On the one hand, I don't expect anything to exist "forever". Companies don't stay in business forever. A forever contract doesn't even make sense.
But on the other hand, there need to be protections here. Just because a company merges or gets bought, doesn't mean they should be able to end their guarantees.
What about if, to be legally allowed to license streaming content, companies were required by law to:
1) Specify a minimum duration available as part of the buy button and all other text using the term "buy" or "license"? E.g. "Buy for 5 years" or "License now (min. 10 years guaranteed)"
2) Require some kind of insurance/escrow/backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded)
In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I've even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.
No. If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it. If it starts falling apart, you can repair it. If a cd gets a scratch you can repair it. You can store it in a climate controlled environment. All of these things are in your hands. Some people will burn their books or toss them. Some will preserve them for centuries.
The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.
Sure, but that's a lot of effort. And if you want to copy your streams illegally or pirate duplicates you can do that too, which also involves effort.
I'm just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it's degraded, they're upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with all of it, but probably most of it. So there's already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you're doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.
You are reasoning from what might be better described as an artifact of a limited period in time that will never come again reasoning from happenstance as if it were a fundamental source of meaning.
It's trivial with backups to retain digital data forever. Even going just a bit further back in time books and vinyl can last a lifetime. What you are hanging your argument on is the lack of durability of optical disks a factor for ~40 years vs the inherent infinite durability of files forever after.
We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
The interests of rights holders is rarely aligned with the public. Its a multitude of barren fields that have never yielded anything because they are capable of buying art but not capable of making it. Even creatives have largely been compensated for their work many times over and are largely offering society bondage in return for nothing. More manure than fertile field. I suppose this is an overly long way to say fuck em.
Instead of quite frankly over complicated nonsense just don't legally let people use the term buy if the company can by any means whatsoever reclaim their rights EVER. They should have to use the word rent and give a duration and that duration should be enforced. The simplest way to enforce this is if you use the word buy you cannot encumber the PURCHASE with DRM whatsoever.
Current rights holders should have to provide a means to remove existing DRM. Failure to do so should imply forfeiting the entire purchase price. Rights holders that offer rentals and don't meet the duration should have to offer a prorated refund for the time stolen from users.
The sky wouldn't fall. People would still make movies, music, and write books.
Not only that, it's copyrights which are supposed to expire. The idea that physical media should be expected to degrade through the passage of time sooner than works will enter into the public domain is absurd.
What provision does DCMA have, if any, for removing DRM when a copyright expires?
After the copyright expires it's no longer a copyrighted work and then you're not circumventing DRM that protects a copyrighted work.
The real problem is that circumvention tools are prohibited regardless of what you use them for, so then they use the same DRM system on works that are still under copyright and you nominally can't provide someone with tools to break the DRM on the ones in the public domain. (In practice people just ignore the law or distribute circumvention tools from servers in other countries.)
It's not completely obvious that it actually works this way. For example, if someone's "DRM system" is that the box it comes in is screwed shut and you're intended to use some I/O pins provided on the outside, does that mean a screw driver is a circumvention tool and therefore screw drivers are illegal? Obviously problematic if so, but in the reverse case where anyone else using the same system for something other than protecting a copyrighted work means anyone can distribute tools to circumvent it, third parties would just put public domain works behind the same DRM system as copyrighted ones so that anyone could distribute circumvention tools. The prohibition on circumvention tools is batshit crazy.
That is incorrect. We still have perfectly fine vinyls from the 1970s and that's just us. No climate controlling or anything like that.
If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
Remember to re-rip as lossless (e.g. flac) while you still have those CDs.
Vinyl doesn't degrade with time, but it does degrade each time you play it. A heavily played album does not sound the same as a new one. The rate of degradation probably depends to some degree on your specific turntable and needle. (Of course, a worn-out record has its own special charm.)
And I've certainly lost all the MP3's I had from 25 years ago to 15 years ago. God only knows what old hard drive they were on that got tossed. I hadn't listened to them in years, of course, once Spotify's library grew large enough.
I get your point but I think your timeline is off. I don't have concrete data but from personal experience (myself, friends family) is say it's trivial to keep books, records, even newspapers for decades. CDs in my world only go back to the 1990s. Tapes definitely didn't
Books, comics, magazines and similar commonly last at least decades if not mistreated or stored badly.
Books that are hundreds of years old are a thing too, but I'm not personally sure if that's pretty standard for their lifespan.
Having AC and bookshelves is not fancy or hard. Books with decent paper can and do last centuries. Books with really crappy paper last decades and are generally still usable if you’re careful. DVDs last a stinking long time, too.
All you’re saying is that physical things aren’t eternal. Yes everybody knows that. Digital things aren’t generally eternal either. I accept that. But look at the timeframes.
I'm in my forties, I have books and comic books that my dad was reading as a kid.
Making copies isn't fancy. It's just illegal because IP brokers have too much power and made it so. It's a commonsense measure that you could do with most forms of purchased media, increasingly trivially until said IP brokers succeeded in roping the government into threatening people who did so, and so now less people do so. To promise that a digital copy would be accessible forever and then rescind that access without offering a download is straightforwardly fraud
Streamed digital media can be copied trivially, you're just not allowed to.
I'm not even allowed to tell you how to do it.
Well, only for the one protected by DRM.
Nit: It's not protected by DRM, it's protected by copyrights. It's still against the law in most places to violate copyrights, even if there's no DRM involved.
But it's equally important that where the copying would otherwise be allowed under copyright rules, anti tampering DRM laws (like DMCA 1201) make it criminal to perform or aid that copying.
That's why DRM protection for its own sake needs to get tossed. It's a massive overreach.
Would it still be considered bypassing DRM if you just record the screen? All the layers of DRM are active in that case.
I wouldn't say copying streams is trivially easy
The tools to do so would probably be easily available if it weren't illegal
Maybe we should be given a lifetime "license" for the digital goods we buy. For example, if I bought a digital copy of a game or a movie and the company went out of business, I would be allowed to obtain and use a bootleg copy. Ideally, we should be allowed to download it from anywhere, including other stores, but that seems unlikely.
Just to be clear for anyone who didn’t read TFA, the digital copies were given out as a bonus with purchases of physical media. Sure someone may have made a different purchasing decision if they knew the streaming platform would be going away eventually, but it’s not like they took back their DVDs.
I was thinking to some thing. But I can see how this would effect people now that everything is digital.
Just to be clear for anyone who thinks that makes Sony's actions acceptable in any way, it does not.
Sony took from the customer what they sold. That they legally "allowed" themselves to do this in fine print while telling their customers otherwise makes it even more scummy, not less.
Perhaps anybody that uses the term “Buy” or “Forever” should risk the content falling into the public domain should they cease to uphold their service requirements of the contract they made.
Why only my lifetime? If I buy a copyright protected work, the doctrine of first sale asserts that I have the right to transfer it to anyone else, and if I die before doing so, whoever inherits me should have the rights to access to every single copyrighted thing I ever bought.
This is why the analogy with "wear and tear" doesn't apply to digital goods, it doesn't even make any sense. Wear and tear is something that applies to physical things in the real world, not information, specifically information in a digital format.
The problem here is not physical things that are the medium for information, it's the information itself that somehow people want to control.
Copying it is illegal in some countries, even if it is purely for private use - the UK and some EU countries, probably others around the world. The UK tried to introduce a private use exception but it was only legal under EU law (this was pre-Brexit) if the copyright holders were compensated for it (which was not part of the UK law).
What if it falls and breaks ?
Let's tie it to the length of copyright law. If it's still protected and under copyright then the obligation to keep it available exists. So if they want to keep extending copyright, well, it will go both ways.
This is too easy to loophole out of and it leaves too big of a hole to patch. As a company, all I would need to do is sell the rights, shut down the service, buy it back, rinse and repeat. I don’t think this is a great solution.
That's awful for your reputation.
whereas this shit here is doing some wonders!
We don't buy Sony/Apple/Microsoft/etc because we want to, but because we have no choice. To too big to care.
I chuckled a little bit when I read this. I honestly believe this isn’t something these companies care about at all. It already does damage their reputation yet we see it happen again and again. I do wonder why, does it come down to the monopolization of content? I want to say I’m surprised but I’m not.
I disagree; in that if they try and sell the rights, they're trying to get out of their obligations to make the content available - that's the point at which it should be blocked; or the new rights holder needs to pick up those obligations to existing customers with the same terms.
I imagine it’s much more complicated than that because they themselves may have never owned the content. A lot of times, they’re leasing content. I think the content owner could choose not to renew a contract thus requiring the distributor to stop distributing. I imagine if the regulator were to go after this, thee’d really need to start at the content owner themselves as well as every middleman.
You can't sell your right without selling the liability.
When the company go bankrupt, somebody should represent the customer and get a fair share in what's left..
Which they shouldn't do unpenalized since selling would void the contract.
Then they can be blocked from selling the rights without the liability of maintaining the service being attached. In order to end the obligation of maintaining the service, DRM free copies must be provided to everyone who purchased the content for some minimum time frame. Failure to do so puts the work in the public domain.
And if they want to stop maintaining it, let them have the option of releasing it into the public domain and sending a digital copy to the library of congress or something.
You can't make a work public domain, just because one distributor is shutting down their digital library. In the first place, they don't even have the rights for this, they just resell other people's work.
Demanding for ensuring another way for accessing the work in the same or similar way is fair enough. You lose nothing, they gain nothing, fairly balanced.
True. Yet I think the idea is sound — if a publisher / rights holder refuses to put a work into print or make it available, they should not be able to keep it away from the public. Copyright is a benefit given to authors & publishers, but is too-often used to suppress works due to content or retire works that can be replaced in the catalog by more profitable offerings.
Yeah it needs to be made transitive. If you've bought a digital copy of the work from one distributor that should obligate the rightsholder to transferring the individual distribution rights (this needs to be nailed to the wall by the legislature so that distribution rights all carry this mandate by law). If they want to switch distributors then the old distributor needs to be obligated to provide a method of transferring those individual distribution rights to the new distributor. If all this is "too burdensome" (editorial note: cry harder about your profits you fucking capitalist goons) then all the parties can just make it public domain.
If the distributor doesn't want it anymore the author or publisher should get a different one
......
At the very least I would also accept a DRM free copy being provided to everyone who had purchased it (e.g. at least one year or so to download it), and in failure to do that it becomes public domain. Anything less and we basically just end up with the classic xkcd situation https://xkcd.com/488/
Why bend the knee? They want insane copyright protections. We do to.
That's a clever idea, but I'm not sure it really works because the company who owns the copyright isn't necessarily the company providing the stream to you digitally.
This is about ensuring it stays available from the streaming distributor, and how much time remains on the copyright doesn't really have anything to do with them. And even if the copyright expires next year, I still want to make sure I can keep streaming it for the next 10 or 15 years or whatever, if I buy it today.
If it expires next year then you could download it free anyways.
I am not buying the content, I am buying the service.
What I expect as a part of deal was, to have access to that content without worrying about backups or storage spaces.
If they can't provide that, it have to be communicated upfront.
Presently, in practical terms, 'lifetime' may as well be 100 years. Though I'd still prefer to see it as 'lifetime*' ... '*lifetime is 100 years'.
If the provider made it available for purchase (not subscription), the liability should go to them first to make DRM free copies available for those who purchased it before shutting down the service. If they are unable to do so, e.g. a sudden bankruptcy, then the liability could go to the copyright holder to find another provider to continue the service and transfer purchases, or provide DRM free copies (either should not be a problem if they are still making money from the given IP). In the event they are no longer making enough money from that IP and wish to just rid their hands of it, it becomes public domain.
And they'll choose the crappiest provider they possibly can whose website (no app, presumably) only works in some ancient browser and is "down for maintenance" 50% of the time because that provider has the lowest costs and is thus willing to charge the least for it...
If made a law it would make such negligence illegal. You may try to launder the responsibility, but at the end of the day you would be on the hook as the copyright owner. You might have legal contracts that your servicing contractors might break, allowing you to pin the blame back to them, but this would all be making it a business problem rather than a person problem.
Not if you change the law to say so :)
I don’t see how Sony isn’t simply defrauding their (funimation’s) customers. How does a merger change this? I could maybe understand a digital library being disappeared after a bankruptcy but it appears funimation was doing okay and they just screwed their customers to make extra margin. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be sued.
It’s not as though funimation advertised these leases as leases, they called them forever purchases lol. It’s outrageous these companies don’t advertise a period of time your purchase is good for and purchase insurance to ensure availability. They trick their customers with the fraudulent lie that they’re buying something and then screw them because they paid a lump sum up front and made themselves easy marks.
I’ve paid for Crunchyroll before but fuck doing that ever again when anime piracy sites like aniwave provide in many ways a better experience.
The license agreements and ToS for all of this has various "we can terminate this in any way we want at any time we want for any reason we want" clauses, which is effectively a magical bulletproof solution in many countries.
And customers are free to refuse to engage with companies that have such clauses in their terms-of-service.
Do companies that do not have such clauses and provide comparable services exist? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage even in theory.
If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage in practice.
The only freedom that customers (=citizens) have is to engage into a cartel (=state) to impose their collective interests (=democratic choice) on companies by force (=law).
Companies are then free to refuse to engage with states which have such customer-protective clauses in their laws.
Yes, and you can found more of them, too.
Yes.
Care to elaborate? Honest question because I'd genuinely like to know
There are plenty of companies that sell you physical media. Even analog format like vinyl and cassettes.
GoG (good old games) sells you games without DRM. There are others like that, too. Some companies, like id, open source many of their works.
You can buy DRM free music and videos.
There is not any significant DRM free digital movie marketplace, and the reality is that movies aren't fungible: if I want to watch Strange World or Doctor Who, I'm not going to just instead watch an indie arthouse film that happens to be available without DRM
They are also free to vote for a government that will protect their rights against egregious and plainly deceptive marketing practices, so they don't each have to do that stuff individually. Companies act as a collective enterprise, so can citizens.
Yes, citizens can form companies and clubs and cooperatives.
The thing is, company can put literally anything they want in their ToS, they can say we're free to break your legs for any reason whatsoever at any point of our choosing, that won't make it legal. Courts frequently rule based on the customer's and market expectation vs what ToS say all the time, and the consumer wins more often than not.
What's wrong with Crunchyroll?
I just recently noticed that new Sony TVs come with a dedicated Crunchyroll button and wondered whether this streaming service is worth it? It seems like you don't think it is, correct?
There's probably nothing wrong with Crunchyroll if you're into the content it provides. The article is about Sony removing the digital copies that buyers of Funimation DVDs/Blurays purchased together with their physical media - and the article argues that some may have discarded the physical media because they have (had) convenient access to the digital copies (hint: don't do that!). But yeah, this is another instance where people who forked out their hard-earned money for legal copies of media are screwed and might be tempted to think "why didn't I simply download a pirated copy?".
I'm surprised that these companies are not feeling the effects of the ill will that is caused by these kinds of decisions.
It’s really a baffling move by Sony which seems to be unaware that they have the most to lose from consumers losing confidence in and sympathy for official anime content distribution.
Sony’s Crunchyroll is advertised as “supporting anime creators”, when you are trying to persuade people to pay for anime on moral grounds, and often do so successfully, it seems like a stupendously bad idea to put people in the position where supporting Crunchyroll means financially benefiting a company that just defrauded their customers. The PR win of making sure people didn’t lose access to their content would have been well worth it.
If you want to support anime creators AND consumers, buy merch, don’t give Sony your money. Don’t be a sucker getting guilt tripped by an evil corporation. At least with merch you actually own something.
This is the same company that recently deleted huge swaths of TV shows that people had purchased from their library because they didn't want to pay to renew the license. That one got enough people pissed enough that they walked it back, but this is just how Sony operates.
Thanks for the explanation, yeah, being in that situation must be terrible.
Owned by Sony.
Crunchyroll is the most bizarre streaming service I’ve tried. None of the anime had original audio tracks. One Punch Man was available only with a French dub. A Korean anime had many audio tracks to choose from... but none of them were Korean. What the hell?
Cancelled the trial after several minutes.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said.
But the difference with physical media and streaming access is that it's actually legal to make a backup of physical media. It might be annoying or enthusiast-behavior to do so, but on the flip side, if a company finds out I'm making rips of streams, they'll at the least shut off my account (which includes access to the rest of the media) and quite possible throw a lawyer at me. Companies have done everything they can to nuke the idea of perpetuity.
Vanishingly few people are themselves ripping streams thanks to Widevine. They are just torrenting stuff.
BTW only the first "level" of widevine has been cracked as far as I can find, which is limited to lower quality streams.
The torrents don't just pop out of thin air, someone has to download from the streaming service and strip the DRM at least once.
Right, but my point is most people are not ripping streams. HDRips are likely either some 0day exploit in Widevine or a device which pretends to respect HDCP.
Just about everyone archiving or "archiving" is torrenting.
I'd argue that the archival happens the moment the DRM is stripped, the seeders are just helping out with the data replication part - but I get what you're saying.
As an aside, HDCP is broken in practice but frowned upon for archival, since it requires a re-encode, introducing generation loss.
HDCP itself isn't broken, but it shifts the problem to the next weakest link which would be between the controller board and the panel.
No, HDCP itself is broken. According to the DMCA, and corresponding legal precedent[1], you're allowed to convert one version of HDCP to another. You can buy legitimate adapters off the shelf (provisioned with valid keys) to convert HDCP 2.2 to HDCP 1.4. No jumping through hoops, no legal grey areas (for now), it just works.
HDCP 1.4 uses export-grade (broken) cryptography, the master keys are available on the public web. But you don't need to bother understanding the specifics, since just about any HDMI 1.4 sink you buy from China (whether it's a capture card or splitter) will strip HDCP 1.4 as a matter of course.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/4k-content-protection-stripper-beat...
You may be allowed, but how would such a device get keys from DCP, and how do they avoid all of those keys being immediately blacklisted from being used for HDCP downgrades? HDCP 2.2 isn't the latest version either.
They don't get blacklisted because what they're doing is explicitly allowed, and very widespread. Yes, HDCP 2.3 is the latest version but HDCP 2.2 is all you need in practice. I can't talk from experience on 2.3, but I can on 2.2, so that's what I referenced.
If you don't believe me but also don't want to buy any hardware to test for yourself, search for "HDCP 2.2 splitter" on amazon and read the reviews (but beware of confused customers who aren't aware of the difference between HDCP 2.2 and 1.4).
Compliant converters can exists, but the upstream can tell that there is a downstream device using HDCP 1.x
I'm not sure precisely why it works, but I can tell you for sure that my upstream devices cannot tell, and that it works in practice. I assume the splitter only tells the source about one of its downstream sinks (if at all), but not both. (maybe that makes it non-compliant and at risk of revocation - I'm not sure, but do know that it hasn't happened yet)
Well, sort of. It's legal to have one, but the steps necessary to actually make it aren't always legal.
It would be a lot simpler to just ban DRM, and allow digital copying for personal use. I don't expect it to happen any time soon, but I can dream.
We don't need to ban DRM, we just need to force content providers to choose between technical and legal means of copyright protection.
They should not be permitted to use both, because DRM amounts in practice to theft from the (eventual) public domain.
We don't need to ban DRM, we need to unban DRM-circumventon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
Yeah, I agree with that, and was going to add an edit to that effect but I guess I forgot.
The way things are currently, the legal protections are stronger than the technical protections. I think it's much more realistic for legislation to be updated to allow copying for personal use, than it is for DRM to be banned outright.
This is not even interesting because in practice all of the DRM is broken. The actual problem is that we have tools that prohibit circumventing DRM even when the copy is not an infringement of copyright (e.g. fair use) and that prohibit distribution of circumvention tools even if they're not used for copyright infringement, e.g. because the same DRM system is being maliciously applied to works already in the public domain.
Or -- and this is the real reason this garbage is on the books -- the DRM is being used for anti-competitive purposes rather than to prevent copying. Because it doesn't prevent copying (evidence: all the content being on all the piracy sites), but it does prevent a legitimate competitor who actually cares about complying with the law from doing interoperability things that are not an infringement of copyright but are a violation of the DMCA.
I like your idea.
Though in a sense this problem is already solved. If a company promises "forever" but doesn't back it up with a surety bond or endowment guarantee of some sort, then you should treat it with great skepticism.
In the meantime, consumers are free to litigate under breach of contract, false advertising or other appropriate doctrine.
In this case, it was never really "forever" at all, as the Terms stated:
Funimation can “without advance notice… immediately suspend or terminate the availability of the Service and/or content (and any elements and features of them), in whole or in part, for any reason."
Isn't that still false advertising? At least in some parts of the world?
Why not till the end of life of the customer plus 95 years?
Seems reasonable.
Maybe don't say BUY or OWN clearly and be upfront and pedantic about it.
There are hundreds-of-years-old annuities that are still paying interest.
"A living artifact from the Dutch Golden Age: Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest"
https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-dutch-golde...
Hmmm, how about "if a company advertises something being available 'forever', they are required to make it available for a length of time not less than the average human lifespan"?
That sounds reasonable to me. :)
Or that they have to provide a DRM-free version before removing access.
There was a related post a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned that it shouldn’t be called buying, but _renting_ the content. Since it can be removed from you any point and time for any reason.
They might already have that kind of fineprint in there somewhere?
That's a nice idea, but I think customers should also be allowed to opt out of that requirement. Why should I be forced to pay for that insurance, when I don't need it? (And, of course, that's the situation we have today: companies can legally license you content with our without that kind of insurance.)
They won't be and that's your problem.
I believe that the rules you are asking for exist in the EU.
https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-bus...
On one hand, that's kinda fair. Forever is pretty rough. On the other hand, companies probably shouldn't use the word forever when promising things then.
I don't like your solution, because there's legitimately movies I really only want to watch once (actually that's the majority of them), and I'm pretty sure companies are gonna use the need to provide it for X time as a reason to jack up the price. I think there's a legitimate place for limited time things, but the deal should be up front and you shouldn't be using the word "forever".
Also, kinda limits the notion of "buying" far beyond the standard english definition. "Buying" a ticket to a movie in a theater is perfectly legitimate, but doesn't really correspond to anything you're talking about. We all know we have to leave the movie theater afterwards and can't watch the movie again. This is fine, generally, because we know the deal going into it.
It seems like the solution here is to have companies be up front with the deal. I feel like the easiest way to do that is to hold a couple companies accountable for the language they use when promising something, and the rest of them will be very up front, very quickly.
And I don't mean bury it in a EULA, but the actual deal that gets filtered down to the human beings, just make it so that only provisions of the EULA that most customers know about are actually enforceable or something.
Why not ? People aren't forever either.
Unless a non-human entity can agree to one / it can be sold / it can be transferred to heirs ?
(I guess it would be better to call it "until your death", but I would guess marketing finds that phrasing too negative ?)
This is kind of ridiculous in this context. The content is not really at risk of being lost. Did the service go away even though you were supposed to have permanent access? Okay, now it should be legal for you to download it from The Pirate Bay.