We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.
In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we've also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:
It's easy to scoff at this whole "You will own nothing, and you will be happy" phrase, but it's really gone too far already.
We've been screaming about it for 20+ years now and no one seems to be listening.
I'm hoping that someone will tie digital ownership rights to a block chain sooner or later and offer me movies, music, games and books that I can actually own resale rights to - but as publishers are already drinking from the rent-seeking model teat where every single license is a new sale I'm not terribly optimistic about that particular future.
Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they're the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
The only way to actually digitally own something is to have a full DRM-free copy of it (ianal though this still might not be enough to allow resale).
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain. It's a transparent and consumer friendly model compared to what we accept now. I know people are over block chain hype but this type of publishing model is where it's actually useful.
Transferable digital rights tokens and chain of custody are places where block chain tech actually works.
Edit: People seem really hung up on crypto as currency which I'm not asking for at all. I'm asking for control, ownership and resale rights to digital goods I've paid for which isn't possible at all on current digital publishing platforms. I appreciate that people hate crypto shit, that's fine, but at least read the content you're replying to.
Fuck no. I ain't paying a transaction fee each time I want to take a breath. If you don't want to be robbed by streaming companies, blockchain is the last (or maybe not even a) thing you should consider as a solution.
Hyperbole much?
It's only hyperbole until it isn't.
What you describe is fundamentally impossible. In order to decrypt something you need a decryption key. Put that on the blockchain and anyone can decrypt it.
Even if you can, pirates would only need to buy a single decryption key and suddenly your movie might as well be freely available to download. Pirates never pay hosting fees because it's using the same infrastructure as customers and they can't be taken down because they're indistinguishable from customers.
This doesn't make any sense, who distributes/gives out rights tokens? And if they lose publishing rights, why would the new owner of the publishing rights care about the rights tokens they didn't sell?
Blockchain doesn't fix anything new here, there's no point in decentralizing the rights ownership, verifying ourselves as owners of the right to watch the media was never the issue here.
Getting companies to be willing to give out non revokable rights tokens is the issue, and no company wants to do that because it's not profitable for them. It's not a technological issue that blockchain is going to solve
it's quite fun to see the whole thing you want to engineer just to have an excuse to use a blockchain.
Have you ever heard of Torrents? USENET? eDonkey? Those things are more resilient than your blockchain, they've proved themselves by being around more than 20 years and still in use.