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Disney Pulls a Reverse Santa, Takes Back Christmas Shows From Amazon Customers
Sockatume writes "Since 2011, Amazon Instant Video has sold a series of Christmas shorts from Disney called 'Prep and Landing'. Unfortunately this holiday season, Disney has had a change of heart and has decided to make the shorts exclusive to its own channels. The company went so far as to retroactively withdrawn the shows from Amazon, so that customers who have already paid for them no longer have access. Apparently this reverse-Santa ability is a feature Amazon provides all publishers, and customers have little recourse but to go cap-in-hand to a Disney outlet and pay for the shows again."
Why not just call this a Grinch move and be done with it?
how this isn't theft?
The best arguments for piracy come from the studios/MPAA/RIAA/media outlets themselves. Even after you pay for content, it's only their whim that lets you keep it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I'm very comfortable with technology, but in one sense I remain a Luddite: When it comes to video that we're going to shell out money for, I only buy it on DVD. If it's not available on DVD, we don't pony up the coin. I'll often rip the DVD and put it on my kid's iPods, but we still have the physical media. I accept that in a decade or so DVDs will go the way of the Dodo Bird and I'll have to make a change then, but for now it's plastic discs for me.
gotta love digital content. It's like the guys from Best Buy kicking in your door and taking your treasured DVD of Flash Dance. What thats not legal? Who Knew!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
The article says that Amazon called it "accidental," and that access has already been restored for those who already bought it.
The most likely explanation is that Disney wanted to stop selling it through Amazon, and nobody really considered the fact that that customers should retain access to what they've already bought.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The company went so far as to retroactively withdrawn the shows from Amazon, so that customers who have already paid for them no longer have access.
Can we say "class action lawsuit"? I knew you could...
Disney's PR flaks are going to be working some overtime this holiday season.
Disney has been fighting to extend copyright forever so they can keep every second of anything to themselves, so why not pull more shit like this? Clearly Disney only cares about how to make a quick buck and shaft the fans and viewing public whenever they can, but this act really only undermines digital media as a whole as you can not tell when someone will just pull their shit for some arbitrary reason leaving you having paid for nothing.So yeah the pirates right now are glad that they don't have this crap to deal with and if one site goes down, they find it someplace else for free and maybe better quality as well.
Take back what you sold me, I take back the money I gave you.
The summary is complete FUD according to the article. The show was removed from customers that paid for it by a mistake, which was corrected shortly thereafter. It seems that anyone that bought it can still watch it just fine.
I almost forgot why I don't purchase individual videos that don't give me either a tangible copy or an actual file download. Now I remember!
You're not buying the goods, you're renting them. You're always at the whim of the copyright owner with regards to your continued access to the work you paid for.
Mark my words, when physical media is gone, they'll stop selling media to you indefinitely, but charge you for the same content on a recurring basis. Not like Netflix where you're paying for access to stream any number of works, but you'll pay per month (or per access) for a single work.
Plus, with everything so locked down and controlled by the copyright owners, much more media will be lost to time due to the inability to move it between systems freely. Almost 30 years later, you can still acquire and play the original Super Mario Bros on an authentic NES, without getting the okay from Nintendo to do so. When digital downloads are the only method to acquire media, then you can forget about buying used copies 30, 40, 50 years later. By the time copyright actually lapses and you can legally do something about it, it'll be too late as all the original hardware will likely be either destroyed or non-functional.
FC Closer
The article says that Amazon called it "accidental," and that access has already been restored for those who already bought it.
Accidental my shiney hiney. It was only "accidental" until either the PR or legal department found out about it. In any case this is EXACTLY why I do not own a Kindle. This isn't the first time this happened and the fact that they even have the ability to do this makes me pretty uncomfortable.
From TFA:
Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases."
One person claimed on another blog that Disney was retroactively removing this on purpose, So of course we'll sensationalize that as the Headline here....
We're all full up on Crazy here...
Is not your library if the vendor can take it from you. You didn't buy, just got a limited permission to play it while the real owner is in good mood, and in their own terms.
Because they didn't buy a show, they bought a license to stream it.
You are almost certainly correct but that doesn't make it any less disingenuous or wrong. It also won't stop the almost inevitable class action lawsuit from some ambulance chasing legal firm which in this case I might actually cheer for.
If there's a movie I want to own, I purchase a used DVD from Amazon and rip it myself -- then I can transcode it to any format I want (even extracting audio-only to listen to in the car if I want to), and no one can later decide that they didn't mean to sell it to me and reverse the purchase, and even if the vendor I bought it from goes out of business or leaves the streaming business, I don't have to worry about how I'll be able to access the content that I already "own".
Plus, the used DVD is typically cheaper than the streaming "purchase" fee.
I'm sure many people skip the DVD middleman and just go straight to PirateBay to download their very own copy for free. I still don't know why the movie industry insists on making purchased content much less convenient than readily available pirated content. I don't mind paying a fair price for content, but why do I have to go through hoops to use that content the way I want to?
The studios have been pushing their own Ultraviolet digital copy scheme for a few years now (interestingly enough, Disney was one of the last holdouts). Even if you set aside the well-earned distrust most of us already have for the studios, it's obvious they're trying to play yet another game with the media we purchase. With at least some of the disks (and perhaps all of them), the purchaser's right to view the digital copy of the movie/show has a finite lifespan of just a few years (like 2-3)!
Thank heavens these guys are stupid enough to keep shooting themselves in the foot often enough where even non-tech-savvy people mostly don't buy into it.
On the rare occasions I decide to purchase a movie or show, I just buy the disk. As soon as it arrives, I rip it - then the disk gets put away in a closet. There are no issues with latency, quality, or bandwidth when I'm streaming my own movies to my TV - and I'll have them ten, twenty, even thirty years from now.
#DeleteChrome
Then why do these companies continue to act like we will keep "buying" stuff from them if they can do this whenever they want?
If I paid you for something, I either expect a refund, or something clearly up front which says "you're only kind of buying this, but we can take it away any time we like". Not finding out after the fact that they can.
And this is the problem with the corporations view of digital media -- we have no rights, and only get what we 'bought' as long as they feel like giving it to us.
In general, it's easier for the consumer to just pirate the stuff than to try to do it the way they want; because we just keep getting burned.
That it was Di$ney doing this is no surprise. They seem to be the world leaders in this kind of thing, and are mostly greedy bastards. Pity they've bought Marvel.
This kind of stuff will only get worse.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Is not your library if the vendor can take it from you. You didn't buy, just got a limited permission to play it while the real owner is in good mood, and in their own terms.
This.
Let it stand as a lesson to all: You don't buy digital media from the likes of Amazon, you rent it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You are never buying from them, only renting for variable durations
let the CC companies bully disney and amazon.
Amazon wouldn't sell digital downloads where the company that owns the rights can just revoke access at any whim. Both Disney and Amazon know that doesn't make sense. People who bought it still have access to it. That's the whole point of a digital purchase. Denying access to it was an accident and apparently has been fixed. And for people saying they want to stick with discs, have fun living in the past.
for forcing the
Di$eny channel
Di$eny JR
Ds$eny XD
are forced into the basic pack
anyone remembered the Amazon Kindle's 1984 affair?
Why the heck did they name Christmas shorts "Prep and landing"? I've been baffled by this since it came out.
Also, Amazon didn't seem to be able to remove the versions I have of these shorts from my NAS. Funny thing.
If greedy content providers had their way, then instead of having a single netflix or hulu or amazon account, we would also buy monthly subscriptions to Disney, WB, HBO, Universal, etc. Ain't gonna happen.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
After the Orwell's 1984 fiasco had not Bezzos "promised" he would never use this feature again?
(Yanking content from the users?)
-><- no
Rant On.
You don't own it, you only rent it and the "owners" can get make you pay again and again.
I'm sure they (RIAA/MPAA/etc) would like if everything was pay-per-view and we could
not even own our own thoughts.
I dread the day when IP lawyers realize our brains hold memories of the songs we've
heard, the movies we've seen and the books we've read and demand we be made to
forget it all or pay, pay, pay.
Rant Off.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
Is not your library if the vendor can take it from you. You didn't buy, just got a limited permission to play it while the real owner is in good mood, and in their own terms.
This is why I don't "buy" videos from online streaming companies like Vudu or Amazon or iTunes. I either rent it for a small amount (usually Redbox these days) or for the select few I buy the disc so I can watch it anytime or media shift it to whatever format/device of the year it needs to be on.
Because Myley Cyrus took Reverse Cowgirl with her when she left Disney!
There are no issues with latency, quality, or bandwidth when I'm streaming my own movies to my TV - and I'll have them ten, twenty, even thirty years from now.
This is also why I like having a MythTV to record TV from an antenna. It's a standard MPEG2 stream with no encryption, and I can cut out the commercials and keep it forever.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Amazon as a corporation is forced to agree to these terms in order to be able to offer these publisher's products. Almost all publishers demand similar rights.
The only solution is DO NOT BUY LICENCES. Amazon will stop selling them, and publishers will have to renegotiate.
Of course, there is an argument for Amazon doing a bait-and-switch here as well. "Buy" button should say "License" instead...
No, you don't rent it either.
When I rent a movie from the local rental place (yeah, we actually still have one), they can't come to my house and take it back whenever they damn-well please, much less within the specified rental period.
Disney et al, on the other hand, can revoke any privileges you've already paid for because of the one-sided, bullshit clickwrap "agreements" that you "accepted" when you signed up for the service.
This is not a rental, this is ... shit.
> The company went so far as to retroactively withdrawn the shows from Amazon, so that customers who have already paid for them no longer have access.
So now how do you feel about keeping your content "in the cloud"?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you own a Kindle you should be backing your stuff up anyway. Calibre is a good companion for not only backing up purchased content, but adding new content not purchased through Amazon.
Common sense says this isn't something that *any* PR department wants, it would be a huge blow to whatever company did it, and the whole model in general.
On grounds that Amazon misrepresented how not-perpetual the license was.
I'll second Calibre. It's also an amazing tool for converting between formats if you have a preference for one or the other, with the ability to apply virtually any formatting you'd like. Quite handy.
And yet you see many slashdotters practically bending over backwards trying to get DRM integrated into html nowadays... The stuff in this story is exactly what it will get you.
I like paying Netflix for streaming precisely because it's a rental model. Shows keep disappearing from there too, of course, but at least I don't feel like I've lost what I "bought".
I don't care how many Disney's take their shows back, I'm not subscribing to 50, or even 5 services. I'm happy to pay, but for goodness sake if you're not willing to let an aggregator take a slice, you'll be getting nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Once again demonstrating to all and sundry why piracy is superior, and why the public should never trust megacorporations.
Of the things I have personally built, the standard flowchart for DRM consists of:
Create user account.
Purchase digital goods under user account.
If user has paid for digital goods, make them available for that user account.
Every time a client would say something along the lines of "but what about the users being able to send the files to their friends? How do we prevent that?".
I would simply tell them, "The cost of implementation is going to be higher than the amount of money you'd lose if every user shared every file in their account with ten people." Once you start to speak their language (the client), they start to listen.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
...from Amazon and Disney
Yet anyother reason not to patronise either.
EULA's are non binding in New Zealand... the Consumer Guarantees Act sets out consumers rights, and it CANNOT be contracted out of. Once I purchase something, it's mine... If Disney took them back from me, they'd be in for a bad time...
IMO, a contract which has no negotiating room, SIGN HERE OR ELSE, is a worthless pile of poo
Is not your library if the vendor can take it from you. You didn't buy, just got a limited permission to play it while the real owner is in good mood, and in their own terms.
This.
Let it stand as a lesson to all: You don't buy digital media from the likes of Amazon, you rent it.
Improper generalization. I buy DRM-less MP3 "digital media from the likes of Amazon" all the time, at mostly reasonable prices to boot. I wish I could buy more, but for the channel-controlling likes of certain publishers.
This is why I smile and torrent whatever I like. If that option goes away, back to sneakernet which worked nicely in the analog tape days before the intarwebs.
The masters have no moral obligation to me in their own eyes, so I consider none whatever to them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Owning a kindle doesn't mean you purchase all your material through Amazon or that Amazon can remove locally synced files from the device. I manage my library with Calibre, and have the wi-fi of the Kindle turned off to conserve more battery.
DRM in HTML != one-sided "licensing" agreements.
Yes, it can be used to restrict digital libraries, but really on the HTML-side it's a way of (pretending) that a media stream between two groups is secure and un-copyable. Netflix has DRM. They don't guarantee that any particular show will still around, but their library is good enough that you don't want for content in general, and is worth the $8/month or so that it costs to obtain access.
No, but the word/action of a company employee can still be grounds for legal actions against said company.
If an employee at McDonalds tells a customer "We don't serve [visible minority] here", who do you think is going to be hit with the expensive lawsuit?
from customers that paid for it by a mistake
That's one of the better typos I've seen lately. Certainly I would consider paying for some easily-disabled rights-restricted POS a mistake...
Every time I am tempted to buy a Kindle (like around Christmas season, for example), Amazon pulls this crap. Yes I know it was Disney the publisher that made the big decision. But the money went to Amazon as the provider to me. And if they retain the right to pull back anything I've already purchased, then I don't need to give them my money. And this isn't the first time. It may be rare, but so what? I wouldn't tolerate a bookstore coming to my home and pulling books off my shelves either.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Streaming and The Cloud: Where the Content Owner or designated representative can come in and remove content you had paid for.
What, exactly, is so appealing about this model? If it's the lack of physical media to store / move, I can *sorta* see that.. but other than that.. where's the appeal in paying for something that the seller / owner can just *zap* out of your world? Does not compute.
And don't give me the "I can view from any device at any time" schtick. Let's take "Wreck-It Ralph." I bought the BD / DVD combo. Ripped the DVD into an apple-friendly format and have it in my phone as part of my "desert island" playbill. The actual disc set is just chillin' in my shelf, and gets played -- a lot. So.. I just do'nt follow. Sorry. I have it in two devices at once. I can make that 3 or 4 without much trouble -- without having to "stream" it from somewhere.
I simply don't see the value of paying for something you can't hold in your hand and can be taken away at a whim. Sounds to me like a model made by criminals bent on theft.
If you want to keep it, get it in physical format.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
The piracy groups don't create content
The problem is that movie studios and other incumbent publishers make zero distinction between the warez scene, which distributes exact copies of the entirety of copyrighted works, and the remix scene, which makes transformative uses of excerpts from copyrighted works that are nonetheless illegal because fair use is impossible for a not-rich individual to prove.
Actually that already happened. It was called DIVX. And it sold propriety encoded disks. It died a very large fiery death.
Yet video game consoles continue to play only discs pressed by the console maker, and console makers haven't been very welcoming to startup micro-ISVs. Blu-ray Disc is likewise: consumer players tend not to play burned discs.
Netflix and Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping) are enough for me right now. Dropped Cable
So how do you get Internet if not over cable? In a lot of places, DSL isn't fast enough for high-definition video, and cable companies offer a bundle of Internet and TV for less than Internet alone.
I accept that in a decade or so DVDs will go the way of the Dodo Bird and I'll have to make a change then
The change is already on. Ishtar skipped DVD and went straight to Blu-ray.
The problem is that Amazon and most other distributors don't represent the transaction properly. It says "BUY NOW" and "GIVE GIFT INSTANTLY".
3) There is enough competition (and will ALWAYS be enough competition) in the entertainment sector for someone (very often a kid with a dream) to provide something interesting at a reasonable price
Not necessarily. "A kid with a dream" can get shut down by gatekeepers, especially in the video game market where a console maker can just refuse to approve a developer. Bob's Game anyone?
"Apparently this reverse-Santa ability is a feature Amazon provides all publishers, and customers have little recourse but to go cap-in-hand to a Disney outlet and pay for the shows again."
Sounds illegal. Nail both Amazon and Disney on that.
My Dad asked me once how I got DVDs that I owned onto my iPod Nano, and if he would be able to do it himself. I told him it was a pretty convoluted process involving multiple pieces of software I downloaded and built from source, some shell scripts, and invoking the Nyarlthotep, the Crawling Chaos, at the appropriate moment.
After a few minutes of research, I bought my Dad a piece of software for $20 that with one button click rips a DVD and transcodes it into an iPod-compatible file. I believe it was something from Cucusoft. I then watched him easily rip his entire DVD collection to an external hard drive using that software, This made me realize something important: The saying "Sure, a tech savvy person could do this, but not an average user..." is only true because "tech savvy" people (like myself) are morons and will happily accept a poor user experience and hours of lost productivity to save $20, and then pat themselves on the back because they did something "cool". Meanwhile the "average user" has already been watching their movie for a couple hours.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Does this affect me? No. I get the actual DVD from Netflix. Sure I may have to plan ahead ( gee what a concept) but no one takes the DVD from me mid play because some VP needs a bonus this year.
I used to be
...did somebody actually ''want'' to watch Disney? Even the kids their parents forced to watch it know that it's crap.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
When I submitted this article to the Firehose it had been up for several hours, and it painted a substantially different picture. Some time in the hour or so between my submitting it, and it getting put on the front page, the Guardian received Amazon's comments and they substantially changed the tone and content of the story. Sorry for inadvertently misleading you.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I dropped Calibre after iBooks was released. Calibre is too slow for my taste. Are there any decent alternatives to both of them?
I wished Amazon's VoD had rentals for TV/television series' episodes. I don't want to keep them after watching them.
Same for movies with extra features. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
However one way would be for company X to say up front and explicitly... when you buy from us, we will never revoke your license for this material (such as by not using DRM in the first place, etc.)
Or for a few key states to say "You're not allowed to call the button 'buy', or to advertise using terms such as 'own it Tuesday', unless the license is perpetual."
It sounds like Disney is taking pages out of the current administration's playbook. Offer something as "free", and forget to mention that there are taxes involved. Every time this Administration can find a backdoor method to raise taxes they do, without it ever being a "Law" with Congressional approval. If it works so well and is accepted by the US Government, why denigrate a business for doing the same thing? Without revenue there is no business.
Disney is just acting like the children they market to. What kid doesn't get greedy at Christmas, dreaming of every toy or gadget or gizmo. Either Disney has lost touch with their roots or their roots were always rotten. In the end it make sense to buy a physical copy whenever possible then rip it to digital yourself. These digital copies that Disney offers are joke, there is just too much DRM. The last time I looked at them ( a few years ago now) I noticed that you could only have the digital copy on a few devices and those devices died you weren't granted the rights to make more copies. Thanks but no thanks. For real joke just look at the Mickey mouse copyright extentions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act I'm sure many of you know this already but it's freaking rediculous in every sense of the word rediculous. Shame on corporate America.