Amazon being sued over "buying" a movie via streaming

[thewayne]

A similar case has been in litigation since 2000. Specifically, everything hinges on the sub-headline: "A suit challenges Prime Video telling people they can "buy" a movie when they're purchasing a license to watch it for a period of time." Licensing. They're using wiggle-words to get you to pay money so you think you're purchasing an intangible when, if Amazon loses the license to supply it, it gets yanked from your library.

In the early days of the Kindle, a high school AP English student was writing a paper on 1984 that he had "purchased", he was going to use as a college submission essay. Amazon lost the license for that particular edition of 1984 and yanked it from all Kindles using their ubiquitous Whispernet. Not only did the book go away, but so did his paper. Impossible to recover. Up until that point, no one really understood in a real fashion that (A) Amazon would yank books like that, and (2) if you had notes, they were irretrievably gone if a book went away. He sued, I have no idea what became of it. I believe Amazon gave him another copy of 1984. YAY JUSTICE!

The article goes on to say "...Consider the $4.99 director’s cut of Alien on Amazon Prime Video. Cheap, right? But if the tech giant loses the rights to that version, the movie can be replaced with a different cut, like the one for theaters. And if Amazon loses the rights to the film altogether, it’ll completely disappear from the viewer’s library.

So should Amazon be able to say a consumer is “buying” that movie? Some people don’t think so, and they’ve turned to court."

The main crux is bait and switch, Amazon contends that the consumer is aware that the term "buy" is understood by the purchaser to be limited to Amazon continuing to own the license.

This is why most of the ebooks that I buy either come with no DRM or are in a format that I can crack, and I don't "buy" online videos, just DVDs/Blu-rays. On occasion I'll rent a streaming video.

And this is also a problem for gamers who buy games from streaming game services like Sony or Epic, where they shut down a particular game or platform.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/prime-video-lawsuit-movie-license-ownership-1236353127/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/26/0354217/class-action-lawsuit-targets-movie-ownership

Comments

[arlie]

It would be nice if some of these lawsuits succeeded.

Meanwhile, what I'm willing to pay for a short term, unpredictable ability to use something is a lot lower than what I'm willing to pay to actually own it.

And I just discount the blatantly false claims of selling ownership the same way I discount all the other Truths (TM) I find in advertising. (My current 'favorite' is the bazillions of "free" items that are often more costly to this potential purchaser than they'd be if I could simply acquire them for $$$, at least if I value my time at even minimum wage, never mind my final salary before retirement.)

[elayna]

Amazon is full of shit. I have questioned what ‘buying’ really means in a streaming sort of situation but I was not at all confident that my purchase simply disappeared if Amazon’s licensing ended. And I imagine I think a lot more about such issues than a majority of the population.

I’ve only ‘bought’ one show, a limited run where I wanted to see the actor in it. It was only $10 or so, I figured if I lost it, whatever. But that was from Comcast, and I assume I’ll lose it if I ever leave Comcast. I’d have bought the dvd if it was available. I’ve never even thought about whether Comcast might lose the license.

[thewayne]

Yeah, that's the problem.  And with people like Disney locking up things like MCU material and never releasing it on home media, it really sucks.

[moonhare]

I never considered that my few digital purchases, video and audio, could just vanish along with their license. I have a vague memory that, yeeears ago, you could not only buy the digital copy of a movie but you could download it in playable form and keep said copy to yourself.

[thewayne]

I would not count on that.  Now, some DVD/BR purchases come with digital content, but in those cases you still have the physical media.  That's more for the situation where you're on the road and you want to watch whatever.

[moonhare]

No, the opportunity passed- these went from actually owning the copy as an online download (not the one that came with the Blu-ray) to only being available as ‘owned’ but on their server.

I used to upload my music rips to my account on the Amazon site when that was allowed. The tunes are still there but they discontinued that upload ability a few years back as well.

Now I’m using their photo server to offload and store extraneous pics: unlimited storage right now and I’ve put up a few (about 500). These aren’t keepsakes, per se, but I didn’t want to eliminate them here: in a box on a shelf mentality ;o)

Google is telling me I have used 91% of my free storage (currently ~10,000 photos and videos) which I find odd as that too was unlimited at lower resolution and I didn’t change anything.

Gonna need a bigger hard drive here!

[thewayne]

My digital and digitized photo library, going back to 1977, takes some 800 gig of disk.  I don't know how big my music library is, I assume at least 300 gig.  Video?  It is to laugh!  700 mostly DVDs plus a lot of Blu-rays, and that's titles.  Many of those are multi-disk sets, like a season of something.  I do intend to digitize them, but have to buy a SAN and the complications that go along with that.  And that'll have to be backed up.  Once they're backed up, I can at least discard of the plastic cases and dump the discs into large spindle cases which will hugely compress the volume my library occupies.

[murakozi]

I've always leaned toward buying DVD and BR because of that. Of course, they're dependent upon companies continuing to make players for them.

[thewayne]

I don't think that will be too much of a problem, though selection will dwindle.  You can still get nice ones from Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic.  Plus lots of unrecognizable names.  But a lot of material never gets released on home media, which is really irritating to us librarians!

[silveradept]

I hope they succeed, and that the precedent set is wide and sweeping, so that it affects all digital goods, including software, because we've been dealing with this nonsense since 5.25" floppy diskettes (and earlier) and lots of places have built great rent-seeking enterprises on that specific concept of "oh, you only own the license to use the product, not anything else."