Amazon court argument : you do not own your Prime Video purchases ; what is bought is an on-demand viewing licence

[SolarNova]

i got no problem with that proposal when it comes to films on Amazon Prime Video included to view for free with ur account.

 

However, 'purchasing' a film digitaly ..thats another story, more times than not these films are more or less the same price as finding a Blue-ray / DVD in store, and to be frank, there are many many ways u can rip the video from Amazon once u have access to it even fi it doesnt strictly give u an option to 'download'.

 

Purchases made for digital copies, should very much be treated like a hardcopy.

Movies and series included within ur subscription 'for free', should not be considered 'owned'.

[ewitte]

"purchase" = own

I'm not sure why someone would purchase a digital movie.  If you like to own get a 4k bluray copy.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

"purchase" = own

I'm not sure why someone would purchase a digital movie.  If you like to own get a 4k bluray copy.

Two main reasons I can think of is convenience and availability. 
 

If you buy physical discs, you have to go to the store and get them - or wait potentially days or weeks for it to arrive in the mail. 
 

Then you need to find somewhere to store them. 
 

Then when you want to watch it, you have to go find the disc, get it out of the case, pop it into the player, then do the reverse when you’re done. 
 

On top of that, where you live might not have great selection. 
 

With digital, you just buy it, download (or immediately stream) it, and you can watch it whenever you want without needing to think about the disc and all of that. 
 

Personally I won’t buy digital movies that are content locked to one service. And since you can’t buy DRM free movies, I therefore simply don’t buy digital movies. 

I also prefer the very obvious higher quality of a Blu-Ray over the same movie streamed.

 

But not everyone is me. Lots of people don’t care about the things I take into consideration. 

[Bombastinator]

Well for what it’s worth I found the claimant brief.  Team is very very small for a class action: 3 lawyers, 2 firms.

https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/amazon-lawsuit-video.pdf

 

it was apparently filed the 24th of April and the Amazon motion to dismiss is only coming now.  5 months is a long time.  It looks like this one might drag out. 

[AnonymousGuy]

The term "purchase" typically means you actually own something.  They're trying to argue that purchase means "unlimited term rental" which is still just a rental.

 

The legal question is always "what would a reasonable person think" and I don't think they'd agree with Amazon on this one.

[TheDankKoosh]

It needs to be crystal clear to consumers that they do not own the movie, and that needs to be reflected before a purchase is ever made since people cannot be expected to read an entire terms of service document. That should be the standard for ALL platforms, but they're afraid that making that apparent will lose them customers, and rightfully so, people should be more concerned about actually owning what they use. 

[drexTech]

Its basically then a music streaming subscription. Just because I add it to my library, doesnt mean I own it for life.

[WkdPaul]

3 minutes ago, drexTech said:

Its basically then a music streaming subscription. Just because I add it to my library, doesnt mean I own it for life.

yeah, basically, and that's the issue the person making the lawsuit claims ; if it says "purchase", it should mean you own it and you should be able to view it offline without an Amazon subscription, and it shouldn't just vanish if it's pulled from the platform.

[JZStudios]

On 11/3/2020 at 8:24 AM, DavidKalinowski said:

Aint that the truth. I've had friends ask me what the best wifi provider in town is...

Starbucks. Duh.

[StDragon]

lol, a "perpetual rental"

[Bombastinator]

Motions to dismiss are omnipresent in modern litigation because even if they have zero chance of success they still cause delay which can be helpful to the more monied side, which is what Amazon is so a motion to dismiss would have been filed regardless.

[Kisai]

On 10/29/2020 at 10:43 AM, Teddy07 said:

Amazon tried it a while ago in Germany. They denied access to ebooks, audiobooks and other stuff but the courts already decided that customers need to have access to their bought stuff or get a full refund.

 

That's a problem, because companies revoke licences for reasons, including demanding more money from the service as leverage for carrying content they don't want.

 

On 11/3/2020 at 7:35 AM, Smit Devrukhkar said:

The person who filed this is insane. In that case all the movies that I downloaded for offline viewing with my netflix subscription should be my property.

Eh, not quite. Netflix is much closer to the classic PPV model before it evolved into a VOD model. PPV models you paid to rent a movie for one viewing, and if you decided you had to visit the toilet, you couldn't come back and rewind it (Cable versions had to temporarily provision a channel to do it at all.) High Speed internet turned all these services into TVoIP VOD systems and now it's pretty much a stupid thing to pay for a low-quality stream from TV when you can buy the DVD/BD and watch it whenever you want. 

 

To that end, people, like myself, only buy movies they like, which means I may have seen it once already in the theatre, or on netflix/crunchyroll/other means. I'm not going to buy a movie disc that I haven't seen. That's what renting and netflix is for. 

 

15 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

yeah, basically, and that's the issue the person making the lawsuit claims ; if it says "purchase", it should mean you own it and you should be able to view it offline without an Amazon subscription, and it shouldn't just vanish if it's pulled from the platform.

 

Yes, and it should be that way. If you buy music, movies, films, comics, etc, be it Amazon, iTunes, Walmart, Google, etc you should have a perpetual license to that content, and if the "content owner" decides to be dick about it, either they must

 

a) Migrate your license to whoever now has the license at their cost (which is what happened twice now with flixster

Quote

Thu, Dec 12, 2019

To Flixster Video users:

In a previous e-mail we informed you that Flixster Video is planning to shut down its website, applications and operations on December 18, 2019, and that we have made arrangements with Google Play to enable you to migrate available videos in your Flixster Video collection to Google Play.

Quote

Sun, Nov 25, 2018

WB Movies All Access or Flixster Video is now linked to your UltraViolet Library.

This will allow you to access your UltraViolet Library through WB Movies All Access or Flixster Video without logging in separately to UltraViolet.

 

Quote

As a reminder,

Your UltraViolet Library was created for you by Universal Studios Home Entertainment on 2014-*-*. It has approximately 3 movies/TV shows.

As you can tell, I knew better than to trust this. I put everything on iTunes, except these which decided not to be on iTunes.

 

You watch, in likely a year, they will move all the Google Play movies to Youtube as well.

 

OR

b) Refund every movie that is no longer available.

 

If you choose to cancel your account, then just like a MMO game, you forfeit any purchases made on that account. You could always resume using your account. Unless you did something to get banned.

 

Now what really does need to happen, and this will only happen with regulations, is that a "universal ledger" or something similar to what's is starting to happen with games, starts to happen with music and movies/tv show services. Where you can voluntarily move your purchases to competing services as easy as you can move your phone number through local number portability. No more "pay per play" or "pay per media shift" nonsense. That may just the carrot needed to get high bitrate video streams instead of crappy 1/4 quality streams with no DVD extras.

 

Once we get there, we also solve the problem with music and video clip licencing on youtube and twitch, because then even the idiots at the media companies can query if you purchased the thing and simply require people to buy the media if they want those parts of the videos unmuted/uncut. Solves the problem of trying to get the twitch streamer or youtuber to licence the content with an unknown number of viewers. If someone likes watching videos about Saints Row 3rd or GTA, they will either be compelled to buy the game themselves (thereby acquiring those music licenses in the process) or the music alone. Like I may not even care about listening to the music of a game I'm not that invested in, but if the video is pointless without it (DDR, Just Dance, BeatMania, PIU, Step Revolution, OSU, Beat Saber, etc) then you'll want the viewer to either license it or just pass on the video.