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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.
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...
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.
"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.
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
MakeMKV will rip anything to disk, blueray and dvd included. Handrake will then happily encode your mkv to the format of your choice.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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