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Google Re-Refunds Video Purchases
holymodal writes "In a new post to the Google blog Bindu Reddy, the Google Video product manager, admits that only offering refunds via Google Checkout was a bad idea: 'We should have anticipated that some users would see a Checkout credit as nothing more than an extra step of a different (and annoyingly self-serving) kind. Our bad.' Google now plans to issue customers a full credit card refund, while allowing them to keep the Checkout credit and extending the life of purchased videos another six months."
I wonder if you (and others) would accept the apology if it were Microsoft instead of Google...
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I actually wonder if Google planned on revoking the DRM movies the whole time. It's not hard for me to imagine myself thinking that way if I was the head of Google--give a first class lesson on why DRM sucks, that even normal people (albeit those who would buy movies via Google!) could understand.
It's like everything you buy has a long, long string literally attached to it; and at any time your new tv could start jerking toward your front door, outside, and back up the street to corporate headquarters.
expandfairuse.org
I have to wonder if the six month extension exists specifically so some third party can create a workaround for the DRM, allowing people to keep their videos forever. Google obviously can't release such a thing without violating contracts with the media providers, but they might be able to make it very easy for such a thing to get produced.
Ok, I am the guy that actually tried to buy one of their videos. Unfortunately I couldn't because I needed an American credit card. Brilliant.
Buying stuff on the Internet is hard as hell. I don't mean buying stuff that gets delivered in a package - that is easy enough to do over the Internet and works just fine worldwide. But when it comes to buying bits and bytes, nobody wants to sell you anything. None of the music stores support my country. None of the video selling/rental stores support my country. What the hell? Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers? I think the only stuff I can actually buy online that gets sent electronically is Virtual Console stuff on the Wii.
I know periodically Google gets involved in things that seem to show they're drifting to the dark side of giant ass-raping corporatism, but amazingly obvious pro-customer decisions like this show that there is at least a significant amount of "not Evil" left in the heart of Google.
This is the kind of behavior you expect from a local mom and pop store or some other small business who wants to make you happy more than they want to screw you out of $5 just because they can.
Seeing that Google is taking care of end-of-product-lifed customers is going to make people a lot more comfortable taking a risk on future Google products. I know that if they do something else I'm not sure will last but sounds good, I'll go ahead and buy. I don't think I would have before.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Admitting and reversing a bad decision is an excellent thing per se, but as long as purchased videos ("downloaded to own", in their own terminology) will still expire, ever, the more fundamental wrong has not been made right.
Buying stuff on the Internet is hard as hell. I don't mean buying stuff that gets delivered in a package - that is easy enough to do over the Internet and works just fine worldwide. But when it comes to buying bits and bytes, nobody wants to sell you anything. None of the music stores support my country. None of the video selling/rental stores support my country. What the hell? Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers? I think the only stuff I can actually buy online that gets sent electronically is Virtual Console stuff on the Wii.
I get where you're coming from, but it's more complex than that. I believe most online music and video stores would love to sell to anyone willing to pay. Unfortunately each new country is its own market, with applicable taxes and other regulations. There's also an issue of provocative content; many countries have strict and even strange definitions of obsenity (that includes the USA) that means content has to be screened for local sensibilities.
But more importantly, the stores are just that, storefronts. They don't own the rights, the labels and studios do, and they make the ultimate decision when and where to distribute their product. Unfortunately the system they have in place puts a lot of emphasis on dividing the world by regions... For example just about every deal a musician makes with a label has provisions for foreign markets. Amplify that times a hundred contracts for television and movies: writers, directors, actors, music rights holders, and maybe a dozen others who get paid every time a product is released (or re-released) in a new region. I'm oversimplifying in a big way and there are a ton of other factors but the point is, in many cases if there isn't an obvious profit to be had it just isn't worth it to release at all.
Yes, this does suck, and it should be legal for anyone to purchase from a store based in any other country online, but that's not the system we have in place (a system which was based on theatrical releases, video tapes and vinyl records.) And yes, it does need to change. But the point I was trying to make is... Don't put all the blame on the stores, there's plenty to go around.
Unfortunately, the DMCA makes that illegal. Providing software to bypass a copy protection system is against the law (in the US); I believe this applies to even your own products. But regardless, it doesn't matter as they'd have to go to every single content publisher and get their permission to remove the copy protection rather than just pull the license and give a refund, which is logistically insane.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?