I just came across this article about people making copies of DVD they own or rent, and the first sentence got me thinking: How does Netflix prevent its customers from copying their movies?
Is it in their interest to care? You’re still renting the movie. How often do people re-rent movies, anyway? If it’s something that you really like, you’re not going to continue renting it over and over again. You’re going to buy it. (Or Pirate it) Netflix wouldn’t get that money, regardless.
And anyway, Netflix is a monthly fee. You pay them the same much no matter how many movies you rent or how many movies you pirate from them.
I can’t imagine they’d go to any lengths to prevent pirating, since it doesn’t effect their bottom line one bit. Am I missing something?
Where does it say they do?
In other words: They don’t.
I know someone who was using Netflix to make copies of all their anime. I thought it was incredibly lame of him.
GQ answer: They don’t, other than existing DVD encryption measures (which we all know to be 110% uncrackable).
Cafe Society answer: If I like a movie enough that I’ll want to watch it often enough to own it, I’m going to pay for it for the simple reason I feel the film makers deserve to be rewarded for their good work.
Bear_Nenno, I believe Netflix sells used DVD.
Indirectly, pirating can hurt Netflix: someone who’s ripping movies to build a “library” can more quickly return DVDs to Netflix than someone who may take a day or three to watch then return a disc. A pirate can cost Netflix more in postage costs than a normal user with an equivalent plan, and can also get more DVDs per month under a lower-cost plan than a normal user-- someone with a big queue and who times their mailings right theoreticallt could easily get 15 or 20 discs a month on the $8.99 one-at-a-time plan, while an average viewer on the three-at-a-time plan might also get 15 or 20 discs a month while paying $16.99. There are plenty of message boards and USENET postings about how best to maximize disc turnover on Netflix plans.
Thus the much-hated “throttling,” which I would imagine is Netflix’s only real tool against such folks.
I used to actually do this, but not so I could keep a copy of the movie; just so I could have more choices at once. I would always end up deleting the copy from my hard drive after I watched it (I really don’t understand wanting to “own” lots of movies, especially with flat-rate unlimited rentals), but my hard drive had enough space to hold 20 or so movies that I hadn’t watched yet, rather than the 3 I could get at once from netflix. Even doing this, my rate of movie watching didn’t increase.
But to answer the question: they don’t do anything to prevent copying, but the DVD manufacturers do. The software I used was no longer being updated, and more and more DVDs were designed to prevent the copying that it could do. I’m sure there are other packages available, but the one I was using probably works with less than 25% of the new DVD’s I try it on nowadays.