Plex blocks IP addresses from Hetzner as of October 12, 2023

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Not living in the USA so IDK......

My point still stands. Plex is an American company and therefore can be sued for bull shit reasons. 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Donut417 said:

And McDonalds was sued over a hot cup of coffee…… How that one turn out? 

That one has an easy explanation. McDonalds Coffee (and also plenty of other restaurants) over heat coffee and tea to a level that would physically burn you. And they know that. https://web.archive.org/web/20150923195353/http://www.business.txstate.edu/users/ds26/Business Law 2361/Misc/McDonalds coffee.pdf

 

Now, I'm not one to dismiss stupid lawsuits, but that was definitely one McDonalds should have seen, and wasn't the first time. 

Quote

Before trial, McDonald's gave the opposing lawyer its operations and training manual, which says its coffee must be brewed at 195 to 205 degrees and held at 180 to 190 degrees for optimal taste.

I don't drink coffee, but I also can't stand hot drinks at all, but it seems to me that if a drink is being held at a temperature that would burn your skin in a time shorter than it would take to react to the spill, you would make some effort to operate it at the lowest temperature that would make it safe, which is 160F, not 205F.

 

They also apparently continue to do so, and so does Starbucks.

 

I suppose if you're stupid enough to drink coffee, and you spill on yourself, you have nobody to blame but yourself. McDonalds and Starbucks can avoid the potential half million dollar lawsuits millions of times per day by getting out of selling Coffee, or only filling customer's own suitable reusable coffee cups. Because then the problem is not the coffee but the customer's choice of mug.

 

 

[Bad5ector]

Whew lad, Went from Hentzer blocking Plex to how Open Source isn't as resilient as we think to death of physical media (which is a spot on assessment btw) to McDonald's Coffee lawsuit... what a wild ride.  

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

My point still stands. Plex is an American company and therefore can be sued for bull shit reasons. 

For now, at least until Anti-SLAAP laws are adopted at the federal level and not on a per-state basis with varying degrees of effectiveness. There are some states with very good Anti-SLAAP laws which make bullshit lawsuits much harder to deal with since they carry the heavy risk of a reverse lawsuit being lodged with increased damages iirc.

[Fasterthannothing]

Might want to update this to note they are handing out individual bans as well now

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

For now, at least until Anti-SLAAP laws are adopted at the federal level and not on a per-state basis with varying degrees of effectiveness. There are some states with very good Anti-SLAAP laws which make bullshit lawsuits much harder to deal with since they carry the heavy risk of a reverse lawsuit being lodged with increased damages iirc.

Those laws at the Federal Level are subject to lobbyists. All media companies have to do is pour enough money in to the political system to end those bills from becoming a law.  

 

Furthermore an argument can be made that Plex is for piracy. Technically ripping copyrighted media off of disk violates the law. Sharing that said media across the internet so others can access it violates the law. The fact is if an ISP like Cox can be held liable for piracy (over $1 billion judgement) then Plex can most definitely be held liable. Neither of those parties technically host the content. 

41 minutes ago, Caroline said:

it's just a regular media player with extra steps, and paid.

We use Plex as an OTA TV DVR. It provides not only recording but a guide.  Also all the media on a Plex server can be distributed to like any device (PC, Tablet, Phone, TV, etc). 

[LAwLz]

14 hours ago, Caroline said:

Never liked it, not sure why is so glorified on tech forums it's just a regular media player with extra steps, and paid.

 

I have my pirate collection in hard drives and discs, why overcomplicate it? whenever I want to watch a movie on the TV I just copy to a USB stick, read it from the STB and that's it, no size issues as the TV is 480p anyway.

 

Local storage.

Plex is more than just a media player.

• It's a fancy GUI that pulls info from sites like IMBD and displays things like posters. Might not sound that appealing to some, but if you are sitting in your couch late one evening and don't know what to watch, being able to browse through posters, trailers, synopsis, sort by duration/genre/rating and such is pretty neat.
• It can do transcoding so if you are on a shitty Internet connection somewhere, it can adapt and lower the quality of the video being streamed to you. Or maybe your device doesn't support the format the original video is in, so it changes it on the fly.

 

It also seems like Plex these days is mostly focused on being a streaming service rather than playing your own media. 

A surprisingly small amount of their website actually talks about streaming your own media. Most if it is about streaming content that Plex licenses through their partners. So you start Plex and then watch live TV, or stream a movie you don't own yourself.

 

Please note that a lot of these features in practice require a subscription that costs money.

Either through a monthly subscription fee, or through a pretty hefty one-time payment. But I wouldn't be surprised if the one-time payment thing will go away in the future.