this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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If they're saying "own" on their advertisements then they should be required to refund you when they eventually have to take it away. I'm pretty sure "ownership" has a legal definition and it's probably not too ambiguous.
It should at least be considered false advertising if they can't guarantee access permanently.
That's the best part
They redefine "own" and "buy" in their TOS
And so do many many other online retailers that sell digital goods
I wonder if that would hold in court. They could simply use "rent" or "lease" in their ads, but they purposely are trying to mislead to imply permanence.
The people who can afford to fight this kind of court case have no interest in doing so.
Don't you have customer protection NGOs in the USA?
We have corporate protections in the USA.
I can't believe you were able to ask that with a straight face
We should start a gofundme then to get the funds needed to afford such a fight. Id throw in 100$. Might take a few thousands of me, and a lot of time, but it should start somewhere.
Or join the EFF which already does great work in this area. They don't always succeed, but I doubt a GoFundMe could do better.
This is modern alchemy trying to turn lead into gold. Just change the meaning of the magic words et voilá you make gold while the other party is robbed blind and can't do anything about it after the fact.
And of course, it's totally legal and totally cool.
Then it's not binding and they're just waiting for the class action. Which will win, but they'll still be richer in the end.
ok that makes me sick
They actually never mention the idea of you owning content in their tos https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=content-only
It's "purchased digital content"
Which is exactly like physical media. You never owned it you bought a license to view it on that particular disk. But it also had limitations put on it.
It's not "exactly like" physical media. The license portion is a similar concept. But the difference is that the variables that determine whether I can keep watching the content whenever I want, in perpetuity, lie solely with me as the person who physically possesses the media. The corporation from which I purchased the license can't unilaterally decide to revoke my access to the content.
Refunding the sale price is still theft. If it was only worth that much to me (zero surplus), then I wouldn't have bothered with the trade in the first place. The only things worth buying are worth more to you than the sale price.
Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That's a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you're putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money... meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.
You've sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I'm off to read about economics 🤓
What did you lose in this theft?
You got back everything you paid and you still got to enjoy the movie.
The way I see it you benefited from this transaction.
Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?
Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.
Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise "pay this price and own this movie" rather than "pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time".
Well of course, but I wouldn't care much about movies or media. Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you "bought" digitally.
Except when they aren't. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.
A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 1 year
Oh, whoops. I read it as them explicitly telling me to pirate it. Yeah of course they aren't going to let you actually own it. That doesn't come close to making sense.