Remember kids, if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing!
Remember kids, if buying is owning, piracy still isn’t stealing. You can make infinite copies of digital media.
It’s still very much copyright infringement. I don’t give a shit about CI, but it still is that.
They know. They simply do not care.
Not only that, but they think people are dumb enough to keep paying (and sometimes they’re not wrong).
There is an easy fix here:
Require mergers to refund customers impacted as part of the merger.
Refund the sale price (that’s less than its value to me), or the value I placed on it (that’s difficult to estimate)?
Or just let people download the media they purchased before you shutter the service.
The whole issue here is that everyone wants to sell you some service and never let you own something.
The issue is obligations for you, but not for them.
Want me to buy your media legally? Oh please, this is tremendously easy to do for a corporation!
- Downloadable files (you have files, right? Otherwise how are you streaming out the stuff)
- …with open codecs (you are using an open codec right? Otherwise you have to encode your stuff like 10 times for 10 different devices each with its own idiosyncrasy)
- …without DRM (you have clean copies right? it’d not be smart to base a business model on files you can’t open, see the above)
- …at an aggregate price that’s lower than paying for TV cable (you can cash in only a bit, right? It’s digital media and your competition is literally over-the-air TV with extra steps, it’s not like you have the mother of pearl of cancer cures here)
I wish guides about cracking DRM for legally purchased content were more popular
The reason they aren’t is because methods for cracking DRM like Widevine are kept extremely secret so that the exploits don’t get patched. It does mean that a lot of content is locked to whatever the scene decides is worth their time to crack and distribute, but if anyone made the methods they use public, they would stop working very quickly.
This happened with a version of Denuvo. Someone leaked an unobfuscated cracked version of a game (I think it was Need for Speed), giving Denuvo the opportunity to study how their protection got cracked.
What does Widevine actually do? You may not be able to download directly but you can just use OBS
You’ll get worse quality. Widevine doesn’t let you play 4K content on unapproved systems. It’s also way less convenient. Obviously, pirates are not affected because they can just download Star.Wars.XII.Galactic.Boogaloo.WEBRIP.4K-DarkNaruto69.mkv, it’s only an issue if you try to watch content legally for some reason.
Making their products harder to use, while making them more expensive
I will genuinely never pay for a streaming service again lmao
This kind of shitfuckery has been going on for as long as DRM has been around and yet people still fall for the scam.
As opposed to buying it illegally, or stealing it legally?
Stremio
And Onstream apk if you’re on android
