Honest question, if the movie reappears in the catalog on Google does the “ownership” return to the customer? My money is on no they would have to repurchase
Fun fact: in my country (Slovakia) it’s totally legal to download things. It’s the uploading it back that’s seen as illegal, so as long as you have a paid private torrent site where you can hit’n’run you are not breaking any laws.
Same in Switzerland. If it’s not software, downloading is fully legal.
Piracy isn’t stealing, period.
It was totally ok to pirate movies before this practice ever took place. Information had always wanted to be free.
Both Mickey Mouse and Mario are having grand mal seizures because of your comment. How heartless.
Don’t do business with google for starters. You just know you’re gonna get screwed one way or another.
It’s never been stealing, it’s infringement of copyright, which aught to carry much less of a penalty since the original owner was not deprived of their property.
But we live in hell, so capitalism literally bankrupts families when they film their kid dancing to music that was playing on a public broadcast on FM radio.
Is this a region specific thing? I bought these years ago in HD, at some point Google automatically updated them to 4K, and they are still in my library. Should I expect these to disappear for me as well or did Google lose the ability to distribute it in certain countries/regions only?
They don’t claim that after the fact, it’s their terms of service to begin with. Just another reason to never buy anything on these services. Even paying for streaming is less of a scam since at least you aren’t being misled.
(I can feel my huge steam library giving my hypocritical ass mad side-eye right now)
The live-service model is a bigger problem. Steam isn’t going to randomly remove your purchases; but if you buy a digital game that runs on servers it can be taken away from you regardless of what platform you bought it on.
They don’t claim that after the fact, it’s their terms of service to begin with.
Terms of Service constantly change and are retroactive so it literally does not matter what was in them when the purchase was made.
are retroactive
That definitely depends on jurisdiction, it is not in my country and should not be this way in any civilization.
deleted by creator
I know it doesn’t fit the Piracy narrative, but there’s actually more to this story. I’ve never actually heard this story, but at some point, Google gave everyone that same movie (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) for free. Anybody who saw the deal could claim it. I still have it. I’d gift it to this guy if I could, because I’ve since bought the extended edition trilogy in 4K. The Fellowship copy is locked to 1080p, and it’s the theatrical version. I have no reason to ever watch it. But I still have it.
So I don’t know what happened with them losing the rights, but they did kinda try to make it right by offering a giveaway. It would have been awfully nice of them to email everyone who lost their original copy and tell them they could claim it, though. That rarely happens with giveaways. They had a few of them back then. I also got Happy Feet and Big, maybe one or two others.
Make no mistake though. While I do have quite a nice collection of 4K movies in Apple TV (call them rentals if you want, but I won’t pay more than $5 for them, so rental is fair since I paid rental price), I have easily 10-15 times as many on my Plex server (not all 4K though, but still).
Here is the original story: https://www.techradar.com/streaming/youll-own-nothing-and-youll-like-it-google-pulls-the-lord-of-the-rings-digital-editions-from-one-users-library-our-latest-reminder-that-digital-purchases-arent-always-forever
It seems they paid for it and were not given a refund or replacement.
Piracy isn’t stealing anyway
Not that I agree with the following, but I feel like many say piracy is theft because one is “stealing” potential income, not stealing the material itself. I vaguely remember someone on YouTube even said using Adblock is akin to piracy, as one is watching content without paying for it (and the assumption is one should pay)
I feel the same way about people applying terms like “theft” to events of intellectual property misuse like copying another artist’s art style, reusing another comedian’s jokes, etc. Those things are problems of their own, but should not be called “theft”.
Gatekeeping technology is a personal irritation of mine.
The famicom and capacitor electrolytes should not belong to individual companies, they belong to all of humanity.
They call it stealing because the real legal term is unlawful copying or reproducing without copyright permits, and that sounds closer to a misdemeanor.
If we claim someone has stolen thousands of songs causing millions of dolars in damages it does look like a felony, and that is the way they’ve chosen to scare us.
As Mr Krabs would say, “it’s not stealing, it’s borrowing. You can borrow anything you’d like as long as you give it back”
So I’ll just “give back” all my copies I have obtained, before I die!
Why not after? You put this in your testament: “I hereby give my movies back to google. Fuck google!”
I just had to check if I still owned it on YouTube, i do. This caused a panic let me tell you
“owned”
One of the reasons for pirating is that there are no ultimate and afordable source/s of all the content. Actually there should NOT be single centralized entity which would hold the informations/data, making single point of failure (SPoF).
By distributing the content, the risk of inaccessibility of it is decreased. That is why P2P networks like Gnutella, ED2K, Direct Connect, Soulseek and others are used.
Piracy isn’t stealing.
The “If buying isn’t owning” part makes a catchy slogan but it really isn’t necessary.
Yea. Piracy is sharing.
How to recruit new pirates to the cause. Thank you goofge.
because the movie was bought
Since they admit the person bought the movie, they are also admitting they stole it from him
