We need to stop calling it “purchasing”
Long term rental or at-will ownership for US people.
We need to prosecute companies (and their executives, personally) who fraudulently misrepresent it as “purchasing.”
I think in legal terms it’s even called licensing.
If paying for digital content isn’t ownership, then downloading it for free isn’t piracy.
so they’re going to refund all the people that purchased this stuff, right?
🫨
I’m pretty sure it all goes to Crunchyroll. I don’t think you’re actually losing anything, just having it moved to a different platform
(edit): Nevermind, I didn’t know digitally redeemed blu-rays and stuff were a thing. You’ll lose those if you have em but tbh I can’t imagine very many people do.
An jus as one piece is kicking off not only it’s final saga but more of its successful live action. The Great Pirate Era is really upon us!
Buying a digital copy of something you cannot download is an oxymoron. It only makes sense if you subscribe to a service.
So steam, basically? Less likely that they’ll be shutting down anytime soon, but still.
Edit: people downvoting don’t seem to understand how steam works
Not a good comparison. With Steam, you download the games to your computer. If Valve ever went out of business, they could unDRM the games, or you could crack them.
Either way, you download the games onto your computer. That’s not the case with Funimation.
That’s why it’s better to buy from gog
Why? You also buy licenses from GOG, despite their and their shills’ best efforts to make you believe otherwise.
It’s completely DRM free. You download the game and that’s it, you can run it from your computer forever
The only difference with Steam is that you have to crack the game files, and Steam DRM is notably easy to bypass. Either way, once you have the files you have it.
Is it? I should look into that
Whether its “allowed” or not, I assume you I own every file from my steam library.
For smart people, piracy is a financial problem.
Why pay more for things you can get for free? It’s not like the businesses you’re supporting wouldn’t rob you blind if they thought they could get away with it.
Even the ‘creators’ don’t get the vast majority of the money you spend; their landlords do. When they make more money, rent goes up.
I wish this generation wasn’t full of useful idiots with more money than sense.
They’re charging people higher prices and refusing to allow them to keep their digital content? They’re basically just handing out the pirate hats and eye patches at this point.
Disclaimer: this absolutely sucks and I’m baffled that they’ve made this move at all.
That being said, I don’t think folks have noticed the very specific situation where this is the case:
Users who redeemed digital copies of a Blu-ray or DVD purchased from Funimation were granted access to the streaming service, where they could store and stream the purchased program or film.
They are very specifically removing the free digital copies that came with buying hard copies via Blu-ray or DVD. It still sucks, but no one is losing a digital product they outright bought.
I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think that excuses anything. If you bought a hard copy with the understanding that a digital copy came with the purchase and now they’re taking away the digital copy, that’s still a Darth Vader “I’m altering the deal” type move.
kinda feels like selling someone a burger and fries, taking away the fries and then going “no one lost a burger”. the digital copy is part of what was purchased, and its been taken away from purchasers with no recourse. The digital copy was part of the deal.
Doesn’t matter at all, they gave the copies, it’s the costumers property now and is being taken away.
Still shitty, but at this point, anyone buying Blu-Rays and DVDs should chuck that stuff on Plex/Jellyfin and be done with it.
I chipped in when my friend bought Paranoia Agent on Blu-ray because he promised me the digital copy, so this does affect me. Granted, after learning the news I “found” some rips online for my NAS, but still. It’s not okay.
I literally wouldn’t advocate “sailing the high seas” if companies didn’t all aggressively accelerate enshittification and run toward consumer-hostile, short-term, endlessly greedy practices. And then there’s this, which is on another level. Storage is crazy-cheap these days, people…
How these companies don’t realize these incompetent decisions push formerly paying customers into piracy is actually beyond me.
Do every c-level employee in these companies have brain damage?
Not going to lie, i think most consumers will take this lying down and that’s what Sony is betting on. The amount that actually turn to piracy is so small, and the price hike easily makes up for the customers they’d lose. I’d say most people on Lemmy know how to pirate (if not are pirating already) so it’s a bit of an echo chamber here where we assume everybody is just going to pirate so as to stop lining Sony’s pockets.
@KravenTheHunter @trackcharlie plus, it gives them a reason to justify the higher prices because they have to be protected from all those big, bad pirates out there taking food out of their kids mouths by not paying their extortionary rental fees.
They’re actually counting on people to pirate stuff to create some weird sense of inflated value for their products.
In my experience the main issue with piracy is the ads.
Nothing better than trying to watch a show with my kid then having an ad pop-up with a girl fucking herself
I’ve been pirating for years and never encountered an ad beyond subtitle ads. Is this anime specific or something?
Nah the anime sites I use either don’t have ads or have normal ads.
It’s the movie sites I use that have constant explicit pop-ups
You’re not using adblocker?
Edit: Just read the other commenter. Where do you watch shows with your kids? TV or Computer? If it’s on Desktop or Laptop it’s easy af, but Smart TV less so but not impossible.
Ah, I stick to torrenting. Pirate stream websites have always seemed sketchy to me.
Ever heard of BitTorrent? Just get the video and watch it locally
Adblockers or torrents mate. I’ve not seen an ad in over 18 years.
I’ve been meaning to look into adblockers but I really only use these sites for shit that’s not on streaming services so I don’t really think about it until it arises
Firefox + ublock origin would be your best scenario for privacy and security. Privacy because all these ads track your page loads and attempt to generate a unique id for your browser based on your loading time of certain pixels, and security because nearly half of all ads (and more than half of all links on google search and nearly all ads on google search) are viral loads just waiting for an accidental click.
It’s 2024 man, tormenting a movie takes about 10 minutes and then you neither have to worry about ads nor connectivity for the rest of the movie
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve tried torrenting before and maybe I’m just an idiot (most likely), but I’ve never been good at figuring out which fuckin button is the actual download button and I’m tired of ghosting my pc
If you set up qbittorrent with the built-in search you can torrent stuff without ever opening your browser
Sounds like 90% of your problem is ads then. Or going to shitty sites. Get on a decent tracker - even the good old one - and have an adblocker installed
Why do you have torment it? What has it ever done wrong to you? 😭
/j
Downloaded: 87% Status: Stalled Seeds:0 Peers:670
Or just get it so you don’t have ads on YouTube
Do adblockers work on smart TVs? That’s the only time I use YouTube.
If your TV is Android based then there’s the SmartTube app. YouTube without the ads and tracking.
Look into dns ad blocker, you can avoid a lot of ads on your entire network with this "one simple trick ". No additional hw or sw needed.
Use an adblocker.
They don’t care about losing customers to piracy just like fast-food restaurants don’t care about losing people to grocery stores.
They’ve realized it’s more profitable to take further advantage of an ever-shrinking pool of customers.
If you can charge 1 customer twice the price of what you could charge 2, then you make more money because you require less overhead.
I definitely agree with you but I’m not sure how far they can take this in an economic situation that is currently devolving into a major recession and has all the macroeconomic factors of an incoming second depression.
Because their best interest is to appease shareholders and not excellent service. The problem which will emerge in 5 years time is a problem for the next CEO.
You’ll own nothing and be happy
funny, i dont feel too happy
This is why I never bought a subscription to these services.
i got suckered once on a different site that got shut down. never again.
Subscription is pretty different from buying. Pretty disingenuous to try to talk about them the same way. There’s no expectation of keeping access when you end a subscription.
I see patreon subscriptions all the time where you can subscribe, download all the content, and not subscribe again the next month.
I fail to see why just because it’s a big corporation that the expectation is different.
Do you really think all of Netflix’s catalog is really only worth $15, or whatever the cheapest ad-free plan is?
If anyone has this stuff it would be good to add them to i2p too.
Download.
Sony deleting purchased items from a person’s library?
Shocker.
What the hell is that thumbnail?
deleted by creator
Laughing? More like yelling.