VidAngel is a service you can get on roku, apparently you ‘buy’ a movie for $20, then after a day you sell it back for $19. So you can rent new releases, high quality movies, etc for $1 instead of the $5.99 being charged on amazon prime. Basically redbox prices w/o having to stop at a redbox.
It sounds too good to be true, but it seems legit. Has anyone used it?
This sounds similar to Zediva, a company from about five years ago that allowed you to watch any movie available on DVD by playing the physical DVD in its data center and streaming the signal to you. It was sued out of existence by the movie studios.
Looking into it, VidAngel makes a big point about how you can edit out cuss words and nudity when you rent a movie. I’ve never seen a streaming site talk about that.
Is doing that (offering people the ability to block out cuss words) somehow giving them a legal loophole to rent movies for $1/night? They mention the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 on the website.
Bravo if so. Bravo.
i dont know but thanks for telling us about it
I doubt their streaming service has found a legal loophole that will actually stand, but we’ll see. This is another hydra head of the various Mormon edited movies services that have popped up. The others were sued into the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised (or shed a tear) if this one is, too.
It’s also worth noting that, per their blog, you can’t stream uncensored movies. They seem to be thinking that the filters are their loophole for that content.
It sounds to me that their supposed loophole works as follows: You buy the actual disk. You them make a temporary copy of said disk for your own personal use that has had the profanity edited–something that statute says you have a right to do. Then you sell your disk back to the company.
If this same scheme can’t get you around having a rental license for real media, then I doubt it will work online. And I bet it has, as I’ve never seen a mom-and-pop rental store sell you the video at full price with a guaranteed buyback.
Yeah. And, above and beyond that, making a copy for your own use HASN’T been shown to be legal, as far as I know. It’s legal to copy content you own, but last I heard it was still “illegal” to defeat the copyright protection on a DVD or BRD in order to make that copy. That’s why Real’s DVD jukebox app was sued out of existence.
This is a commercial service streaming (and charging for) content they don’t have the rights to stream or charge for. The editing itself is probably defensible, but their whole “sale and buyback” scheme doesn’t make any sense as a way of getting around the DMCA.
I’m also curious what would happen if somebody “bought” a bunch of BRDs (especially ones that actually cost more than $20 to buy), and then asked VidAngel to send them the discs.
But does that only go for making perfect, exact digital copies? Is making an analog copy of a rented DVD legal? That would be similar to recording a song that plays over the radio which I believe (I don’t know) to be legal.
There is some software called Tunebite which works like this. It copies either audio or video. I used it some years ago to legally (they claim, but it sounds reasonable—they’ve been around for years) make analog versions of digital songs offered by Rhapsody and it’s ilk.
This is different from what it sounds like VidAngel does but I’m curious about the legality of the “analog copies from a rented digital source” thing.
The legality is murky, but generally people say it’s okay as long as you delete your copy once you have returned the original. There’s a definite precedent that it’s legal to break copy protection for interoperability–that’s how DeCSS works in Linux, allowing commercial DVD playback. It actually cracks the copy protection.
It’s also something that doesn’t really cost the copyright holders any money, so it’s unlikely that they would ever try to establish the precedent that it’s illegal. They get people to still rent the audio who would otherwise would not because they couldn’t play it on their favorite device.
As long as you aren’t using it as a loophole to do something you otherwise have no right to do, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about it being treated as illegal.
I wonder if you can “censor” a film for criteria that don’t qualify such as technically censoring the nudity out of Goodfellas thus leaving you with an intact copy of the film.
I’m guessing no (but not willing to pay money to check). I’m guessing they think, for whatever reason, that they’re only legally vulnerable if they stream an unaltered copy of the movie.
Am I reading this right? If you use their service you will watch a movie censored to whatever standards they have??!!
Sounds too BAD to be true. So much for my plans to rent the classic Showgirls.
Not QUITE. You can choose what gets censored to varying degrees. There’s little on-off switches for nudity, gore, f-bombs, liberal bias, etc. You just can’t choose to filter NOTHING.
It’s a Mormon company that rose from the ashes of numerous companies devoted to the idea that Mormons should have the option of watching any movie they want but without having the let those jerks in Hollywood decide what kind of content was actually in said movies.
I…take a dim view. I can appreciate the idea that people want to avoid “filth,” but, if you’re going to take that stance, I don’t think you get to change the art of other people (against their will) to suit your preferences.
I think the ability to remix and otherwise transform existing intellectual property is sort of important.
Remixing has nothing to do with it. It’s your own personal copy, and you can experience it how you want.
And Campbell’s planned on suing Warhol until they realized it was better publicity for them not to. A lesson that most everyone but a certain Japanese video game company should learn.
