this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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To be frank, how do you even use Plex without pirating? Ripping your own DVDs and Blurays? And if so, isn't that sort of considered piracy by the powers that be?
Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely "back up" any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it's not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.
In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that's not enforced unless you're doing some sort of public showing.
In the USA at least, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made circumventing copy protection mechanisms illegal. Basically every DVD and Blu-ray disc implements those, so every backup copy we make is illegal even though it should be covered by fair use.
They stripped us of our rights and made protecting our purchases illegal through the back door, so we have the moral obligation to ignore that law.
I have a mix. Ripping your own is in line with format shifting. Putting a cad into a cassette for use in your car that didn’t have a cd player is the old school equivalent. I believe it is a valid fair use case.
There is free content on Plex now. You could never pirate a single movie and still have content.
that alone isn't worth 'yet another app'
it's titles that are also on other services (including free or 'ad supported'--and ones which work with ubo and/or pihole) or titles that seem to rotate frequently and continually between several services.
I use it for my own dvds/blu-rays, yeah. This is technically still considered piracy, but my personal view is that I'm fine paying for something once because the people who made it deserve to get paid, but I'm not fine paying for the same thing multiple times when the effort on their end to make the new version was basically zero. It would be one thing if there were physical costs like going from vhs to dvd, but that's not the case here.