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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: 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.