is required. Let's hope it's not the communists again. A few
simple bits of regulation could go a long way to correct things.
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
The same could be said though of DVD. Remember that DVD is completely proprietary - we've just done a fantastic job reverse-engineering it. Blu-ray, ironically, is still proprietary, but the specification on how the DRM is implemented is actually public information and you can just download that online. You won't get the required encryption key for your new device without a contract though for it to work, but if you want to read the details, that's fine.
Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale, there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5 with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
You purchased a license to view the media content. I don't agree with this philosophy, I see it as a variant of "right to repair" that we should call "right to own", but that's the way it is for now.
Which is a good thing, if you think about it. It means that the vast majority of people who have no desire to play Blu-ray movies on their PC don't have to foot the bill for licensing.
If the bar for “owning” something is that it is guaranteed to function unchanged 20+ years from now without exception, then I don’t own very much stuff.
I had friends running timing attacks against the Xbox 360 encryption key around that time, they never publicly disclosed their work but I saw them playing games on a hacked firmware around mid 2000s. No reason to think this wouldn't be the same for the CSS encryption key.
Except if your player wasn't conpatible with your TV of course.
At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.
Support for multiple analog signal formats did not become common on TVs until people started moving away from CRTs and towards flat panel LCDs and plasmas. This transition lasted a pretty long time, as both LCD and plasma presented numerous drawbacks compared to CRTs (LCDs arguably still do), and CRTs were still very cost-effective even well into the '00s.
Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.
With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.
The impact might differ a lot depending on your region and where your interests are.
Living in the SECAM region and wanting to watch US/british stuff makes it a lot more prominent issue that if you're in the PAL or NTSC area for instance.
And if you ordered a disc from abroad, you could completely legally import a disc player from, say, the UK and play your region-locked Blu-ray Discs and DVDs that way (and still can, eBay.co.uk works fine). It's inconvenient but it does work, and is 100% legal and hack-free.
Overall I think geo-locking was bad, but I wouldn't go this far:
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
> Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
People complained, but I can't imagine the user experience of playing an NTSC DVD on a PAL player and TV would have been very good, or vice-versa. There isn't a clean way to convert between 50 and 59.94 fields per second. You would have ended up with either jittery playback or incorrect playback speed. The field sizes are also mismatched, which would have required some pretty gross scaling given late-'90s DVD player technology.
Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately, it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no region restrictions.
Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS, instead of using an "official" player.
Even for DVDs, the region locking also applied to computer drives (which typically only had a limited number of region changes) where NTSC vs. PAL were not a concern.
Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
DVD region locking didn't need to be hacked away; it operates purely on the honor system. There are 8 regions, and a DVD contains a single byte specifying which regions it should be allowed to be played in. If the bit for your region is clear, you can play the DVD.
Or, of course, you can just ignore that byte, and play the DVD.
I havea few DVDs I bought in my previous country... I remember first time I tried to play them in a player from the new country, it asked me if I wanted to "move" it to the new region... I think there were 2 "moves" allowed. So, anyway, I was able to play it, no worries.
>even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM).
I think you're really stretching this one. These were dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they HAD to make them in the format that would work in that region.
DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that point.
> geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format
when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing to an enrire industry with no pushback.
This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi light does not pair with the app because its was meant for chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not hia problem either.
The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define digital ownership.
If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
This is out of context and has nothing to do with what they said. The comment is about how companies were already region locking content using technical means on DVDs, not anything to do with government involvement.
Anyone interested in the history of DVD DRM / region locking may be interested in the "illegal number": a hex code which defeated DVD AACS encryption, prompting an attempt by the industry to surpress it across the internet, leading to a streisand effect and the end of effective DVD DRM.
That was a leaked Blu-ray Processing Key that was quickly revoked - but the industry was livid that it was allowed to propagate before they could revoke it (which takes 90 days). This means, ultimately, that if you have a player that hasn't had a Blu-ray Disc made since 2008 inserted into it, and are trying to decrypt a disc made before ~2008, then maybe with the right tools you could. It's a shallow victory meaningless nowadays.
[Even then, a Processing Key isn't nearly as interesting as a Device Key, plenty of which have been leaked since without much attention. Blu-ray has so many keys...]
Stripping Blu-Ray encryption works just fine with MakeMKV (and other tools). Even UHD disks if you have a LibreDrive-compatible reader. Sure, it requires someone to decrypt the individual disks keys and distribute those but in practice it just works for anything that is not a brand new release.
In the UK it was quite common to be able to purchase DVD players that were region free in most of the large electronic stores. The few that were region locked required something like the Konami code to unlock all the region's.
No. Not in the US either, at least. Even if there was a part of the world where it was a big deal, I imagine if you were so big a cinephile for it to matter, you would know how to deal with it.
DVDs were region locked but not to the same degree. Digital content is on a country by country level. An American can easily buy and use a Canadian DVD while on vacation and then use it back home. The same is not true of digital content.
It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
NTSC, PAL and SECAM wasn't a case of intentional geolocking, those were simply different signal standards used in different parts of the world. NTSC had different frequency from PAL/SECAM because the signal was synchronized to the power grid; SECAM was different from PAL because the French being French had to make it their own way (and then communist-affiliated countries adopted it).
Geolocking kind of made sense back when we had incompatible standards like NTSC and PAL. It makes zero sense (except as rent-seeking behavior by rights holders) for Blu-ray and beyond.
To be fair, NTSC/PAL/SECAM were political decisions made by governments at the start of the television era, well before modern copyright maximalism had got its boots on.
They were not political decisions made by governments. They were technical standards developed by standards bodies primarily made up of engineers. Then government institutions like the FCC adopted them for their countries.
> Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side effect that if a particular online release is pulled from distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process, especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable second hand market offering available.
With digital media on the other hand you more or less immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if that happens…
>> You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account to a different geo after it's created but with multiple accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
Maybe iTunes wasn't a good example but it has happened to me with other services. I live in the Netherlands where I bought a subscription for the Formula 1 TV service. Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.
>> Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.
Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
I think they're referring to the official F1TV app, which is region restricted in UK because of an exclusivity agreement between SkyTV and Formula One Group.
F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.
Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.
> AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU
Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can have different access in different places, but the location that counts is the users home location. So e.g. a national sports league can license exclusive rights to different streaming services in different countries, and in your home country there is only one choice, but if you sign up with them and then travel, you still can access it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that country is with someone else.
The original point was that you might loose access to purchased movies because the licensing doesn't allow you so watch it from a different locality.
This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the only point they made.
There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
Potential buyers still have to consider the original point however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it currently, there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre buying on another platform.
Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for example?
I am on the same boat but found it more and more a PITA to manage as Apple started to push for 2FA (that damn prompt every fucking login to "upgrade" your account). Switching account is now way more burdensome, and it's also a pain to get the password prompts on updates as apps are still bound to your logged out account.
I find the password prompts an improvement over earlier versions of iOS, where there was no way to get updates to those apps without logging out of the app store entirely and logging in with the other region's account.
Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.
in 2010 I bought an ipod touch at the px in Afghanistan and Apple wouldn't even let me create an account; without an account most of the features were not accessible.
Final space was also interesting. Another show that got the chopping block for tax purposes. They were removed from AMazon, even if you purchased the seasons!
Came here to say this. I thought "Now that it's not streaming, I've at least got a copy on Amazon Prime!" Nope. Not anymore. And definitely can't get Season 3 any longer. Complete bullshit.
> You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.
If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.
That is feature of DRM and has nothing to do with digital movies. If you bought DRM locked product that you are not really an owner. You can play video file anywhere in the world and any time.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
Ok, "digital movies as most consumers know them". People aren't buying DRM-free digital movies. (Technically, DVDs and Blu-rays are digital as well, but we don't call them that)
Doesn't matter if you are talking about downsides. Digital movie has no downsides, DRM on other hands has as we all know. Only valid complaint here is DRM and it always was. We were warned but nobody listened.
> Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.
> As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes?
Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.
Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
True, and if the market economy was working as it should. Then if enough people were selling old digital music at lower prices, Itunes would have to lower their prices. Essentially what their doing is anti-competitive.
You could even imagine an automated system where you buy a song for some two cents and then sell it back after you're done listening to it for a one cent. You could have users make their collections available on a market place and pay them some fraction of the profits you make.
The ability to upgrade was only available for songs purchaseable as DRM-free on iTunes. I still have tracks in my library with the DRM because the distributor went out of business, making it impossible to upgrade.
On Linux nowadays, but last time I was on macOS with iTunes I has an album of Australian folk rock that still had DRM, were still an old bitrate, and not upgradeable to "Plus" (yes, the thing from 2007) or DRM-free.
I think most were but also as I mentioned elsewhere on this page, Japan and possibly other countries didn’t go DRM-free for some time so possibly they had iTunes Plus but with DRM.
The only problem with this is that with physical media, there's an intrinsic amount of "friction" that prevents gaming the system. It's not convenient to, for example, have five people buy and share one set of DVDs. The hassle of moving the disc around (which gets dramatically worse with distance) incentivizes people to buy their own copy. But digital buying and selling would make it rather easy for one person to "sell" their movie to a friend for next-to-nothing and then "buy" it back when they want to use it. And we can be a thousand miles away with no problem.
There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
If you're talking about loaning a physical copy of a movie to a friend, sure. We have to make arrangements to get the "thing" from one location to another.
Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others.
If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.
We already have exactly this system for library e-book lending. There is a queue of people on the waitlist for a book and once loan period for the current reader is expires it is automatically loaned (no scare quotes because it is in every way a loan) to the next person in the queue.
I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.
I don't disagree with any of this. The mechanisms that ensure that only one person at a time can consume the content in question provide appropriate friction to mirror most of the limitations of physical media.
I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.
Even with non-streaming media, I invite you to share a 5GB movie with a friend of yours without any "friction". The best you can probably do is upload to your personal "cloud" (20 minutes? what's your uplink speed?) and share a link for them to download (what's their download speed) and then move it to whatever device they want to watch it on.
Sharing credentials on streaming services has happened exactly because it is the most seamless way to do it.
With streamed digital copies, one can limit simultaneous playback. Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction, and considering how any little friction (instead of torrenting or getting BR disks) is keeping people on streaming services anyway, it's unlikely it would move the needle too much.
> Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction
Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel" allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of friction involved.
Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"
Response: "Easy? Have you ever used an app with a 10-foot UI that's controlled by a TV remote?"
The friction you are overlooking would be, e.g., the platform to sell the media and the likely cost to do so. Not only that, but you are also not aware of the fraudulent price that is charged for the media now precisely because the market is a monopolistic fraud. If movies were priced at what they are really worth, they would be some … and easily significantly … lower lower price, e.g., $.50 rent and $2 to buy.
If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming service and divide it by the content you consume.
For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the industry has monopolized the market and added DRM, because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going to deprive people of their earnings.
But what it’s really about is, as instituting a new form of slavery where you are given everything for “free” just like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.
I'd be curious to see if a system like that exists already for some kind of digital asset: secondary sales for something that is not limited in quantity, and can still be bought from the source at a higher price.
steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.
>as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.
>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes
Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
This I think is one of the places where smaller technical differences make things legitimately different. I'm not coming from the side of "it shouldn't be allowed" or "it must absolutely be allowed like physical goods".
Second hand items are often
* Lower quality, as they've been used
* Lack consumer protections
The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.
The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.
It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.
I'd say this goes both ways. It's vastly easier and frictionless to sell content. It could and should also be easy to re-sell this content - it's only fair that both seller and buyer benefit from the properties of digital content.
It probably does, I think mostly in the sense digital media is relatively new and misunderstood -- even today -- and publishers thought they could get away with an iron grip they simply could not have with physical stuff. So it's probably not that they lose profitability, but more that the extraordinary profit margins of digital get capped back to normality.
Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process (so that I'm not making duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way? Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency? Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?
[1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.
> if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process
Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.
Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.
E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.
And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".
[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.
> Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.
> it would likely restrict the choice of software players
I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.
If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.
> I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.
Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.
You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.
It’s rather simple, because you want to sell it. If you want to hold out for selling it at market price while the buyer will prefer buying it directly from the source, then so be it, or if you want to sell it immediately, you price it at bargain prices or even free if you don’t care, i.e. value the item anymore. What we are witnessing here is a total destruction of markets and commerce between free humans.
What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.
Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something.
Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.
In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.
Steam has a list of licences I own for the games I have on Steam. They could easily add 2nd hand sales to the Steam store and just transfer that license to another user. No need for a Blockchain when Steam have a perfectly working database.
The issue with resale of digital content is that there is no discernible difference between new and used.
Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less?
I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.
One way to be fair to stores is to not require them to host the marketplace for buying and selling the used copies. People looking for "used" copies of movies and games would have to leave the official store and use third-party web sites to buy and sell. This creates a layer of inconvenience which would level the playing field somewhat.
Another way to improve fairness to stores could be to allow them to charge a "transfer fee" of perhaps 5-10% of original MSRP for transferring any used content.
That would be one way of handling the technical how, but it isn't technical problems that are stopping companies from doing this. Places like Steam already have digital marketplaces yet games aren't resalable.
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.