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You all remember just a few weeks ago when Sony ripped away a bunch of movies and TV shows people “owned”? This ad is on Amazon. You can’t “own” it on Prime. You can just access it until they lose the license. How can they get away with lying like this?
If they're saying "own" on their advertisements then they should be required to refund you when they eventually have to take it away. I'm pretty sure "ownership" has a legal definition and it's probably not too ambiguous.
It should at least be considered false advertising if they can't guarantee access permanently.
That's the best part
They redefine "own" and "buy" in their TOS
And so do many many other online retailers that sell digital goods
I wonder if that would hold in court. They could simply use "rent" or "lease" in their ads, but they purposely are trying to mislead to imply permanence.
Anything holds in court when you have more money than several small nations combined.
Or "watch". That way they don't have to make it obvious that their customers won't own it but still don't straight up lie.
Then it's not binding and they're just waiting for the class action. Which will win, but they'll still be richer in the end.
This is modern alchemy trying to turn lead into gold. Just change the meaning of the magic words et voilá you make gold while the other party is robbed blind and can't do anything about it after the fact.
And of course, it's totally legal and totally cool.
They actually never mention the idea of you owning content in their tos https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=content-only
It's "purchased digital content"
Which is exactly like physical media. You never owned it you bought a license to view it on that particular disk. But it also had limitations put on it.
If license ownership rights with digital custodians were as good as they are with discs, there would be no conversation happening right now. The difference now is that custodians will occasionally snap a finger and disappear your stuff, and you have no recourse.
It's not "exactly like" physical media. The license portion is a similar concept. But the difference is that the variables that determine whether I can keep watching the content whenever I want, in perpetuity, lie solely with me as the person who physically possesses the media. The corporation from which I purchased the license can't unilaterally decide to revoke my access to the content.
ok that makes me sick
Refunding the sale price is still theft. If it was only worth that much to me (zero surplus), then I wouldn't have bothered with the trade in the first place. The only things worth buying are worth more to you than the sale price.
Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That's a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you're putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money... meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.
You've sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I'm off to read about economics 🤓
What did you lose in this theft?
You got back everything you paid and you still got to enjoy the movie.
The way I see it you benefited from this transaction.
A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 1 year
It's called the Discounted Value Of Money in Finance.
As in, the future money returned by an investment is converted to today's money by using a risk free investment - say US Treasuries - as baseline to convert that future money to today's money.
Maybe an example helps: if I have a $1000 investment I can make today that returns $1050 in 2 years time, the way to check if it's worth it and by how much is by comparing it with how much would $1000 put today in, for example, US Treasuries return in 2 years time and if it's more than $1050 then that investment isn't worth it because I could make more from those $1000 in 2 years with no risk.
You could say that the baseline, no-risk, future value of today's money is how much it will turn into by that future time if I kept it in a risk free investment from today until then, and you can also do the operation in reverse, Discounting the Value Of Money in the Future to a Present Day value.
PS: There is also another concept which applies here which is to do with having your money lock-into something called Opportunity Cost. Simply it's trying to have a value for the investment opportunities you might miss if you money is already lock-in for a certain time frame in something. Back in the example above, if those $1000 are put in our example investment for 2 years, they can't be used if a better opportunity appear in the meanwhile.
This actually applies to regular people all the time: for example, if you don't have time to play a game, why buy it now if you can instead buy it later when you do have time to play it, it might be cheaper and you even have the option to change your mind in the meanwhile and get something else you enjoy more with that game. Mind you, this is maybe an example more suitable for the Patient Gamers forum than for the Piracy one ;)
Yes but the movie will have lost its value over time so you could probably find it for much cheaper.
But you've already spent your dollar.. That only proves my point. Both the dollar and the media both decrease in value, for separate reasons.
You lost the ability to enjoy it forever, and that's what the language at time of sale said you'd have.
You buy it again then?
It's probably much cheaper by the time it's deleted anyways.
You've gone from asking what was lost to insisting that they took it in order to give us a discount.
No, I just think that everyone here is over reacting like always
So you moved the goalposts?
Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?
Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.
Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise "pay this price and own this movie" rather than "pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time".
Well of course, but I wouldn't care much about movies or media. Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you "bought" digitally.
Except when they aren't. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.
Oh, whoops. I read it as them explicitly telling me to pirate it. Yeah of course they aren't going to let you actually own it. That doesn't come close to making sense.
"rent a license for 15 years"