Some people feel this is not “ownership” in quite the same tangible way owning a DVD is. We don’t own the cloud, nor do we really control what’s available to us in the cloud in the future, even if we once paid for it. It’s a kind of mediated, conditional ownership.
Not to mention, I don’t know anything about keeping things on the cloud. I mean, sure, I can download stuff from Disney+ onto a mobile device and watch it offline. But I can’t keep it forever. If I cancel my Disney+ subscription, I lose everything I’ve downloaded. I don’t call that ownership.
That’s not what they’re talking about. If you buy the digital copy of “Lion King” on Amazon, you own the digital rights to that movie. You can stream it any time you like, as many times as you like for as long as Amazon remains a company*.
This is certainly different than ownership of physical media like a DVD. Disney could edit the movie should in the future society decides that the depiction of hyenas is offensive (for instance, Disney edited the post-credit scene in Toy Story 2 where the dialogue suggested Barbie slept with the director to get the role). You’re also subject to the incredibly unlikely event a whole host of services cease existing at some point.
- Disney is a partner with Movies Anywhere (it created it, I believe), so purchasing the title on Amazon pushes it on Vudu, Google Play, iTunes and Fandango. So not only would Amazon have to go out of business for you to no longer have access to your movie, but all those other companies would as well.
Interesting. To the extent that I was aware of that (you must remember that I am officially an Old Person), I assumed you were buying a digital file, which you downloaded onto your hard drive. I would have put that in a different category than “streaming.”
My thanks for the explanation.
I absolutely agree. These discussions tend to gloss over this option, I think because of that exact lack of clarity. I “own” a large number of digital movies (primarily via Vudu and iTunes), and don’t think of watching one of them as “streaming” - that’s what I do when I watch something on Netflix, right?
Whenever you see “Digital Copy” on the cover of a DVD or Blu-ray, there’s usually a slip of paper inside with a big long 16 or 24 digit code. You enter that code on a streaming site, or on the studio’s webpage, and it redeems it to your account on one (or all, if it’s a Movies Anywhere-affiliated studio) of the steaming sites (Vudu, iTunes, Google Play, etc.). There are marketplaces for those codes these days. Codes for new releases can go for $10-12 these days! (And codes for hard to find movies can go for even more.)
Or the incredibly unlikely event that some future version of copyright law makes digital ownership of movies illegal based on the theory that if you permanently own a movie, you’re not making ongoing payments to the copyright holder.
But what are the odds that Congress will ever enact a law that changes established copyrights in a manner that favors Disney?
I thought those codes were only good for a limited time period. I know I have bought used dvd’s and seen that the associated digital downloading offers have expired.
Some of the really old ones have, since there was a type of code that was pretty much a full download, and the technology moved to something else. For the most part, there aren’t too many expirations. They are one-time codes though - you can’t use it and then let someone else use it. (With some exceptions - there are Paramount codes that allow you to redeem on iTunes, and then again on Vudu, then again on Movies Anywhere.)
They did stop putting them on bluray, unfortunately. I didn’t think it would make a huge difference, but damn them crude drawrings sure do look purtier on theys more fancified watchin discs