What is the legal difference between owning digital and physical media?
What is the legal difference between owning digital and physical media?
So, if you bought a DVD licensed by Sony, can they now legally enter your house and take your DVD?
Or can Sony have some sort of DRM that prevents the DVD from playing when Sony loses the license agreement?
I'm just trying to reconcile how digital purchases can be subject to license terms changes, while a DVD apparently can't be.
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So, if you bought a DVD licensed by Sony, can they now legally enter your house and take your DVD?
No. You fully own the DVD. However if there are any features that are live based they have full rights to deactivate those. You can (grey area) legally make a backup copy of said disc. However, it's also (grey area) not legal to break encryption (which almost every disc has) to make said copy, so catch 22. (Someone I'm sure will correct me if I'm wrong). But since it's for personal use they haven't really pressured that.
There is no "license" with a DVD. You bought it, you own it. It's just the law that you can't make copies, sell or distribute them, or I believe show it to your neighborhood. (Legally I don't even think a bbq movie night with more than 5 people watching is okay, which is why Microsoft reeeeally loved the whole kinect camera watching you)
Sidenote, this post makes me so sad. People have become so accustomed to renting everything we have to explain what owning things was like. "What, you mean you could just have it? And they couldn't come take it away?"
Legally, you own a disc, and a limited license to view the contents of the disc.
It's effectively full ownership, but this same "limited license" model is how they fuck you over digitally, because without the disc, they can, at any time, revoke that limited license legally, because it was limited and they never granted full ownership. This is why the legality of pirating a movie you already own on Blu-ray is morally correct but legally wrong, because your license only grants you that one disc, in that one format.
I fucking hate it. The fact we dont have better property laws for media and IP is insane.
This is what I was looking for, thanks for clarifying. For the last 10 years my friends thought I was insane for continuing to purchase physical media. No more.
OP I should also say there are some fan edits of Mythbusters out there that are frankly amazing. None of that "recap" stuff after every break, they don't jump around. If you stumble on those they are well worth it
Oh dam that sounds watchable!! I shall keep my eye-patch raised...
They used to be on Reddit and were called smyths or something similar.
With the obvious caveat that IANAL, I think there's a distinction to be made between the physical medium that an IP is distributed on, if any, and the IP itself. Like, when you buy a movie on DVD you obviously don't own the IP. But strictly speaking, you don't even own that particular copy of the movie as encoded on the disc you bought. But you do own the disc itself, which just happens to have a copy of the movie on it. So while a publisher can always pull their IPs, and make it illegal for people to distribute them, they can't come and take the discs that you already legally own.
That makes sense, but then the next part is:
Or can Sony have some sort of DRM that prevents the DVD from playing when Sony loses the license agreement?
Surely that would still be a possibility?
I mean, sure. That's basically how always-online DRM for games works. But the fact is that you do still have the disc with data on it, so generally it's just a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to bypass or spoof the DRM.
If there is ever a next successor to Blurays, for VR film or something, their DRM could be linked to a validation server. Once it's always online what you describe becomes possible.
Currently Blurays and dvds are designed for offline playback, and are read only, so their licenses are always valid and perform no verification.
Physical players disconnected from the internet can still receive offline firmware updates included on the discs themselves. The moment you insert a new disc, it automatically executes BD+ code that in theory could patch the firmware to blacklist an arbitrary old disc that you own. This has never yet happened with a previously-legal disc, but then again for example Amazon has never deleted purchased copies of the 1984 book from customers' kindles, until one day when it did.
I think it's set up this way so buyers can't get back to Sony to ask for a free replacement if the media can't be used anymore.
Let's say you buy a disk that contains a movie. You din't buy the right to watch that movie forever, because if the disk breaks, you need to buy a new copy.
However, we could argue that this is just a symptom of a short industry... If my backpack breaks, even after 10 years, the company will replace it free of charge!
This isn’t entirely true and more so for Blu-ray disks. You own the physical media along with a temporary, limited license to watch the film on the media. That license is revocable and, technically, can be removed in the case of the publisher no longer being authorized to distribute licenses. It hasn’t really happened yet but Blu-ray players, as part of the spec, can connect to the internet to verify their licenses. If they wanted to, Sony could make your Blu-ray disks worthless if all your players follow the spec correctly. If you have a standalone drive or a drive hooked up to a computer that doesn’t fully follow the spec, you can copy the film from the media but you’d be breaking the law in most places for exactly the reason you’ve stated - breaking the encryption is illegal.
So there is a “license” with a DVD. It’s just far less enforceable than it is on a system where there’s no physical portion of the media for them to take away.
a standalone drive
Another cool/scary feature of the BluRay spec is offline firmware updates (called BD+). Any disc can contain code that runs automatically and can patch the player firmware or execute arbitrary functions. So if you have an older hacked player and you insert a newer disc into it, the AACS Consortium has the ability to brick it. Or if you "own" an older disc but the Consortium starts to dislike it for some reason (maybe they discovered that the disc was printed by a pirate publisher, or maybe there was a retroactive licensing dispute), they can include code on every newly published disc that blacklists the old disc. Even with a standalone player that you never connect to the internet, the moment you insert any new disc into it, your old "problematic" disc will be unplayable. This has never yet happened with a previously-legal disc AFAIK, but it is possible within the spec. Every player manufacturer must obey the spec and implement the BD+ virtual machine in order to be allowed to read AACS content. And if you hack your player to ignore BD+ code, then the newer disc will not play because its content may be scrambled in a way that only the custom BD+ code included with it can unscramble.
Yup. That’s why you buy non-spec drives and backup your own shit.
That's true, blu rays came with updatable firmware that you had to keep nice and happy or they'd stop playing. Like one other commenter said - you own the disc, and the bytes on them. If it's playable is a whole other story
Using tools to break the encryption for backup purposes is legal in the US, but distributing tools to do so is not legal because the tools can be used for non-backup purposes.
There is no “license” with a DVD.
But Sony had a license to produce and sell that DVD, right?
Media is treated more like drugs. A license to own rights, produce, distribute, and physically possess are all different licenses.
if there are any features that are live based they have full rights to deactivate those
Didn't know this one...
People still own the clothes, I always explain in terms of clothing, it's like Sony following you in a playground and take your pants away because you never owned them.