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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
I've been using Peerflix through the beta test. Every time I receive a disc, it asks me if it appears to be pirated. I assume they would then take action against the sender if this is the case, but I don't know for sure.
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
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
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
I seen a lot of copies of "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Fight Club" with Sharpie labels on people's shelves at home...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
- 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 like the whole idea. In fact, my friends and I have been doing this for years now. We never buy the same game (unless it's needed to play networked games) and just pass it around between each other when we're finished. Always have new games to play and typically at about 1/4 the cost.
Now it has happened and will continue to happen that we all like the game so much that we end up buying our individual copies of the game anyway. I really like this idea though!
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
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.
A friend worked at blockbuster for a year or two (in the UK) and she was adamant that they could know if a disc they rented out had been copied by the renter.
When they'd find someone with suspicious renting patterns, they'd collect all the discs he returned and send them off for "analysis"
It's an interesting idea to convince your employees and even store managers that you are capable of doing something technically impossible, presumably with the hope that it'll trick your customers too.
The "average user" can't (according to the Windows shills) figure out how to run Linux - but they can figure out how to duplicate a DVD and then share it over a P2P network (according to said "average users" writing for the RIAA and MPAA).
What's wrong with this picture?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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why not sell your stuff for cash. http://replaylink.com/ you get the full purchase price minus a $1 service fee and the Amazon seller fee, and it's as easy as returning a netflix rental. They send you an addressed postage paid media mailer.
they are called 'Libraries'
check one out some time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The only right movie producers have is to exclusively show first viewings in movie theaters. That's the only right they've ever had for the last 100 years since films were first made.
The fact that digitization is making it easier and easier to distribute this media after the showing in theatres is completely beyond the moral scope of these companies.
They quite simply found a lot of free cash in the 80s with cable TV distribution and VHS rentals. That free cash was never theirs by right in the first place, and they offered a viable distribution service back then...those times are over, and the right to reap all those free profits is being taken back by the real bosses in a free market, the customer.
Eat shit and die MPAA/RIAA
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I've only had 1 problem so far. I got a copy of Night of the Living Dead that was scrathed to hell. When it arrived, it played, so I confirmed it. Of course, when I played it, I found that a couple minutes would not play. But because I had let a week or so pass between receipt and claim, I was out of luck. I wrote about 5 emails to their CS about this, and got 1 response, which really had nothing to do with my complaint. But otherwise nearly all the movies I've gotten are in very good condition.
The bad part is that a lot of movies are technically "available", but might only be in the hands of 1 or 2 other users, neither of which actually intends to share their copy, but has it listed for one reason or another. So it sometimes takes a few weeks (or more) to get some movies. Also, maybe half the movies I listed have been requested by others. But then again, I didn't expect the demand to be extremely high for that copy of The Mask someone gave me. Generally, good movies get requested fairly quickly.
If you have a specific movie in mind that you want right away, Peerflix isn't the best solution. But if you have a list of 20 or so movies you would like to get eventually, it's a nice service.
My only other complaint would be that when your "Peerbux" goes to zero, it automatically charges another $5 worth to you, rather than waiting until you actually want to buy something. This is obviously a nice way for the company to get a few bucks extra from everyone in the end, but it strikes me as shadey.
As far a Piracy goes, well, it's really no different than renting movies or using Netflix, so I think it's a non-issue as it pertains to Peerflix specifically.
The only option the MPAA would have would seem to be to bribe the corrupted politicians to pass a new law banning First-sale doctrine.
I just signed up for the service to give it a try. I have some DVD's that I just don't watch anymore. There is no legal reason why I should not be able to sell/trade them for different movies that were also legally purchased.
The Peerflix system makes you put in the UPC code on the back of the DVD box to be able to list it for potential trade. You can't just type in a name of a DVD and say "hey, lets trade". I think the system is actually pretty cool. You cannot trade copied movies. If you do, you get banned. So all of the DVD's were legally purchased and the MPAA made their money off of them.
I personally think it is pretty sad that the reaction to this type of service would be that "people are bad and will just copy and send". I am tired of the MPAA/RIAA assuming that I am a criminal. I will be happy to never give them another penny of my money again.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Back in the days, I used to swap computer games on UGTZ.com. Later they added books and movies swaps, and I participated in both. By the time I completed my collection and left the site, I haven't heard of anybody suing them for anything.
There would be greater difficulty in doing so. There is an exception in the statutory first sale doctrine, which prohibits renting sound recordings and computer software (other than console games).
While you can just go out and rent DVDs as you like, you'd have to argue that you were actually selling the CDs and that it wasn't a convoluted rental scheme.
Libraries have an exception, but not just anyone is a library.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
...while such trades may be legal under the first-sale doctrine of U.S. Copyright Act...
That's just because it isn't software. On more than one occasion I have been told by software companies that selling your used copy was illegal, even if the sale included all packing material and an affidavit that you wiped your harddrive of the product. They argue that the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to them because the software was never sold, only licensed. They have shut down eBay sales of software and sent cease and desist notices to yard sales.
All the DVD manufacturers need to do to stop Peerflix, is to slap a license on every DVD. It won't be legal, but that hasn't stopped the software industry or its lapdogs in the judiciary.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
District courts in California and Texas have disagreed
If you're in Missouri, though.. watch out.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
When you mail someone a DVD you don't want any more, it's like walking into Best Buy, shoplifting a DVD, and shooting the cashier on the way out.
It's unfortunate, but pirates are using this "postal system" to destroy the value created by hard working movie creators. If the postal system is allowed to go on unchecked it will destroy the movie industry. No movies will ever be made again.
We question the use of this so called postal "service". The creators should have known that it would be abused this way. However, some people claim that there are legal and valid uses for the postal system. Fortunately there is a very reasonable compromise, Digital Rights Management in the postal system. This will close the analog hole. When you mail something, a postal employee will open up your mail and carefully examine what is inside. If it's a copyright protected movie on DVD, or copyright protected music on CD, or a copyright protected page torn out of a magazine, the employee will refuse to deliver the message. Your average US Postal Service customer won't notice any change. Only pirates will be inconvienced.
We here at the MPAA trust that all law abiding, moral citizens will support this perfect plan. We also look forward to your support for our future plan to monitor all physical human contact to eliminate the "handing a DVD to your friend" loophole.
Sincerely, the perfectly reasonable MPAA who is doing this for your own good.
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