Right now it is legally sketchy to take your physical media and digitize it. Both DVDs and Blurays are “protected” with digital locks and under the DMCA you can’t remove those digital locks.
I don’t expect law makers to have a good understanding of how media centers like Jellyfin work. What we need is a specific, spelled out change that would legally protect those who buy media for building a media center. Perhaps we need a community written bill or something.
I also think piracy is a big issue. I see a lot of piracy discussion on Jellyfin and related communities which doesn’t help the perception from the law makers perspective. I think it is also important to set limits and penalties to those who decide to start sharing and downloading illicit materials.
you technically can’t “buy” media, you can only license it. It has always been this way although we keep saying “buy” and “own” like we do with a hammer. It’s just that in the past things were less sophisticated and the license owners didn’t have the means to enforce their control over their property the way they can now.
Always has been like this. Copyright violations / piracy is covered by law in pretty much all “civilized” countries.
The issue was never that small. It was a lot bigger without DRM being technically feasible and working. Piracy is negligible today compared to the past.
That’s called Democracy. We already got this (most of us)
The only problem is e.g. a BluRay with DRM only being a license to use that BluRay. A general license like “hey you buy this and we provide some kind of medium, but just use it in whatever form you like for personal use”.
But then you have the majority of people deciding on platforms, locking down that freedom, like Kindle, Steam, Spotify, whatever.
So “the will of the people” isn’t so clear. Most are happy the way things are today. And “most” is what counts and the rest have to submit to these decisions.
I’m glad you are ok with it but a lot of us are simply not happy with merely a “license.” I want to buy a physical media and then have it as long as I own the physical media. I don’t see any problem with taking my blurays and then digitizing them. They are purely for my enjoyment and its not like I am running this giant empire of crime like the media companies would like you to believe. Also opening up the ability to control your own media would also greatly benefit a lot of people. I imagine a lot of people would want to take there favorite shows and movies and then put them on there computer. Large parts of the public are unhappy that there favorites are constantly disappearing.
Its not like consumer friendly legislation isn’t unheard of. In Canada you are allowed to format shift your media as long as it is for your own use. If you start sharing your media with the public it becomes a different story but to do it privately is completely protected under Canadian law.
I don’t know but maybe you are to young to remember or know about lazer disc. Lazer disc were before dvds and were almost record sized they also don’t decay like dvds 25 year life span. Then you brought a lazerdisc you owned it like a car. There was and still isn’t any licensing (leaseing) for lazerdisc and you can show, make money off of, reformat or anything else you want with them legally, do to the way “sell” is legally defined.
After some small movie theaters were showing movies from lazerdisc Hollywood didn’t like it and moved to dvds for planned obsolescence and scrambling the media in different ways and added technically illegal clouses after while claiming to “sell” the movie.
The media industry has not fully pushed the legal aspect of the “lease” not sell argument in court because it could open the whole industry up to a class action lawsuit for anyone that has “bought” a movie deing “sold” in false pretext . Instead they have pushed to make it harder to do what you want with what you brought. They try to scare people (the “legal notice” do not copy is legally only for that notice not the movie) and hope people don’t look into it.
Now they are talking about not making any hard media probably because they know the legal flaws in there “lease” argument they have been feeding the public now, and making obscured contracts (some may not hold in court) in all streaming services (Look into Disney plus wrongful dead). Then your only option if you want to watch a new show is to “lease” and you will be almost unknowingly be signing away all your legal protections including and not limited to Disney literally killing you.
This is kinda a big deal. To add to the privacy and piratecy, you can look at things like sony “selling” digital copies of shows then stripping them from costomes local drives. This makes people want privacy to keep there stuff safe and not have the place that sells them something try to steal it back and “sell” it to you again. Not all but alot of “pirates” I see are not trying to make a lot of money but trying to hold onto what they already bought.
I known it was legal for about a year in the UK before they made it illigal again in i think 2015. Unfortunately there isn’t even the usual case of “have you got a licence for that”. As far as I understand I think that video games are in a (very dark) grey zone but aren’t definitively outlawed. I’m not being funny though but with the fact physical media is known to rot in time and there is media that is not available to buy, stream or rent anywhere but is available on physical media I should legally be able to format shift, from a quick look if I wanted to watch Buster keatons " The General" it is completely unavailable to buy, rent or stream in the UK. Another argument if my kids wanted to watch my copy of top gun Maverick or Oppenheimer in the car, from another quick search you can’t buy a potable 4K UHD DVD player for a car, so the only way to watch it is to format shift. The problem with this is that it isnt stopping piracy l, and it just punishes people who want to format shift for personal use only. Then on top of that if I wanted to share a format shifted copy of a film with a friend what’s the difference if I hand them my physical copy of the film instead of them going to buy their own, vs giving them access to the format shifted version?
I own many physical textbooks because I prefer paper. But I also make sure my ebooks in calibre all work offline.
I have this old kobo. But it has this cancerous requirement to make an online account to get passed the setup screen…
Turns out it runs linux! You can simply mount it and insert an account manually in its local db, to trick it into thinking it’s registered and bypass the setup screen.
