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Peerflix Launches P2P DVD Sharing Service
Dotnaught writes "Peerflix has offically launched, ending a 12 month beta test. The company manages the peer-to-peer trading of physical DVDs (with CDs and videogames coming soon) by mail. As the article in InformationWeek suggests, while such trades may be legal under the first-sale doctrine of U.S. Copyright Act, content owners won't be pleased -- discs are easy to copy and there's ample precedent to suggest users will dupe discs before trading them."
rent it all, copy and send back? is this less/more offensive than netflix= just because there is no monthly fee?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
How would you tell if someone pirated it?
I believe the submitter is suggesting that the end user would make a copy, keep the copy, then send on the original, not the copy...
How would any media corporation of any kind fight something like this on any principal but that they think all their users are lying, cheating bastards?
And even then... would companied like Paramount have to sue themselves for owning something like Blockbuster?
FanFictionRecs.net
The problem isn't sending pirated discs, but pirating the disc for personal use and then sending the original back.
Me, I've attempted to use way too many pirated discs (it wasn't mine, it was given to me by friend(s) and I didn't realise until I started watching it). The quality has been so shit that I've given up. Sure there's ways to pirate stuff while keeping the quality, but I've been burned so many times (friend rents a DVD and burns it) that I've given up with all of it and now refuse to watch any pirated movies. If it's good enough to watch, it's good enough for me to spend some money on it.
They already think everyone who uses their product is a lying cheating bastard who deserves their scorn.
Reference:
- the "do not pirate" commericals in a theatre, after you've paid to see the movie
- The FBI warning at the beginning of every DVD that you can't fast-forward through
- Unskippable advertisements on DVDs, especially rentals
And why would I even consider using this instead of Netflix? With Netflix, I have every DVD I could imagine one day away, and if there's something wrong with it, they'll send me a replacement. With this setup, I'm getting DVD's in who-knows-what condition, in who-knows-how-much time from who-knows-who. Oh yeah, and I'm still paying, possibly more than Netflix. Where do I sign up?
Maybe thet's it, people will realize what turkys they are when Peerflix gets flooded with those loosers.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Actually, you're forgetting pirated in Hong Kong / China pirated. The far more popular kind of pirated. I've seen plenty of pirated hardware for consoles, and the same holds true for DVDs. The worksmanship is far superiour to your average burnt in a DVD-r quality, but still not a decent release. Pirated carts are typically much easier to spot, since they usually don't work right and the labels look like trash. This is the sort of piracy that netflix can prevent by purchasing in bulk from reputable distributers, that peerflix can't quite filter for.
But the submitter probably was suggesting the usual rent-burn-return piracy. It's just not the only form out there is all.
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Open Source Sysadmin
- discs are easy to copy".
Well, content owners will NEVER be pleased, what they'd like you to do is pay $$$$$ and keep the stuff.
There will always be people that copy (be it legal or not). But this creates an opportunity for those people who don't want to spend lots of money on new films but want to stay legitimate as well.
I used to do this with my friends in college - I bought Eye of the Beholder, he bought Ultima Underworld. When we finished them, we'd trade boxes.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Yet, they aren't worried about this happening with Blockbuster rentals or Netflix? Give me a break.
Seems to me that labelling anything as a cooperative act between peers leads to mad content owners.
If you're just going to trade casually, this service might work okay. Hopefully your sender will mail the disc on time and isn't away on vacation. Does anyone know how long it usually takes to get a request?
On the other hand, if you're someone who really wants to watch a lot of movies, wants to count on being able to get new releases relatively soon, I don't know if this would work out so hot. With Netflix for $18/mo if you really push it, you can get maybe 9-12 DVDs a month. Of course if you sit on your discs, you might only get five or six a month. But they at least ship stuff on a schedule, not whenever they feel like hunting down a DVD and walking it out to the mailbox. I guess I'm just pretty cynical, and relying upon other Joes to send me their movies in a reasonalble timeframe with reasonable quality.
Do I get this right.. You print out the mailer from your printer?
And movies are assigned "peerbux" ratings, so you can't offer up a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies from the 70s and expect to get the complete Sopranos in return? How does that work? You need to build up a library of good movies so you can give them away? I'm not understanding.
*shrug*
I just don't see it as being worth the hassle, but good for you if you like it.
People already rip rental DVD's. I can't imagine the problem getting much worse with traded DVD's.
It would be nice if these media retards understood that the reasons why MP3s took off in the late 1990s was that hard drive capacities increased dramatically in a short period of time relative to the capacity of CD-ROMs, because CD-RW drives became real cheap all of a sudden and because the people who liked making mix tapes really liked a format that was a lot easier to deal with that allowed you to make mix CDs with hundreds of songs just by pointing and clicking. None of these things apply with DVDs, the biggest hard drive you can get today will only hold 100 uncompressed DVD images (I'm assuming that we don't want further compression because it degrades the image which looks like shit on a big screen TV), people don't make video mix tapes (although it would be kind of interesting) and also because it's still a pain in the ass to strip CSS off of DVDs. Jesus Christ, could these lazy media bastards just put down the grape-flavored MPAA piracy Kool-Aid for once?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
As far as content owners are concerned, I'm not sure how this would harm them anymore than something like Netflix. The same making a copy and sending it back is just as easy if not easier with their service.
That is complete and utter bullshit. There is no possible way that they could tell that the disc was copied from. How, exactly, would they be able to do that? To copy a disc, all you'd have to do is, um, read it. You know, with a laser. Just like when you play it.
So they'd be able to tell if somebody scanned it with a laser one time as opposed to others? I don't think so.
1) Put DVD in drive
2) Click on "Clone DVD"
3) Wait for popup message to say "Change disks"
4) Change disks
5) Write name of DVD on disk.
Gosh. That's _much_ harder than learning Linux.
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