Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Often times on this sub there's always an alternative being proposed, so I'm a bit shocked that this time most of the answers are simply "no".

I have nothing against buying what I enjoy. But I also want to use my own streaming service (be it Plex or Jellyfin), I want to watch it offline, I want to not live in fear that it gets taken away, and most importantly I want to know that atleast 50% of my money rightfully goes to the artists of said content.

As I've said in another comment, it's shocking that even the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell high quality digital copies, while the film-industry just plainly doesn't.

Interesting concept. If I understand it correctly it didn't truly let you own the stuff that you bought. It instead gave you a proof-of-purchase allowing you to stream your purchased content on different streaming platforms (like Netflix, etc) as long as you have that one proof-of-purchase. However, if the platforms remove your purchased content from their catalogues at any time, it would be gone. So you're right, almost but not quite like DVD.

I wonder why the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell digital copies (and high-quality ones), while the film-industry doesn't.

I knew the moment I saw these stickers on my dvds that the links to the online content would never last. This happens to me with textbooks all the time - oh great - digital searchable access to the content, but then after awhile the hosting site goes under or changes hands and it's never easy to just download the content. Whether I purchase a text or not. I always try to find a pdf version of it that I can just save. No one is going to let this legally happen with video in any kind of format that you would be satisfied with. Pirating is often the only way to really own useable digital copies of media. Im at the point where I would prefer the simplicity of paying a fair fee to easily download an unfettered mkv file, but I don't see that becoming a real thing.

And with computer literacy on the decline, I wouldn't be shocked to see in our lifetime a generation of people who conceptually cannot understand a local video file.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, admittedly those are all fairly niche and don't really have up to date content but they do indeed offer a digital video file for money (apart from iTunes, I've tested it and can't seem to get a DRM free video file). Who knew that GOG had a movies section!

As for my personal takeaway from your suggestions and those from others, I guess the best approach is to continue to split the "supporting" part from the "getting a file" part.

Honestly, after seeing that there's truly no GOG equivalent for movies, neither now nor probably ever, this is the solution I like the most.

If I want something fast, I get the file through "other means". If I like it and want to support the production behind it, I add it to a list and at the end of the year I do what you've said.

This way I neither accumulate DVDs nor throw them in the trash, I support the production, I make my neighbors happy and get a high quality file on top. Sometimes it's the simplest things, thanks for the reminder and the idea :) Hopefully in the future this will all be possible digitally.

GOG tried, but either gave up or wasn't able to keep supporting it (their communication is bad so hard to pinpoint). Now their movies section is just collecting dust, like Humble Trove was in the months before the old model was axed.

Such as?

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! The website does work for me (although the web-app doesn't, yeah). As for the project: Decentralized sharing, on-chain DRM, p2p social features and payments? The project seems ambitious to say the least. Although many of its features stand in stark contrast with what Disney, Apple and co. currently exploit, so I doubt they would ever have the motivation to join in.

I'm going to follow its development for sure, thanks again for shining a light on it.