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Hollywood Escalates "DVD Ripping" Case To International Incident (torrentfreak.com)
A group of Hollywood studios and technology partners have asked the U.S. Government to assist in solving a long-running court battle against the Antique based software company SlySoft. Despite an earlier conviction SlySoft continues to offer its DVD and BluRay ripping tools. To progress the matter, rightsholders have asked the U.S. to place Antigua on the Priority Watch List. "Circumvention through programs such as SlySoft's AnyDVD HD is a source for widespread, large-scale and commercial copyright infringement by users located in the United States, as well as Antigua & Barbuda, and many other countries," AACS writes (pdf).
Slysoft is not in US jurisdiction, so it doesn't have to follow US law. Full stop.
They should tell Hollywood to get bent. Piracy is going to happen regardless of what they do; this is money wasted anyway.
against the Antique based software company SlySoft
How on earth did Antigua become Antique? Just bad use of spell check?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Who bothers with DVDs anymore? Unless your tastes are way off the beaten track, everything you might want is available for streaming anyway.
There are still many DVD's that I can buy used cheaper than the "own it on streaming" price, *and* the DVD is really mine, so I can rip it to multiple formats for playing on a TV of mobile device. It's not like a streaming move that I "own" where the streaming provider decides where I can watch it, and can lock me out of my owned movie for any reason, including bankruptcy.
Though as people move towards streaming, there are fewer deals to be had on used DVD's.
diction.
Slysoft should just tell the Hollywood thugs to get bent.
Also: let's see some quality output instead of this suing from the hip bullshit, and we'll talk.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
And, for people who only want to rent the physical disc: http://www.redbox.com/
I am totally amazed how much new DVDs cost though. Saw one at the local drug store, the sort not frequented by posh purveyors, and a DVD for a low rated movie from last year was going for $20. I was completely surprised, it's so expensive and few people ever watch one more than once or twice, and it wasn't the sort of movie one would want to collect. It was also a price increase over buying it on Amazon too, but it was at the checkout line so presumably it was intended to be one of those impulse buys for people who don't shop around.
One excuse with some movies is that if you've got toddlers that the $20 DVD will be played at least once a week until it wears itself out (at which point the parents are ready to shoot themselves).
Now the armchair economic excuse to go out and see the movies at a cinema is that a ticket and drink and hotdog is less than the cost of a DVD...
For streaming, they never let you own a movie. It's $5 to "rent" which is more expensive than pay-per-view on some cable/satellite services. There often is a purchase option to "own" but in that case you are still not allowed to make a backup copy so that you can watch it after the streaming service goes bankrupt. DVDs have additional benefits that you can take them with you camping, onto an airplane. Annoying is that they're not that much cheaper than blu-ray; worse both physical forms on amazon are cheaper than the streaming copy, despite the extra costs to produce and distrubute, someone's getting ripped off in the transaction and it isn't Amazon.
Actually, the Hollywood studios don't even have the law on their side in this case.
What Slysoft is doing is actually legal under WTO rules because the US was found
to be in violation regarding offshore internet gambling. The WTO ruled that Antigua and
Barbuda are legally entitled to ignore US copyright (to the value of the judgement) as a
result. What the US government has been doing in regard to this is disgusting frankly.
They have threatened to retaliate against Antigua and Barbuda should they choose to
actively exercise this right, even though the ruling went against them. Funny how when
the ruling goes for the US the other country is obligated to follow it, but when it goes
against them it doesnt. Arrogant doesnt begin to describe this behaviour.
https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds285_e.htm
@boggle. I use that software a lot simply to get rid of the forced previews and the like so I can sit down to watch a movie and watch the bloody movie, which ought to tell the MPAA and company something right there. The biggest advocate of piracy right now is the MPAA itself, as they constantly and vocally equate simply watching a movie you've purchased legally with piracy.
Folks that want higher quality? That want the extras? Folks with data caps? Folks that want stuff after the streaming service drops it? Folks don't want to be tracked or pay a monthly fee?
How long a list you need?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yes, market forces and competition help force the prices down on DVD's & Blu-ray discs. Hence the reason to get them on "Release Tuesday" when they all go on sale on their street date.
Digital copies have no such market forces - the publishers dictate the price on the digital sites and they have no interest in any price except for MSRP. For example, this is why Game of Thrones Season 2 was around $60 MSRP for the digital download when it hit its street date on iTunes. That same day, you could walk into Best Buy and pick up Season 2 on Blu-Ray (DVD's also included) along with a digital download certificate for the iTunes content for $39.
The same situation exists today, where if you look up the price for a digital download of GoT, it's the same price as the MSRP of the box sets w/digital copies.
Digital downloads have to become a lot cheaper to reflect that they have absolutely no value after the first sale due to DRM. With physical media, there is always some resell value.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Unless something changed, didn't Antigua and Barbados get the legal right from the WTO to ignore US copyrights due to the US's ban on internet gambling? http://blog.legalsolutions.tho...
The real crime is government providing businesses with protections such as copyright or patent laws that are government provided monopolies and are both bad business and bad ethics.
You can't handle the truth.
I think it depends on the shop. New releases in Australia tend to be around the AUD35.00 mark, more for the collector and special box editions. I saw at JB Hi-Fi over the weekend that Cowboys & Aliens was 9.98 and Aeon Flux (the movie, not the series) was 4.98. I saw The Martian, relatively new release, being flogged at Target for 14.98. Prices do come down over time but not quickly.
It's not being ignored, nor is it being stolen. A company makes software that allows people to do format shifting. In the US, format shifting is legal under the DMCA. What's not legal is selling the software to do it.
Antigua does not have such an obvious contradiction in their legal system. The software is legal where it is produced, it is legal to use for it's intended purpose. Hollywood doesn't like that because they have to actually find and sue people who are actually infringing on their works rather than just banning a technology. They also don't like it because if there is software available to perform format shifting, you (as a consumer) aren't forced to buy a digital copy if you've already bought a DVD.
Just because the US entertainment industry would like the entire world to drop and suck, doesn't mean that the wold's legal system should comply.
The various recording studios just don't get it. If I'm going to shell out $$$ for a movie, I'm going to consume it in the format that suits me. I also don't want to be force fed adverts for other BS they'd like to sell me. Nor do I want to sit through the obligatory, "you'll go to hell if you copy this" FBI nuisance screens and other nonsense that you cannot skip on the disc before watching the content that I paid for. I don't feel the least bit guilty about ripping a disc solely to remove adverts/warnings and shift it to whatever medium I want to use to watch it.
All that said, I find myself increasingly reluctant to even bother. The content quality is trending down and I don't have the time I once did to jump through the hoops. Their loss.
Digital downloads have to become a lot cheaper to reflect that they have absolutely no value after the first sale due to DRM.
The "pay per download" to "own it" model of digital streaming is all wrong. What consumers really want is a service like Amazon Prime or Netflix where a single monthly fee provides on demand access to an entire library or catalog of content that can be watched anytime from any device. The problem today is that selection sucks because the content owners don't want to play ball which of course fuels copyright infringement as billions of people buy bootleg DVDs or watch movies uploaded to locker sites that stream them for free and try to make money off ads. The content owners need to decide which alternative they dislike the least, widespread streaming on sites they don't control and get no revenue from and bootleg media sales OR a reasonable fee from most consumers for the convenience of access to a wide range of quality content through an official channel, like Amazon or Netflix. Unfortunately, the content moguls have been both stubborn and stupid so far. It may take a few more decades before millennials finally work their way into management at these firms and the old broken business models are finally thrown out. They're already heading in that direction anyway, albeit at a snails pace.
"Who bothers with DVDs anymore? "
That's why Hollywood is asking the feds to reach back through time to mail an "antique based software company."
If they didn't bring this case up, I would have never known about this software.
Great publicity job Hollywood.
Stop this dvd ripping tool and 20 others pop up anyway. What a waste of money
It's a software capability version of the Streisand Effect.
For anyone not allready familiar with it, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article gives a fine definition:
Chop off one head of this software hydra and not one, but several, grow out to take its place.
It's distinct enough that it rates a name of its own. Any suggestions?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You forgot: Parents who have DVD players in the car/truck/minivan for the kids in order to keep their sanity on long drives.
Folks, like my parents, who live in the sticks with no real broadband options, as well.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It's uneven, too. The entire Studio Ghibli DVD catalogue at Sanity are still AUD$27.00 each, even the oldest ones. For some reason (I'm looking at you, MadMan), those titles never hit the discount shelves. I'd buy the lot if they were priced realistically - but not $27 each.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Who bothers with DVDs anymore? Unless your tastes are way off the beaten track, everything you might want is available for streaming anyway.
Maybe that is true in the US (or where ever you live), but where I live the selection is quite limited. Example: I have had Netflix for 1½ month, and I find it harder to find interesting stuff that I haven't already seen. In 1½ month.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Really, a free download of handbrake and an Amazon Fire 7" tablet with a 64Gb microSD card makes far more sense than messing about with physical DVD's. Apart from anything else small kids ruin physical DVD's.
MakeMKV will rip anything to disk, blueray and dvd included. Handrake will then happily encode your mkv to the format of your choice.
To be fair, at least in the UK, and Germany I can find a decent number of films "to buy" on Amazon prime. Can't see the advantage over blu-ray though and can see several disadvantages.
It is a strange country that outlaws a device that MAY be used for illegal copying - which is easily settled by forcing the perpetrator to pay damages. Devices that MAY be used for killing people, on the other hand . . .
If the price were considerably lower to offset these disadvantages then it might be worth buying in this way. But digital movies are priced almost the same as their physical counterparts. I really don't understand why anybody buys media (books, music, movies, TV shows) through a streaming service - not from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony or anyone else's. And of course there's the whole free download thing where you can grab a high quality product which is not tied to any store.
Subscribing to a streaming service or renting is another matter entirely. There are no issues like transferability, or ownership. If Amazon Prime's streaming service sucks then you can just cancel and there is no expectation of retaining access to your collection.
I used to use Anysoft's software to rip DVDs (and the occassional BluRay).
Then I got to realized that it's better to keep my copies on the hard drive rather than burn a second disc for safety. Now I use makemkv to rip the disc and handbrake to compress to a reasonable size.
The plus is that with a small netbook computer attached to the TV I have access to my whole video library over wifi.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Shhhhhh!
What consumers really want is a service like Amazon Prime or Netflix where a single monthly fee provides on demand access to an entire library or catalog of content that can be watched anytime from any device
And that includes downloads, not just streaming. I really want to have access to rented movies when I'm on a long train or plane journey, but if I do have Internet on either of those it is going to be either unreliable or expensive. I want to be able to load the stuff onto my device first. And please don't cripple it with DRM, because I know that DRM means 'it works now, but will stop working when you actually want to watch it'. If I wanted to pirate it, I'd have done so already - high quality rips of all of your movies are already available illegally, please give me an equally good (or, ideally, more convenient) product that I can pay for.
I still rent DVDs, because that's the only format that I can guarantee that I can play. I'd love to see Hollywood as a whole hit with a carbon tax for every physical copy that's made and distributed because of their insistence on obnoxious DRM on everything else.
The worst thing is that DRM isn't even in the studios best interests. All it does is lock people into the platform that controls the DRM. The music labels learned this when Apple ended up owning the distribution channel as a result of their insistence that the iTunes Music Store used DRM.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
..which is why single people have an on/off relationship with Netflix. We subscribe for a month or two until we've caught up, then we unsubscribe for several months.
A normal business response to users like us would be to offer a 2 year contract that we cant refuse, but Netflix doesnt have the luxury to do that because none of their content is so temporary.
Netflix knows that its not in the power position in its relationship with its customers, and the studios could easily destroy them if they wanted to with an easy to follow one step plan: Do not sign any more contracts with Netflix.
"His name was James Damore."
"the Antique based software company SlySoft"
Yeah, OK, DVDs are practically antiques by now, but I'm pretty sure that's not a state. Antigua I assume?
Folks that want higher quality? That want the extras? Folks with data caps? Folks that want stuff after the streaming service drops it? Folks don't want to be tracked or pay a monthly fee?
For everything else, there's piracy.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Who bothers with DVDs anymore? Unless your tastes are way off the beaten track, everything you might want is available for streaming anyway.
The BBC has taken Dr. Who off Netfllx and Hulu in the USA. So far, they cannot do that with the physical discs I have.
Of course, I presume when you meant "available for streaming" you meant legal streaming.
Don't use drugstore prices as a reference. DVDs at drugstores are often marked up horribly compared to other places.
And unless you MUST have Blu-Ray, conventional DVDs are cheaper.
Interesting. In Poland you can get quite a few couple-years old blockbusters in dollar stores (well, counterparts) and bargain bins.
A recent Auchan deal: 22PLN ($5.60) for a kilogram of DVDs. (boxes obligatory, unfortunately, can't buy just the discs).
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
That doesn't work. My guess is t's the old paradox of choice. With a DVD playing overhead, there's no choice ... it's on ... you watch. With a tablet their little minds wander into "what else is on / can I do" territory and the descent into anarchy begins.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
"Antique based software company SlySoft"
*Antigua*?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The problem is the DMCA prevents you from ripping DVD's you "own". Most do this, but legally it is at least "Gray".
Why would they want you to format shift when they can sell you the DVD, and then sell you a DRM'd copy for your amazon fire (which hopefully you got on black Friday for $35, Great deal).
"Who bothers with DVDs anymore?"
Doesn't matter, it's the only thing the judge understands.
Deadpool just delivered a whole pile of new box office records and around $150 million in ticket sales.
The way to defeat piracy is to make movies, like this one, which are so good, people will happily pay to go see them. I know, the idea of people happily paying to go see a movie is a concept Hollywood hasn't understood much. But now they are looking at a huge pile of money, which of course will all end up as losses thanks to Hollywood accounting, but making good movies people want to see is how you fight piracy. Hollywood needs to wake the hell up and learn from this.
Sig for hire.
Still trying to figure out what "antique based software" is.
I'd been wondering how AnyDVD managed to exist in the current "tools are evil" environment. For the owners, it's sort of like a double-bonus: 1) have to live in the Caribbean, 2) get to live in the Caribbean. Reminds me of the guy who sold C-band satellite receivers that did the job without the subscriber cards who was chased away to the Bahamas. Poor thing.
Except it's not just the drugstore, it's pretty much every where. Although the $20 price tag seems a bit odd since all sorts of B&M stores have been selling deeply discounted DVDs for the last 10 years and don't seem to be letting up.
Physical media is sold at a wide variety of retail outlets at various price points and rental kiosks are similarly widespread.
Inside of our little echo chamber here we tend to forget that we're the 1% of technology users. What we do or what we think other people should do really has no relationship to what happens with the population at large.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Higher quality?! Than what? I doubt many people are still buying VHS casettes.
Higher quality than any streaming service.
If you actually care about the actual content, then there's still no substitute for a bit of spinning plastic.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Streaming is the tech that people upgraded from, when they got their VCRs (and later: DVDs), and the reasons to upgrade from streaming are numerous and obvious.
Downloads are next in the upgrade path from physical media distribution (so: two tech levels beyond streaming), but currently Hollywood doesn't want that money, so it's mostly just used by pirates and Louie C.K. customers.
This whole case is about the ways that Hollywood is telling its paying customers to stop paying. People will just have to decide whether or not to take Hollywood's advice and move on to piracy, or keep fighting Hollywood by shoving unwanted money down their throats as they gag and curse you for doing that.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As it is now, Slysoft is actually contained. They make money off of their work, so they aren't inclined to share. This limits the impact of their work considerably.
Successfully liquidate Slysoft and their "nuclear option" may be to just open source everything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can't have both - if you want to be able to download stuff you're paying a monthly fee for to use offline, it's going to have DRM. Otherwise, you could download everything, then cancel it, and keep watching it indefinitely.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
So limit the amount that I can download per month. I am renting DVDs and the same argument applies: I could rip every DVD that I rent and amass a big library. I don't, because why would I? I pay the subscription for two reasons:
These are both good incentives for me to keep paying a subscription and not to download everything. Even without caps, the amount of disk space that I'd need to download everything that I might possibly want to watch for even a year would be huge (and it would be fairly easy to spot people who signed up for a month, downloaded a huge amount, cancelled their account, then repeated the process a year later).
Neither of these requirements would be satisfied by downloading things. I don't want to have to curate a collection of movies and TV shows, I want to pay someone else to do that for me and to keep adding new things that I might want to watch to it. And I want the economic incentives for the supplier to be to keep creating new things that I want to watch (and, actually, the studios probably want the economic incentives for companies like Amazon and Netflix to be for them to have to keep adding things to their library). And, most importantly, if I were happy to pirate then I wouldn't bother signing up for their service anyway. I sign up because I want to give them money in exchange for something of value to me, in the hope that this will cause more stuff that I like to be created. I'm pretty sure that anything that I want to watch is available illegally already. The existence of DRM wouldn't stop me from getting it from The Pirate Bay, or whatever the kids use these days, but it probably would stop me from using it legitimately. And that means that it also stops me from giving them money.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Part of that is that Netflix doesn't show you its whole catalog.
While I actually have browsed the entire catalog in the genres that I'm interested in, I have occasionally found interesting things in other categories that (IMO) were mislabeled. As an example, the Swedish Science Fiction series Real Humans was labeled as a Scandinavian TV series, but not as a Science Fiction series. But, yeah, I tend to agree that the whole exploration part of Netflix is horrible.
I have also heard some claims that Netflix only display those titles where they have local subtitles or audio. I'm not sure if that is correct, but I haven't found any titles in my local Netflix without local subtitles, nor have I found any way to disable that filter if it exists.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
I really don't understand why anybody buys media (books, music, movies, TV shows) through a streaming service - not from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony or anyone else's.
For movies, for sure I understand. But buying books from Amazon is great. The DRM is trivially removed (like with DVDs), the azw format is easily converted to others, and their ebooks are often very high quality. Amazon is now my preferred book vendor for this reason. I get to own the book for life.
—G
And, it's almost always cheaper to rent from a DVD rental place, then rip that and keep a copy than it is to buy the same thing, and the DVDs are in the shops months or years before it shows up on the streaming services.
Learn to love Alaska
New stuff, catalog changes, storage, and other reasons should provide a value in the subscription, even if you could download it all. A quality movie is over 1G. That's $0.50-$1 to store it. Storing 10 new movies a month, vs Netflix, and Netflix is cheaper. So if Netflix is cheaper than "free" you'd be stupid to download.
Learn to love Alaska
Same issue, only more so for loaning, selling, transferring the book too. You've bought a license to view a book, not the actual book. In some countries like the UK this even means paying extra taxes because you've bought a software licence (incurs VAT) instead of a book (does not incur VAT).
IMO, all portable digital media should have the same rights as physical property. Even if that means there is an escrow or distributed blockchain that tracks ownership and provides the facility for media to transfer permanently or temporarily to another owner. e.g. perhaps the media file is encrypted with a token. The token can change owners and whoever owns the token has the means to view book / movie. Will there be piracy? Yes of course, but there is today too. And besides, the blockchain could be used in conjunction with the content to develop some practical countermeasures.
Finally, someone who gets what an Antique based software company really is.
It may come as a shock to you, but broadband is not yet universally available.
www.wavefront-av.com
You missed one thing; if the provider of the movie decides to end their contract with Amazon for that movie, it may also disappear from your library. I recall that happening with at least one movie.
HDCP cords, dvds with bricking, etc.
THE FUTURE IS NOW, AND IT IS DIGITAL.
I want to buy your product. I don't want to keep 100 dvds around. I want them all on a thumb drive. DEAL WITH IT.
Among the treasure trove of government actions he brought to light, were emails and other documents showing how the US government was secretly strong arming other countries into adopting the MPAA's version of copyright. (Hey, the MPAA paid for their government so they are getting some mileage out of it...)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...