Disney is a bunch of greedy pr*cks

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FractalAudio

FractalAudio

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We have a Kaleidascape system at our cabin on the lake. It's a DVD jukebox that also lets you download movies from their store and store them on its internal hard drive.

We were browsing the movie store last night and went to order a movie. A notice popped up saying that we would receive an email and that we would have to "opt-in" to Disney's new terms of service to download Disney movies.

The new TOS was about 50K lines of legalese. The very last thing you have to accept is:
"You agree that your player will be modified to prevent the playback of physical DVD and Blu-Ray media published by Disney". Or something to that effect.

WHAT????!!!!

So if you want to be able to download Disney titles they want to modify your player's firmware to prevent it from being able to play physical Disney titles.

I declined as we have a bunch of Disney DVDs.

What a bunch of pukes. Who was the greedy pr*ck who came up with this idea?
 
Disney perfected this kind of home video scarcity thing back in the 90s and it's such a huge piece of their revenue, they've sought all kinds of ways to keep it going in the DVD and now streaming world we live in.

Worked in a video store in the early 90s and we both rented and sold VHS tapes. Disney would restrict how many physical copies we could offer for sale. AND after N months, we had to return unsold copies (which was always zero). They'd sell copies (not rent) for a short period of time and then they'd "vault" the movie -- no longer offer it for sale. Ensuring limited supply and top tier prices to own The Little Mermaid.

It also meant our rental copies were stupid expensive to buy (buying a copy of a movie to rent cost many, many times more than it did to own -- and Disney movies would be hundreds of dollars per rental copy). And they were big targets for theft because people wanted to own the original. They were nearly impossible to replace as they wore out and numbers dwindled too.

They want that "vault" system to persist as much as they can in this day and age. Hard to limit supply in a digital world, so crippling devices is their next best bet.
 
I remember needing to purchase the streaming version of the Charlie Brown Christmas special 2 or 3 times. The versions we bought would still appear in the library but became "unavailable on this device". Tell that to a 5 year old in her pajamas.
 
Oof. The $$$ of those Kalidescape systems! Disney titles must be a huge draw for them to be able to strongarm them to do that and keep their titles on their download platform.
 
I lost all respect for Disney when they requested their first copyright extension for Mickey Mouse. Then, when they went back to Congress to lobby for a second extension and got 75 years of copyright, I decided I hated them. At least Congress told them to not come back again.

I’m glad that, over the next five years, they’re going to lose copyright protection for Mickey Mouse and several other of their characters.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...th-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/ is a few years old but talks about it. There are many other articles out there celebrating this auspicious occasion.
PS https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...t-of-the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again/
 
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There has been a lot of discussion in the industry to one day do away with digital downloads, the various entertainment industries don’t want you to own anything. They want subscriptions which we already see with software.
 
FractalAudio said:
We have a Kaleidascape system at our cabin on the lake. It's a DVD jukebox that also lets you download movies from their store and store them on its internal hard drive.

We were browsing the movie store last night and went to order a movie. A notice popped up saying that we would receive an email and that we would have to "opt-in" to Disney's new terms of service to download Disney movies.

The new TOS was about 50K lines of legalese. The very last thing you have to accept is:
"You agree that your player will be modified to prevent the playback of physical DVD and Blu-Ray media published by Disney". Or something to that effect.

WHAT????!!!!

So if you want to be able to download Disney titles they want to modify your player's firmware to prevent it from being able to play physical Disney titles.

I declined as we have a bunch of Disney DVDs.

What a bunch of pukes. Who was the greedy pr*ck who came up with this idea?
Click to expand...
I quit giving their woke-asses my money years ago.
 
I have largish library of digital movies I have purchased over the years from one of the major services. When one of them dissappeared (no longer available to view) I was surprised to read that these fully purchased movies can be pulled and there's no way to get them back if you had not downloaded them.
 
I would happily buy all my media if the experience felt remotely fair or easy to use.

I'm not going to buy a movie I've already bought and I'm sure as shit not going to sit through 15 minutes of unskippable trailers of years-old movies I don't care about so I can watch a movie I just paid for, or listen to the FBI pre-emptively scold me like it already expects me to be a criminal. I'm not going to click OK to agree to some ridiculous set of terms just to watch a few hours of footage. I'm not sitting through any absurd mandatory "software updates" because the publisher thought the main menu wasn't sparkly enough and needed a GB's worth of updated graphical effects during the 3 seconds between it appearing on screen and me clicking the "Play" button. Also, the minute any movie or game I buy just inexplicably goes away, that's the end of that platform forever for me.

These days it's just faster and easier to hop into my trusty ship named the "VPN" and sail the high seas. I usually end up with much more universally compatible file formats, too.

Get movie, press play, and the movie just, get this... plays. It's great.
 
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Greg Ferguson said:
I lost all respect for Disney when they requested their first copyright extension for Mickey Mouse. Then, when they went back to Congress to lobby for a second extension and got 75 years of copyright, I decided I hated them. At least Congress told them to not come back again.

I’m glad that, over the next five years, they’re going to lose copyright protection for Mickey Mouse and several other of their characters.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...th-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/ is a few years old but talks about it. There are many other articles out there celebrating this auspicious occasion.
Click to expand...
They'll lobby Congress and buy off some politicians and get another extension. Mark my words.
 
FractalAudio said:
We have a Kaleidascape system at our cabin on the lake. It's a DVD jukebox that also lets you download movies from their store and store them on its internal hard drive.

We were browsing the movie store last night and went to order a movie. A notice popped up saying that we would receive an email and that we would have to "opt-in" to Disney's new terms of service to download Disney movies.

The new TOS was about 50K lines of legalese. The very last thing you have to accept is:
"You agree that your player will be modified to prevent the playback of physical DVD and Blu-Ray media published by Disney". Or something to that effect.

WHAT????!!!!

So if you want to be able to download Disney titles they want to modify your player's firmware to prevent it from being able to play physical Disney titles.

I declined as we have a bunch of Disney DVDs.

What a bunch of pukes. Who was the greedy pr*ck who came up with this idea?
Click to expand...

You don't get that much wealth without doing something immoral, and greed is probably the worst one of the seven deadly sins....
 
sprint said:
I have largish library of digital movies I have purchased over the years from one of the major services. When one of them dissappeared (no longer available to view) I was surprised to read that these fully purchased movies can be pulled and there's no way to get them back if you had not downloaded them.
Click to expand...
If digital media is DRM crippled, I won't buy it. Period. Physical media or DRM free only for me, and I have nearly all physical media converted to digital with multiple backups.
 
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