SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the live-by-the-sword,-die-by-the-sword dept.
Disney's attempt to prevent Redbox from buying its discs for rental and resale may have blown up in the House of Mouse's face. The Hollywood Reporter describes how District Court Judge Dean Pregerson sided with Redbox to shoot down a Disney-mandated injunction. In addition, Pregerson contended that Disney may itself be misusing copyright law to protect its interests and its own forthcoming streaming service.
If you're unfamiliar with the backstory, Redbox didn't have a deal in place to procure Disney DVDs and Blu-rays for its disc rental kiosks. So, the company simply bought the discs at retail, often snagging combo packs that include a DVD, Blu-ray and a download code for the movie as well. Redbox would then offer up the discs for rental, and sell on the codes at its kiosks for between $8 and $15.
Such a move enraged Disney, which includes language in its packaging and on the website demanding that users must own the disc if they download a copy. But this is where Pregerson began to disagree, saying that Disney cannot dictate what people do with copyrighted media after they have bought it. Specifically, that there's no law, or explicit contract term, that prevents folks from doing what Redbox did with Disney discs.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/22/disney-redbox-lawsuit/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday February 23 2018, @11:04PM (4 children)
I can buy a single movie, on somewhat permanent media, for $5 if I'm willing to live with used media. Which I generally am. Bits is bits. Further, in that case, or even when more invested in brand new media, I own the media: I can back it up, play it at any time, I don't have to worry about returning it or having my "viewing rights" go away after first-watch + 24 hours or whatever, and I don't have to deal with the network suddenly turning my viewing experience into a bunch of low-resolution blocks, or going down entirely, nor my wifi/lan being compromised by relatively high constant data transfer when it is working properly.
I almost never stream movies. And I am a paying member of Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime. And sometimes HBO and Starz. Most of that is for early access to episodic content — which all of those are now producing in considerably better quality than broadcast television (Firefly excluded.)
Streaming isn't my first choice. It's my last choice.
I do have a large theater system, and tend to have high expectations of the display and audio quality; that makes me a bit of an isolated case overall but I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @11:48PM (2 children)
The going price in second hand stores is closer to $1 per DVD around these parts. Selection is sort of haphazard, as you might expect.
But quite frankly I haven't put a disk in the DVD player in over two years, since the grand kids were visiting.
I'm just not a big movie watcher, and have a great deal of trouble understanding those people who spend a lot of time and money watching movies. (Let alone watching them twice).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:52PM
Why are you all ignoring torrenting and public libraries, the elephants in the room? Are you afraid?
$1 for a used DVD is an okay price, but it can't compete with $0 for a torrent. Yes, yes, I know, that's usually illegal. But it's also $0 to check out a copy from the public library. You do know that these days, public libraries have a fair selection of movies for lending? Admittedly, their media is frequently so scratched up that parts of the movie won't play-- I missed about 5 minutes of Schindler's List thanks to scratches on the library's copy-- and their collections tend to be small.
Also, what about borrowing from friends? Still occasionally trade paperback books with friends.
Torrents have the best selection of them all. So often I have been frustrated by lack of availability on legal, paid services. Lot of good movies I meant to see one day because at the time I didn't have a DVD player or even a TV, not to mention the time or money, are still not available through Netflix or Amazon Prime, of which I now have both. So the hell with them. Torrents, ho! Since I never wrote down a list, odds are that I may never see most of those movies, even with torrenting, and I'm okay with that.
Besides, I don't have room for a bunch of plastic discs. Nor do I care to deal with the DRM and region encoding bullcrap that makes it such a pain to use my computer's DVD drive to watch a movie. I am very glad I was so restrained when I was building my DVD collection. I have less than 50 DVDs all told, and no Blu-Rays at all, and I don't want any more. Sometimes I do rent from RedBox. But mostly, it's stream or download, watch, then send the copy to bitbucket heaven as video is so large even a stunningly capacious 2T or more hard drive can be all too quickly filled up.
I am not much of a movie or TV fan. Make it hard to obtain a movie, and I simply will not bother. There are so many other things to do.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 25 2018, @12:14AM
There are no significant sources of used media here. We have to find them online. By the time shipping costs are added, we're usually at least around $5.
We are almost comically isolated from... well, pretty much everything. According to a recent article [washingtonpost.com] in the Washington Post, this town is the most isolated in the USA in a list of isolated communities of more than 1,000 population. Yay. We won! Sort of. :)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday February 24 2018, @08:16AM
Often, when I watch movies, it's more or less a spur-of-the-moment thing. If that happens while we're in a store that (also) sells movies: great, we might pick one up. But not for full price, it has to sufficiently cheap.
Often, the stars don't align and when the idea hits us, there's not a movie we'd like to watch for a price we'd like to pay in a bin near us. Actually, often it'll be evening and we'll be at someone's home, looking for a one-off movie for a nice evening.
My selection of movies is well-known to me, and as for my family's selection (those with whom I regularly watch movies): ditto. So we could watch something we already have seen once or more.
Or... we click a bit, pay a pittance (less than picking a movie in the bargain bin at the supermarket would be) and get a wider selection and our movie fix.
TL;DR: buying movies for owning is great; renting streams for a quick impulse movie watching moment is great too.