Anywhere to purchase movies / shows legally to put on my Plex server?
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r/DataHoarderu/LonelyLarynx (353)

I have a Plex server running at home and really like having my own collection of music / movies that isn't tied to some 3rd party service. I can have higher quality content and don't have to worry about the third-party service eventually shutting down or changing their apps in a way I don't like, etc.

I'm just about done ripping all of our existing discs of music and movies. Does anyone know of any services out there where I can buy new movies / shows legally and download the standalone files that I can keep and view in any way I want? There are websites out there that let you purchase and download music in lossless format, but I haven't seen anything like this for movies.

Any leads, or am I stuck either buying Blu-ray disks (seems really wasteful) or "sailing the seas"?

Comments (301)

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The problem is that they don't sell the movie, they rent it šŸ˜“

Right? That's why I'm looking for an alternative. Figured if it existed people here would know about it.

There is none. Speaking from a US perspective, there is no legal way to get a DRM free copy of a movie. Ripping DVDs and Blu-rays are technically illegal in the US too since it requires breaking the encryption to do. No storefronts sell digital DRM free copies of movies either; it is all rent or buy a license. Streaming is obvious no DRM free.

The movie industry has a much tighter hold on its content then the music industry sadly.

Luckily, not everyone lives in the dystopia of the USA.

But can you buy (to download!) digital DRM-free movies in your country?

Probably not. I checked my laws in Germany and itā€™s a similar thing. Technically you are allowed to create private copies of purchased media, but only if youā€™re not breaking protection mechanisms such as copy protection

Excuse me what? I want a media server, so you either sell me a digital copy or I will create one from another medium. I'm not advocating for piracy, but at some point people will start using the better product.

[deleted]

Well, as I said, a lot of people choosing the better product will make dents in their fiscal planning. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

And to be frank: yes,I am talking about fucking pirating the shit out of basically everything you don't get to own a copy of legally anymore. Grind their greedy subscription asses into the proverbial dirt, make them try and come after every single pirate, thereby wasting a lot of money.

choosing the better product

There's another Hollywood making movies without DRM that we may have missed? I don't think so.

Well, you're in luck then, I don't care about hollywood and from what I hear through the grapevines, there's way too much money and power concentrated there anyways.

Lick my boot, Marvelboy.

I think Commander Bootlick is actually the next Marvel superhero they are going to option into a five picture franchise. How can we miss out on that gem?

I know, but the question was not about the legality of private copies, but if there are any officially downloadable movies. Like you buy a movie from the studio's website, and they send you an email "click this link to download your movie.mp4".
(yes, that's independent. Studios could still offer you the files even if private copies were illegal.)

In some countries of the EU there was Wakanim that offered DRM-free digital download for anime (and with quaility on par of a BD), but AFIAK they removed that option not long ago.

In Sweden, the law doesn't allow you to bypass DRM, but has an exception if you already legally have access to the media.

Doesn't GEMA get lots of money from every storage device sold via Urheberrechtsabgabe? Copyswede gets a tariff of 0,30ā‚¬/GB for mobile phone storage, so how can GEMA justify their Urheberrechtsabgabe if private copying is allowed but not bypassing DRM if all productions have some form of DRM on it?

Yes we have such laws. GEMA does not need to justify stuff like that, in Germany copyright laws feel like theyā€™ve been written by media companies(letā€™s face it, they probably are).

From what I recall (I am from the US, so I am likely wrong), many European counties do not have the encryption thing for disks. Some even consider anything aired on TV as "free" so you are allowed to legally torrent it.

Yeah, ripping and torrenting may be a little less illegal in some countries, but that wasn't the question. It was: can you legally purchase (not rent, not stream) a downloadable movie (preferably DRM-free, but even DRM restricted selfcontained files seem nonexistant), same as you can buy music, audiobooks or ebooks and be offered a downloadable mp3/epub.

I have some disks and some did not have the protection while others did. I think itā€™s a bit hit or miss, depending on if the disk was made for international/world wide sale or for a specific country.

I meant that some countries do not make it illegal to rip a disk for personal use. Regardless if it has a "copy protection" or not.

Last time I looked at it (back then I lived in Germany, long time ago) iirc it even said in the splash screen when first loading the movie something along those lines (that you can rip it for personal use but not for redistribution)

Right. It's not legal where that user lives either, but it was a good opportunity to call the USA a digital dystopia.

I thought ripping them is only illegal if you distribute them afterwards.

Ripping is illegal because it requires you to break the protections in place on the disc to access the raw files. You are allowed to make disc images of the disc to back it up (preserving the encryption), but not rip the raw video files off of it.

Honestly just torrent it.

Buy the physical disc or something on YouTube or Google tv if you really want to to support the show or whatever.

But torrents are your only real option for this kind of thing long term.

Ya its called bittorrent

Or buy the physical media and rip it yourself.

Or rent the physical media and rip it before returning it? Libraries are great for this. Especially music!

He said legal.

Curious if anything else is left then?

As far as I know even ripping your own media doesnā€™t qualify as ā€œlegalā€ for shifting.

Itā€™s legal for copyright purposes, but the DMCA apparently makes is illegal to defeat the encryption for any reason, even an otherwise legal one. If anyone was to be prosecuted for this, that part of the law would probably be overturned.

That part is location dependent though I think.

[deleted]

Making an unauthorized copy of a legal copyrighted work you currently possess is illegal. Copying a movie you borrowed isn't legal.

But have no fear - law enforcement has so many other things to deal with than this practice.

It depends on the country. In mine it isn't.

In my home itā€™s allowed to copy any movie you want.

!CENSORED!<

I can live anywhere with a good enough VPN.

[deleted]

ā€œYou wouldnā€™t download a car, would you?ā€ Lol

I would. https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI

Psst, buddy, where is this car.STL please?

Iā€™m 3D printing it now. Estimated time to finish: 6 years, 4 days, 13 minutes, 58 seconds.

Shit, it just froze again. Iā€™ll call you when I have an update.

I absolutely would.

Exactly, in practice nobody knows if something is actually illegal until there's been a test case. Courts throw out unenforceable laws sometimes and sometimes just nobody can be bothered to prosecute.

!CENSORED!<

Did you know that your brain makes a lossy copy of a movie? It's called "memory" and as technology dovetails with our intelligence the distinction between wetware copies and digital encodings will become less and less clear.

You never heard of Fair Use? Speaking strictly of rentals and borrowing from a library, you're spot-on, but if you OWN a piece of media you can make all the copies you like, so long as you don't distribute them.

​

You never heard of Fair Use?

Making a copy that is legal under Fair Use is authorized - by definition. I wrote about making an unauthorized copy.

Borrowing a DVD from a library and copying so you can enjoy it later is not Fair Use.

'Hey, I didn't have time to watch them then, so I thought i'd just time shift my rental'

Works for me!

Copyright holders have so abused the legal and political system in the U.S...

Youā€™ll find quite quickly that thatā€™s a terrible definition

Piracy isnā€™t the only illegal thing

Ripping DVDs, even for personal use, is illegal in most jurisdictions.

Ripping farts however, isn't.

Another underrated comment.

dude if you're not doing this you're just wasting a perfectly good library.

They have the disc anyway, they bought them.

That is what I did, especially when I had surgery and couldn't work a while. I ripped movies with my laptop and backed them up so I can watch them via Kodi on my pi 3b+. šŸ™‚

I used to do this with blockbuster lol. DVDrip and another program

Edit: DVDrip and DVDfab to compress into mp4 or avi

I worked at blockbuster for a long time. We had this dude that used the unlimited rental pass and would come in like 5 times a day to swap them out.

I used to use the combo of DVDrip and DVD shrink.

Thatā€™s it! Thank you I was mistaken

I had a cracked version of slysoft anydvd, worked like a charm! Bonus you could just copy it as an ISO file then burn a new DVD. Could even modify the title screen or edit the menu.

I do the rip it yourself method, 4k blu-ray files are big.

You forgot the ā€˜qā€™

I think in most countries if you own the physical you can then download the film

Thereā€™s some whizbang stuff you can do in the browser inspector and other tools to pull raw streams to a file, but with the big streaming services, theyā€™ve gone out of their way to make most of the easy tricks not work on their platforms.

But weirdly media with online digital streams are always so easily available on the seas.. it's almost like it doesn't work at all.

The only fullproof method is to physically prevent people having a copy, which is what theatres were great at.

!CENSORED!<

Linux won't, so we are safe for a while

This is why I'm sticking with ME.

[deleted]

Yours is an underrated comment.

That sounds like it will just end up accomplishing the same thing that software DRM does:

Actual, legitimate customers have to jump through 20 hoops to get an objectively worse product than pirates who pay nothing.

Sure, hand out secure boot whatsits. Unless you can change it so no media can be played without a DRM signature of some kind, that just means that there will be a whole lot of de-DRMed material floating around the seas.

!CENSORED!<

This is why I never upgraded from windows 7. I had the chance for a year or so to upgrade to windows 8 and whatever.

If it ain't broke dont fix it.

Technically, you never own a movie, only a license to watch it šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø

I mean, no shit. Movies can cost hundreds of millions, a license to watch it is like $15.

But if it existed, why wouldnā€™t it be known? That would be a big blow to digital markets. Also, youā€™re not asking about lossless, youā€™re asking about DRM free.

Yeah, even the studios don't have their own movies in a lossless format.

[deleted]

You know Netflix still ships dvds/bluray right?

I may or may not use makemkv a lot with redbox movies.

Actually, youtube has movies you can rent or buy. Not sure about being able to DL them as, I haven't found a way to DL the free ones that have ads in them (DRM protected) like I can/have for the rest of the vids

I think this is the dilemma put upon consumers by the media industry. We can either buy the physical disc, which we'll likely only use one to rip, and then store on a shelf; or we can lease the file through their platform. Anything else is considered piracy.

Yard sales, thrift stores, and bargain bins are all legit. Borrowing and ripping from the library is an option but likely illegal.

Depending upon the content you are looking for, Archive.org may be a great option for you.

it surprises me that you can buy and rip blurays legally (note: turns out you actually cant, error on my part), or at least in some form of gray area, yet you cannot buy a digital license to be able to download said movie.

Nope. It's illegal to rip a Blu-ray or DVD (in the US) because you have to circumvent copy protection to do so. The Librarian of Congress, who interprets the copyright rules, declined to allow an exemption to the DMCA that would allow people to do this. Interestingly, they did say that jailbreaking phones does not violate the DMCA.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/its-still-illegal-to-rip-dvd-and-blu-ray-discs-for-personal-use/

i was gonna make a comment about this technically being a technicality but reddit is somehow incapable of handling copy and paste requests in its ui so fuck that.

TL;DR its allowed for cds because they dont have copy protection but not for dvds and blu rays technically making this is copy protection issue not copyright, so it is technically ok to make copies of them just not breaking the copy protection.

Interestingly, they did say that jailbreaking phones does not violate the DMCA.

If you physically own something (which you do, you own the disk, no one gave you a contract when you bought the disk from the store), then you should be able to do what you want with it, including breaking its encryption or other protective/security software, just like you should be able to root or jailbreak phones.

That's why people were asking for the exemption. I agree you should be able to, but unfortunately the law says no.

Use LibreDrive?

My understanding of that tool is that it allows ripping software to directly access the data on the disk, when firmware might prevent it.

So while that tool makes it possible to do, it's still bypassing copy protection, because the data itself has copy protection.

A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ā€œrevokedā€. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.

Itā€™s not a tool, itā€™s the original firmware provided by the Blu-ray drive manufacturer.

They accidentally left a back door open in the firmware that allows direct access to the files on the disc.

If you want to get technical, it's not "firmware" but a temporary firmware extension that lives in volatile RAM, bypassing any restrictions imposed by AACS, including host revocation, that would prevent ripping software from accessing files on the disc.

You can nitpick all you want but it's still a method of bypassing copy protection.

It is firmware as it comes from the manufacture this way out of the box from a retailer.

It does not bypass/break encryptions such as AACS.

Then you might want to go tell Mike Admin over at the MakeMVK forums he's wrong, because the info there contradicts what you're saying here.

Here's the info I'm referencing, emphasis mine:

What happens in LibreDrive mode

Post by mike admin Ā» Sat Feb 02, 2019 1:22 pm

When MakeMKV (or any other application that uses LibDriveIo library) talks to the drive, the library checks if drive firmware version is supported. If it is supported, the library uploads a small software (a firmware extension) into drive volatile memory. This extension exposes a new (alternative) interface to read any data from the disc. The firmware extension stays only in drive volatile memory (RAM) and drive firmware is not changed in any way. The moment you turn off your drive, it is gone without a trace. As long as your drive firmware is compatible with LibreDrive, and you do not update your drive firmware, the LibreDrive mode will work forever.

The alternative interface provides direct access to the encrypted data without passing through the AACS imposed MKB layer. It's specifically designed to bypass AACS, emphasis mine:

Please note that LibreDrive mode is not about hacking or meddling with AACS code. In LibreDrive mode the updated software communicates to the drive hardware directly (ed. this is a bypass), not touching or hacking AACS DRM code in any way at all. So your drive will continue to self-revoke on MKB updates and require authentication before releasing key material to the "authorized" software - it is just with LibreDrive mode all of it is no longer relevant.

You still have to bypass the copy protection. Going in through the back door to take things from a house that isn't yours is still burglary, regardless if the door is unlocked, wide open, or you have a copy of the key.

I thought you could circumvent copy protection for personal back ups, but methods/programs that did do were illegal to distribute/share

Read the ruling for yourself, starting on page 22: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/fedreg-publicinspectionFR.pdf

There is no exemption for "personal backups."

Fine if not in US, just move to another country, then rip your media, and return.

A solution has been found folks! We just need a map of countries which are sympathetic to our cause, we'll go there in groups (road trip), rip our discs and return home. Brilliant!

simply spin up a vpn somewhere else, EZ PZ!

[deleted]

It depends on the jurisdiction. In the UK for example, circumventing copy protection and DRM is a crime. In New Zealand, you can rip all you want. The US is mostly the same as the UK.

Ripping isn't "100% legal" outside New Zealand.

That's why I always head to New Zealand when I want to rip one.

Please donā€™t fly to New Zealand just to fart

The Aussies send their regards.

Can't rip anything legally in Finland

That may be changing due to trade deals, other countries love to try and impose their shitty copyright laws on us as part of them (alright maybe that's just the US but the point stands).

Don't let it. You have a right to do it, do not let them take your rights away.

It is NOT legal, at least in the US.

Interestingly enough, the laws are much more lax when it comes to Audio CDs because they don't have DRM. But you are breaking several laws when ripping a DVD or Blu Ray. Under Title 17 of the US State Code, it's illegal to make a copy of a copyrighted work without the copyright holder's permission. It makes no exceptions for personal use or backup. It breaks yet MORE laws to remove the DRM from the disc in order to get it into .mp4 or .mkv form.

There used to be a clause carved out that made it legal but that expired about a decade ago and was never reinstated.

Well fuck that. I ain't stopping because of some bullshit law that can't even be enforced

[deleted]

That would be the case if blurays didn't have DRM. The DMCA makes circumventing DRM a crime. You can copy a bluray all you want for personal use, but copying it isn't enough, you have to circumvent the DRM to get the video into a usable format for e.g. Plex.

Show me the law that makes an exception to the DMCA for personal use.

This is not true at all.

Sources backing up the fact that it's illegal:

  • https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/its-still-illegal-to-rip-dvd-and-blu-ray-discs-for-personal-use/

  • https://en.softonic.com/articles/rip-dvd-bluray-legal

  • https://techshift.net/is-it-illegal-to-rip-a-blu-ray/

  • https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-in-the-United-States-to-rip-a-Blu-ray-or-DVD-to-my-PC-and-possibly-transfer-it-to-my-other-devices-if-I-neither-give-nor-sell-copies-to-other-people

  • https://www.soundandvision.com/content/it-legal-copy-blu-ray-discs-hard-drive

  • https://www.leawo.org/entips/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-1373.html

Is there some legal grey area in, after ripping it, selling the copy it was ripped from? Since technically you're selling your "rights" or redistributing the copy.
Not that I care too much either way. Even DvDs and blurays degrade. I like to back up all my files to ensure I don't lose them

What the DMCA does, through DRM, is make the circumvention illegal, not the actual copying. So, now, even if you own your DVD and are trying to make a personal copy for when, not if, your children scratch the original, or you want to make a copy to watch on your computer, it is illegal to bypass DRM protection measures to make your backup.

  • https://legalbeagle.com/12719622-dmca-backup-of-copyrighted-content.html

[deleted]

Itā€™s not.

So bizarre really if you think about it. You can legally re-sell the physical disc version for how ever much you want to anyone you want or even give it away for free but as soon as itā€™s a digital copy youā€™ve forfeited any right to do so.

I guess, but when itā€™s physical, you have one copy and it stays as one copy. As soon as itā€™s digital, you have unlimited copies.

Is it legal to keep the rip if you get rid of the Blu-ray?

[deleted]

No. Once you sell the physical copy, youā€™ve sold your right to have a digital copy.

What about other methods of getting rid of it though, say if it were damaged?

I dont think its a grey area at all personally, in fact im all for it, but depending on where you live and what legal shenanigans lawyers get up to it can depend. Also as others have mentioned, shit like drm exists and circumventing it is technically breaking dmca or copyright whatever it is specifically im not familiar with.

Though realistically i dont think DRM should be held up in a court unless it has to do with distribution, i.e. if someone cracks the DRM of a game but then doesnt distribute it there shouldnt be a case against them. Since they already owned the game in the first place, or perhaps pirated a DRMd version but idk why you would do that.

I think they mean a legal gray area, not a moral gray area

I meant legal as well. Though morally it isnt at all, its just common sense that it should be something you should be able to do.

Though here in the US it's apparently explicitly illegal because it violates copy protection which is absolute bullshit but whatever.

Ripping is perfectly legal, decrypting what you've ripped so it's actually usable is a violation of DMCA. That being said, you're unlikely to have your door busted down for ripping and decrypting DVDs that you literally own and have sitting on your shelf

i was gonna mention this but i figured it would be redundant as regardless of what you did that encrptyed copy is pretty useless, unless you burnt it and put it in the player and it somehow read it just fine.

Though yeah i agree, the chance anything happens to you from ripping DVDs/blurays is small, unless you host it on pirate site or something stupid like that. Especially if you have no clear direct evidence of ripping them.

am I stuck either buying Blu-ray disks (seems really wasteful)

What you call 'really wasteful' I call 'an air-gapped backup'

Especially if you don't want to forget who shot first or that tasers replaced guns in some all time great movies.

This is a really underrated take.

While I like that take,but for a movie to not be available on Torrents, especially now, there probably needs to be a massive power outage over half of the world

I mean I have a shipping container which acts as a faraday cage for my backups, and I live far away from most of the world. If I lose my media somehow, I've got got bigger problems to worry about.

Damn, that sounds very interesting What job do you have? And what setup is inside that container? A library with Books and Blu-ray's? Or something Digital? I am probably moving out of the city in the next few years, and while I can have a normal server there, a container also sounds interesting

I work in software engineering of various types.

The shipping container is mainly for misc physical storage, but I keep my off-site backup inside it.

It might provide protection against an EMP, but rats are another story when they manage to sneak in!

Fine, that's one way to look at it. I appreciate the positive outlook. :)

Still, I could make my own more space efficient backup that doesn't requiring every disc (and associated case and packaging) to be produced on the other side of the planet and transported to my house.

Your take is very reasonable given the current state of things, but I don't think it holds up as well in the context of how things "should be" (which is of course subjective).

All the answers seem to be ā€œeither sail the high seas or do something else that is probably also illegal and way harder.ā€

SEPTEMBER FOREVER!!!

Decades too late for that joke lol

Interesting question. Because in gaming world there is gog.com for legal games without DRM, in music world you can buy iTunes and download them, and in terms of movies...? I dont think such place exists

To the average person, they don't care or need DRM stripped, because they're not downloading movies anyway, they're streaming them and don't want to buy or manage the storage locally so it's not likely the market exists for this.

We may not even get DRM-free audio if the idea was proposed today, most people only care if they can stream what they want, when they want it, and mostly on a mobile device (especially music.) Services like Spotify have ~200 million users that don't care about DRM.

[deleted]

You're right about the iTunes DRM but there actually are plenty of platforms that sell music DRM free.

Bandcamp comes to mind.

There is no DRM on tracks or albums you purchase. Apple removed them long ago.

However, there is DRM on tracks you download via their music subscription service.

How do you remove DRM from iTunes music?

I have a few downloaded albums that I could only find lossless versions of on iTunes, but I havenā€™t been able to find any actually working ways to remove the drm.

How do you remove DRM from iTunes music?

iTunes doesn't have DRM for music.

that I could only find lossless versions of on iTunes

iTunes also doesn't have lossless copies of music.

šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø

The real gigachad move would be buying the blu-rays, ripping them, and then making torrents out of them šŸ˜‰

In all honesty though, it seems you are in a bit of a pickle, insofar as the law doesnā€™t give you a clear way to do what it is you want to do ā€” eg, own your own media. Rather than answer your question with ā€œjust pirate it lol,ā€ I would say to think about why you DONā€™T want to ā€œsail the high seas.ā€ Is it simply the law? Some moral code? Some fear of danger? Whatever the answer, thinking deeply about this will likely make you feel better about whatever it is you choose to do, since youā€™ll understand why you feel comfortable and confident doing so.

imo pirating is a market controlling force, prevents the big boys from getting too greedy with everything.

Copyright in the U.S.A. is supposed to be "for a limited time". It's right there in the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has basically said that anything short of infinity is "a limited time". This came up when copyright was extended to 95 years for corporations.

and now theres like, to the death of the creator, plus another lifetime, its wild how far copy right can extend these days under the right circumstances.

!CENSORED!<

Amazing how the British ownership of Hong Kong was 99 years since that was "as good as forever", and now that's considered a normal duration for IP ownership. It was supposed to last long enough for you to get your product to market before everyone else, not block competitors for all eternity.

Believe it or not - the copyright extension was named for a politician who was married to and performed with Cher, and died after he ran into a tree while skiing.

More facts you can't use! /s

I think piracy is def a market force. Piracy is always defined negatively (as in defined as the negation of a positive, eg the reaction to the legal, the opposition to the ā€œnormā€), so itā€™s definitely a disruptive market force in that sense. If one tried to define piracy positively, as in as itā€™s own maxim and not as a counter-point, suddenly the media companies and their attempts to limit file sharing would be the disruption of the natural state of things šŸ¤”. Fun thoughts to bandy about on Sunday evenings

[deleted]

I think it is actually the perfect solution, like if you think about, taking down pirated copies of something from a torrent net is practically impossible, in theory it should be fully self sustaining even if a large corp starts going after it. I suppose its possible that you could crack down on it but the amount of legal effort required to hit something entirely decentralized as opposed to like 123 movies is a lot more work.

Certainly a great retort to greedy corps IMO.

Assuming whatever the torrent is is interesting enough to attract a global market, you'd effectively need to make every globalist conspiracy theory a reality. You would need a global police force that has jurisdiction, cooperation, and moderate to severe punishments on a global scale, monitoring all internet and other communication traffic, and blocking any form of informational obfuscation.

There's a reason why China and Russia are nightmares for IP and DMCA systems, their government is at best uncooperative with Western IP interests and legal systems, and currently in Russia's case, openly hostile. Get a seedbox up in Russia and it's never going down.

Add on VPN services that pride themselves in giving governments and corporations the run around and suddenly you can't kill the seeders, and spotting the leeches is nearly impossible, since a download probably looks fairly similar to downloading video games, streaming, and WFH teleconferencing through an encrypted/secure channel.

And even then on a scale that large one guy getting hit with a takedown notice is just going to take it down and another will pop up anyway. It effectively becomes a never ending rat race if large enough.

If they went full global police like that, there wouldn't be a notice for anyone that doesn't have plausible deniability. If you were seeding Disney Movie #2305 and weren't in the business of transferring data or some other excuse, they'd just criminally prosecute you. Add on a few laws requiring more KYC laws and requiring logs everywhere (VPNs specifically) and the whole thing would be dead.

I think its interesting that people look at piracy in a negative manner, when often times its the rebellious group against large greedy corporations getting full of themselves.

Dont like the streaming service split up? Pirate movies instead!

Dont like streaming services providing shit content with inconsistent and unlasting licenses? torrenting is your friend!

You really like that one album that no services distribute? Its probably on the torrent net already, and there is actually a law surrounding this specific situation as well.

Certainly an interesting conversation. Piracy of TV/Movies dropped off a cliff when Netflix first took hold, because nearly everything was available for a reasonable price all in once nice spot. Now that everything is split off, piracy is back in full force.

I haven't known anyone to pirate music since Spotify came out, even if they aren't using Spotify they're using competing services like YouTube Music or Apple Music. There's certainly people still pirating music to hoard, backup, or as a refusal of streaming services, but the average person is streaming and downloading (caching) their playlists in their respective apps.

I mean buying them and ripping them is fine. Itā€™s you owning and using a backup. Is that illegal nowadays?

Technically it's illegal to remove the DRM on the blu ray (in the US).

[deleted]

It's neither unenforceable nor "defacto legal."

If you are brought up on unrelated charges and a search warrant is executed against your home, you could very well be hit with charges related to this as well.

Correct, but not in the uk

Well within your rights to rip or torrent the file as long as you legally own the underlying

Torrenting is actually pretty dodgy as you'll be distributing the file as well which is definitely not allowed.

Name checks out

You're not required to seed the file on most trackers, and all clients give you the choice afaik.

I own the original baldurs gate classic pc game, but the cd's are scratched beyond recompense.

Even though I'm in the states, I'll vpn into the uk to redownload that epic game. If I didn't already rip them when I was 15 and they started having trouble installing.

I really wish the US would take that approach to torrent. It makes sense on so many levels

While you're downloading you'll be uploading unless you're throttling your client to 0, which is an arsehole thing to do.

!CENSORED!<

It's stupid. Buy the media, own the media and then rip the files to watch on your own network is a worse crime than just torrenting period.

They make it so difficult to enjoy the media you should be able to enjoy in your own terms. It's unfair.

Even bigger gigachad is putting them on Usenet instead of outdated torrents. (I realize usenet is old aswell)

Hey you! You shut your filthy mouth! You donā€™t talk about ā€˜you know whatā€™!

Buy cheap on eBay, get the content you want, resell to others (ebay?) looking to do the same.

If he sold the disc again, his copy would become illegal.

The act of ripping it itself is illegal no? Even if you own the media

Why do people say this shit like there is only one legislative environment in the whole world.

Because the vast majority of people here are Americans; this is an American website. Other users are the exception.

While the MPAA would have you believe so, the courts haven't. Thus it is fair use if you own the media and rip it to your own computer. It becomes less fair use if you then let others borrow that same media or allow others to access it on your computer. Thus preventing another sale of the media.

Interesting. Good to know, thanks!

Out of curiosity, do you know the legality of buying a disc, ripping it, then giving it away for free? Surely that's legal but if the next person tries to sell it (which I would have no control over) does that make my copy illegal?

Both of those are technically illegal. The ripped copy you make is a "backup" to the physical disk.

The physical disc is the "license" to have the film. If you no longer have the disc (for whatever reason) you don't have any right to the digital file either.

Thank you for the answer!

Though that's super disappointing. I often purchase DVDs to add to my plex then donate the disc to my Library for them to loan as they would any asset. I certainly don't re-sell them. Nobody but my local library made any sort of gain here but it's illegal? Super bummer. I understand it's probably not quite on the level of murder but technically it's still against the law. In all honesty, I'll probably keep doing it. If the FBI comes to take me to prison for life, I suppose this is my manifesto here on Reddit.

Both of those are technically illegal.

Only in the US. Pretty sure its an untested law in court too.

Not legal. Any 'backups' need to be destroyed when you sell on the original media.

Nope, it's legal, just don't live in a IP hellscape like the USA.

Ownership is a grey area also. Look at the little free libraries that some people set up in neighborhoods. Who really owns those books? Same could be done with visual media.

That's not a grey area. First sale doctrine says I can buy a book, disc, or any other item, and then rent it or sell it. If I want to give it away, I can do that, too. Ownership rights transfer.

The little free libraries are giving the books away. If you take them, they're yours. Same is true of the ones that give out DVDs.

If you really want to dive into grey areas, technically backing up your own discs isn't actually legal either. Making any copy of the material is counter to copyright law.

i think the grey area in this example is buying something, ripping it, and then selling it. Buying and ripping is fine, its the same content on both mediums, you aren't redistributing it or anything and they fulfill the same purpose. But once you sell it or distribute the file it becomes easier to argue that its piracy since you dont own the original copy or have distributed the duplicate copy.

I wonder though, if you back it up, don't sell or give it away, but a house fire or flood rips through destroying it all except for your offsite backup. Legally, do you lose those rights. Not that they would have any way of knowing either way. Not owning the original copy.

i would say no, you didnt redistribute it, it would essentially be the same as if you had destroyed the copy you owned and thrown it away or something. Which i guess you could argue against legally but regardless of the case you bought and paid for it as well as own it. So i dont see how you could make a case against that.

The person they're replying to is suggesting that neighborhood libraries are in a gray area. They are absolutely not. The issue of lending books has been hashed out so many times in damn near every country on the planet

yeah, i was just providing an additional example here. Though this makes me wonder whether buying something ripping it and then lending it counts as well or not.

No it is settled law that you have the right to make a backup of media you purchase. This was settled in fair use. Re: Legal Beagle website However under the doctrine of "fair use," individuals may be permitted to make backup copies or archival copies of some materials as long as certain conditions are met. Creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own ease of use is likely to be considered copyright infringement. But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use. https://legalbeagle.com/12719016-copyright-law-making-personal-copies.html

But the moment you break the copyright protection on a DVD, it is illegal (technically).

Ripping DVDs is illegal when you must crack copyright protection to do so, which is almost always.

As long as the copy is for archival purposes, the courts have repeatedly held this to NOT be an illegal copy. You have the right to make archival copies of your media that you have purchased in good faith. Breaking the copy protection for archival copies is handled under "Fair Use". Further having a physical disk or other media in an archival environment is then considered to be the archival copy and the digital copy is the one that is considered to be in use.

If you are unsure ask any attorney for clarity, but making a copy of a VHS/DVD/BluRay/etc. that you own for backup or archival reasons is the basis of Fair Use. In fact several courts have even held that using pirated copies to reacquire your legally obtained media due to damage is acceptable in certain cases. However until I have seen a ruling from a federal court of appeal in this case I'm hesitant to take that route. However there are cases where I really think about taking this route Disney Vault is one big issue. If I was to lose a disk plus the backup copy of a movie that was not available due to the policies that Disney has I might just go this route to get a new copy for my media library.

Look up the DMCA. Making a copy is fine, breaking encryption to do it is not.

Yes, but as keeps being pointed out to you, you can't crack DRM to do it.

What the DMCA does, through DRM, is make the circumvention illegal, not the actual copying. So, now, even if you own your DVD and are trying to make a personal copy for when, not if, your children scratch the original, or you want to make a copy to watch on your computer, it is illegal to bypass DRM protection measures to make your backup.

  • https://legalbeagle.com/12719622-dmca-backup-of-copyrighted-content.html

Are there any 1st world countries that do not have rights management on movies? I am surprised, at this point that CDs (what is left of them that is) are not DRM restricted.

Maybe try borrowing movies at your local library and rip them?

This plus bargain-bin clearance and garage sales.

That's still piracy since you don't own the original disc.

When I was a kid a librarian told me it was fine to copy CDs I checked out. Maybe they just didn't know

Or they knew, and said it was fine, because it was. Who's gonna see that you ripped it locally. This isn't some torrent where if you aren't using a VPN/Proxy they can see your ip.

Thereā€™s a big difference between something being legal and whether or not youā€™ll get caught.

And that librarian may have thought and said "it's fine" even if they knew it was technically illegal. Because, "it's fine".

Itā€™s fine if you donā€™t get caught šŸ¤·

Imagine getting in trouble for ripping a friends cd to your og Xbox back in the day lol

I've done that for a couple library DVDs! It's a good way to support your local library and grow a bigger data hoard. Truly a win-win

Not sure it could be argued that you're supporting the library there, they have to pay a license for a given number of loans, so it costs them when you take it.

This is assuming its a free public library and not a commercial one, not sure how libraries work outside of the UK.

Using the library by checking things out supports them

Not a bad idea.

[deleted]

Could help the library. The more people check out stuff, the more they can say ā€œhey we need a higher budgetā€

This is what I do. Local library has a great selection.

Under the DMCA it is somewhat legal (breaking copy protection is still illegal under most circumstances but it's a grey area and subject of debate) to make archive copies of discs you own. Hosting them on a server to provide to others who don't own the disc would not be legal, but for your own use it's probably the closest you can get to above board. There is no legal way to acquire the rights to stream content to others except through the multi-million dollar deals that Netflix and other large steaming services make with content owners. There is no business case for these companies to make available digital copies without copy protection and restrictive licensing for home and personal use only. Public viewing and redistribution are use cases that they can charge extra to license, so that's what they do. Laws are obviously different around the world, but the principle is similar in many places.

If your country has an anti-circumvention of a technological protection measure restriction, then it is not legal to rip your own DVDs or BlueRays. Movies on both formats are encrypted and creating non-encrypted copies is a circumvention of technological protection measures that the publishers have taken. When you have a right to create a personal backup copy, this only applies to having a copy of the encrypted disc, not the decrypted movie.

This guide from the free software foundation has some sources for legitimate DRM-free video:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/video

Ya know, a not legal but debatable approach I take is that I actually buy the physical media, but then I just download the rip. Itā€™s faster and easier than ripping myself, and I actually paid for the discā€¦ soā€¦ they can eat me. šŸ¤£

All of the other suggestions are solid for obtaining access to films. You can also consider Redbox and Netflixā€™s original DVD by mail service (literally dvd.com).

With that said, unless you own the disc, literally every other option will be illegal. At least the options that involve ripping locally instead of sailing the seas will ensure you get the quality you want without the risk of malware.

Malware is pretty low risk when downloading media files instead of executables. It requires exploiting a zero-day in the media player software, which is extremely unlikely.

The bigger risk when pirating is getting caught.

A risk is a risk, homie! Gotta state the pros and cons regardless of the degree of it :P

Fair enough! I just wouldnā€™t personally think twice about playing a movie downloaded from even the sketchiest of sites.

Pirating a ā€œcracked gameā€ or other executable software, howeverā€¦

Technically there is risk of malware being on the disc you're ripping too. Sure it's unlikely, but so is malware capable of exploiting whatever media player you use in a torrent.

if you feel bad about "sailing the seas" you can just buy the corresponding things that you pirate, but not watch the paid version. otherwise learn how to rip from streaming services (which seems to be a gatekept process which i dunno about)

It's nearly impossible for regular people.

You can use screen recording, but that's going to be a slow process with poor yield.

Pirating is the easier way to go. Ripping Blu-ray disks will be time consuming.

IMAX has a home theater option, but iirc it is like $40,000 for the setup and $500+ per movie.

Edit:$400, 000 but you get 200 movies for free,

https://hometheateracademy.com/imax-home-theaters-cost-setup/

I didn't need a house anyways.

Or savings, or car, i can put my IMAX theater in a cardboard box.

There's really no good way for something like that to exist since it would make it so much easier to pirate.

Works fine for music though (some sites offer this)? And pirating is easy enough, including doing it fairly securely. Maybe the idea with locking everything down is to prevent piracy but in my mind it's just pushing people to pirate.

I can confirm this. I don't have much room for physical media. But I would spend significantly more money on digital media, if only it were easier to download copies for offline use. I already buy a fair few albums or soundtracks when I can get them DRM-free, and I spend way too much on DRM-free games on GOG. But I spend very little on movies. Only a Netflix subscription, and the very occasional DVD or Blu-ray. And the subscription is getting canceled as soon as they make it any more of a pain to share it with family.

Because why would I pay media companies to view movies or shows when I could pay for a seedbox and a VPN and Plex and a home media server, instead, and have a far better and more convenient experience with it?

i sure do love paying for 12 media streaming services at different prices with different content and interfaces while simultaneously only being able to watch content on the goodwill of my internet provider. Fuck everybody with shitty internet i guess.

And besides i can buy blurays of most movies anyway, thats basically the same exact thing as just buying a copy of it digitally.

Luckily it's impossible to pirate streaming movies /jk

The service exists. Kalediscape is exactly what OP described. It's just unbelievably cost-prohibitive and uses proprietary equipment.

Could the signal be captured? Maybe. Would it be cheaper than buying discs of only the movies you want? Fuck no.

That's amusing because Kalediscape's original product was essentially a NAS server that would rip and serve your DVDs.

I think the online movie steams only came in about 10 years later.

you can just straight up buy music with no strings attached though. I dont see why you wouldnt be able to do it with movies. If the movies are cheap enough, and the platform is put together enough and the product is good. People will ultimately use it over pirating as it can be a pita.

Though ofc some people will still pirate it, the vast majority of the public wouldn't.

r/AnyStream, r/Streamfab, r/Playon

Vudu lets you download. You Play On top help you download it to computer

https://androidconsejos.com/how-do-i-change-where-my-vudu-downloads-go/

And not sure if you are part of this group..purchase digital movies for less

https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalCodeSELL?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Depends on what you mean by "movies", but Rifftrax has a bunch of mostly B-movies with comedy commentary tracks that you can purchase and download DRM free - Plex will play them without issue.

No, if there was a way to legitimately buy digital DRM free content for a reasonable price, many of us would be doing it.

Pretty sure it would also reduce piracy, what they are doing now isn't working.

Rant People mostly pirate for convenience, so just let us buy the freaking thing legally and keep the file forever, hell I'm even ok with not being able to redownload it after a set time (which seems fair?)

The people who pirate for the hell of it won't change, so they are not losing anything anyway.

Buy they will get sales from people who want a legitimate option.

Companies keeping Thier media locked behind a billion vaults and streaming services, is just making piracy worse.

This is such a waste of time because the biggest law you can break is not having pirated movies on Plex, its distributing copyrighted movies and TV Shows, which is what you are doing if you are running Plex with more then yourself, which 99% of people are doing.

Anyone who buys or rents movies just to put it on Plex and they share plex with other people are essentially spending money to break the law.

I think more than 1% of plex users are not sharing.

I doubt it, why would you install a server application that doesn't work well if its offline thats specifically designed for sharing, just to use it for yourself?

Kodi is much easier for a single user.

Because some people just want to be able to view their personal media collection in a simple UI on their smart TV. That's it.

Kodi might be "better" at this in some ways, but Plex is much better known and absolutely has this basic functionality, so there you go. I say this as someone who personally used Plex this way for years. It was my whole motivation for using Plex. A friend who used Plex the same way recommended the app to me. I don't think we were in a 1% minority of users.

Power users of any software tend to overestimate their share of the userbase, simply because forums where the software is discussed will tend to be dominated by such users.

If you're still willing to rip physical discs, try going to your local library and see what they have available. Borrow the physical media, rip the media to your storage device, then return the physical media. All free!

go to your local libray or video rental, rip every movie and tv show they have

or just set sail, if they are not going to provide a reasonable option to view the content and they are so determined to stop every one from actually owning the things they buy then torrenting is pretty much the only reasonable option

Garage sale or a lot of dvds. As long as you own a physical disk you can legally have the iso

legally? u wont own em tho.

If you're open to other than mainstream entertainment, a couple of other sources include

  1. http://publicdomainmovies.net/ . As you'd expect, these are generally older (but still entertaining) films, although there are some surprises regarding what's fallen into public domain.
  2. The Internet Archive (archive.org) has a large and varied selection of films on almost any topic imaginable.

Great suggestions, thank you!

Libraries have a large amount of content for loan at a bargain price of $0 if you return them on time. If you don't want to sail the seas, start there.

yarr

mine works great

r/sonarr r/radarr r/nzbget r/Tautulli r/Overseerr r/PleX

They'll have copy protection, and won't be able to play anywhere but where they want it to play. And it's likely a streaming service.

Seems like rip your own is the only legal option, is it still 09 F9 11...? I forget the court results on that. But I think you have the right to backup content you bought.

Maybe ripping a stream? I haven't looked into that.

Thatā€™s a question Iā€™ve always had with plex. Iā€™m like, where is everyone getting their downloaded copies of everything.

Itā€™s actually the only reason I havenā€™t tried plex.

Many people copy their own bought DVDs, but News groups and torrenting for the most part I imagine

[deleted]

Not in most places. You get an online stream.

You can screen cap a move off of Amazon and then put it your Plex library

Interesting. This is my first time ever hearing about a ā€œplex serverā€. Is this equivalent to having a VPN type sh*t??

Nope, nothing to do with a vpn. Plex is a web-based media center, you store your own movies and tv shows in a folder, plex picks them up and you've basically got a self-hosted Netflix.

I don't much anymore but I used to go hit up pawn shops. There was one near me that had a kind of a "daily deal" section of their DVDs and I'd grab them for 2 bucks each...then rip em and sell them for a buck each or give them to friends or the like.

You can't own films or music unless you produced them yourself.

Depends on you country legalization. In may jurisdiction you can legally RIP moves of DVD/BluRays you own. As long as you are not distributing copies, you are fine.

If I were you I would buy digital copies on iTunes, Google play, YouTube or whatever. And just pirate the movies.

It's so much easier and less wasteful than buying Blu-ray's.

There are two options for you here. Accept that there's no legal way to get DRM-free digital copies of your movies, and just use physical copies, like buying Blu-rays (which are still illegal to rip in certain jurisdictions, US specifically), or you can live life on the high seas.

If you want to feel ethical about your piracy, you can buy a Blu-ray disc and then pirate a copy, which is the effectively the same as ripping the disk yourself, just much easier.

So yeah two options: accept you can't do it 100% legally, and either give up or pirate/rip your own copies.

Gog.com

Thrift stores usually have a ton of dvds in stock just rip it when you get home

If you don't want to go the torrent route, nzb is a great alternative. Eliminates the possibility of a newbie ip leak.

Some labels sell DRM free downloads on Vimeo. Largely obscure movies but some real gems amidst it all.

Playon ā€¦personal DVR service creates playable MP4 files.

Does Plex know the movies you own and work with cops and copyright trolls to make your life suffering?

IDK where you live, but in my country, there's a site where you can legally buy movies and shows for around 5-10 dollars (I'm guessing you can find something similar in your country), and they give you some proprietary player and a DRM-protected copy of the movie.

So I just buy movies that way, and just run an automation script (in Ruby) to play the movies at 5x speed, record the screen+media audio and then re-encode it back at the original speed.

I've found that this is quite simply the best way to do so, even though its not 100% legal.

This seems about the most inefficient way to do this

I have a media server that runs Plex, I download shit from IPTorrents and just host them on there for friends and myself to access. I download the torrent file, and then use a web-based server I pay for in another country and add the torrent file to download the movie to it, then use an FTP to transfer it over to my media server. My ISP and nobody else is none the wiser and knows nothing about it.

If you know someone that uses IPTorrents, have them send you an invite. Then go to SeedHost and pay for a subscription to download the stuff. Then use FileZilla to move the actual movies you download over to your local server. I recommend having a dedicated raid server setup for it. I have a RAID server setup that runs TruNAS which has 5 10TB drives installed. Its only job is to be network storage and runs Plex and contains all the movies I download which I can stream anywhere via Plex. I have a handful of friends who also has access to my Plex. Currently I have about 2,300 movies on it.

buy discs and rip them. or buy discs and then download the pirated rip. that's about the only way.

If you don't mind a network watermark too much, you could look into online tv recorders, that record shows and movies and allow you to download it.

DVDs and Blu Rays + VLC as a ripping software. Thats how I do it.

Pretty sure you can buy blurays and back them up to your private media server.

There is really no easy and legal way. Everyone saying you can buy the movie and then pirate it too, in the eyes of the ā€legal trollsā€ that would be like going to a shop, buying one movie and stealing another copy. Then when they catch you, you say, ā€But I already bought this movie so I should be able to take another one for freeā€. So just go jolly roger all the way. But protect yourself and donā€™t use public torrents without VPN.

Depends on your location.

I bought a bunch of blurays second hand, ripped them and resold. Legal? Probably not, but don't care too much when the alternative is overpriced subscriptions to services, or "buying" a copy on an online service that can and will remove my access to it at some point.

If they come up with a better way of owning a digital copy I have control over then I'd happily pay them for it, till then they can get stuffed.

Did basically what you did. Used a rental service that sends you Blu-Rays per Mail. Called Videobuster, was in Germany though

Arg! Shiver me Timbers looks like we have a soon to be pirate

Come aboard matey! Ahoy!

Where do you live? I still have a huge collection of DVDs - about 1000 - with movies & series; I could ship them for say $2 per disk; Iā€™d prepare a catalogue & photos. You could always re-sell afterwards šŸ˜‰

Lmao, no. DRM exists. You will never be able to do this.

There is currently no legal service in the USA that sells non drm movies and tv shows. This is an established system from the seller and the studios. The only way is to buy the dvd and or Blu ray and rip them.

Its nowhere near perfect, especially due to a lack of any big films (marvel .etc), but i especially liked the movie called "the man from earth" which i was able to buy from Vimeo on demand and get a DRM free video file in return for my money.

Seems like this shouod also work well for most of the other indie/documentary type stuff that seems to be on vimeo

If you prefer to buy physical DVDs for whatever reason, ive found that stores like goodwill often have loads of them for cheap (selection isnt the greatest though and sometimes people steal the dvds from the cases).

BitTorrent or easy news.

The only legal ones you can download would be one in the public domain or any movie that has lost copyright. If Iā€™m not mistaken Google has a public domain search where you can find this type of content.

There's no legal way. The only gray area way to get your media is to purchase the dvd/blu-ray or rent/borrow then rip it. I have a tidal hifi subscription but I also download a lot of albums because I prefer plexamp's stations and playlist for android auto, my phone, and my DAP.

If there way a way to pay for drm versions of copyrighted content how much would you pay for the content, same price as the physical media, less? How much less given there is now no cost associated with the manufacture and distribution of little plastic discs and protective cases.

You can use playon dvr to record series and movies digitally fingerprinted to your IP so properly licensed. It will queue and record entire series in one session, and support pretty much all the major streaming services.

Anywhere to purchase movies / shows legally to put on (anywhere)?

Yes, there is. You will have to hire an intellectual property (IP) lawyer and make contact with a company that holds the rights for the movies you want.

For example, if you like Marvel... you need to contact Disney. You make an offer for their IP and if they choose to accept it you can "purchase movies / shows legally". Then, you can do anything you like with it.

This is because we are talking about something that it's not present physically in our world, like rock for example. We are talking about something that's intangible. A product of the mind(s).

So there you go.

Edit: TL;DR = Yes you can, but you ~~probably~~ can't afford.

Sure, kid. Right over here in this van. Come take a lookā€¦

There are none. Anyone saying otherwise is not north american.

I know a way to get some stuff... but it's private.

In most countries, (including the US) the only legal option is to record it from cable or over the air (OTA) with an antenna. Problem is that it's not necessarily a high quality copy and you're still not allowed to break DRM which sometimes means no premium cable channels (HBO, Showtime, etc). Worse though, is dealing with commercials (can be automated, but not perfectly) and TV cuts of movies (and shows).

Fortunately, Plex actually has pretty good DVR capabilities built in, including a commercial detector. Still not a great experience overall though. That's why I keep separate Plex libraries for clean copies and for DVR movies and shows.