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:
Companies issuing refunds in the form of gift cards is just straight-up insulting
And it may be illegal in some states to not offer the customer an actual refund.
£5.99 refund. Quite clearly not in the US.
Sssh… Everyone lives in default country
Default country is best country.
Take me down to %DEFAULT_CITY where the grass is %DEFAULT_COLOR and the girls are %DESCRIPTIVE_ADJECTIVE
I know they probably actually meant the States of the US, but…
They did say states with a lowercase s. ‘States’ = regions within a country, ‘states’ = can mean countries. Technically they aren’t defaulting to the US.
£ is from a country that does not have states
But it IS a state. Sorry if you’re not a native English speaker but just because your vocabulary is lacking doesn’t mean they are wrong.
The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you “buy” the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don’t show that so clearly but that’s the reality.
Hell, this isn’t the first time Amazon has done this, even if it’s the first time they’ve done it for video. Of all things, they retroactively removed a version of 1984 from Kindle, including having Kindle devices delete local copies the next time they connected to Amazon.
I remember the 1984 incident. At the time I thought this is so ironic, it has to be satire. Now, just a few years later it doesn’t even register as odd anymore.
If I recall correctly there was a time, where they did a deal with Disney a few years back. Disney wanted to bring one or more of their classic animations back to the cinema and Amazon disabled playback of those movie(s) for that time even for people who had “bought” them.
If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it.
Even that isn’t strictly true, as IP laws metasticize and mutate over time. But its far more expensive to try and reclaim a book than to revoke a digital license on a 3rd party repository.
If you kept your digital copy of a digital book on an e-reader in airplane mode, you’d have as much access to that as any trade paperback. And backing up my collection of PDFs to a drive is significantly easier than shouldering a shelf’s worth of books.
The fundamental issue with digital media is that its ultimately convenient to access a central digital archive than to keep your own personal collections on hand and catalogued. But then you have to ask the question “Who controls that central digital archive?” And if its a bad actor, there’s your problem. Its the same problem physical libraries have, too. Don’t let the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria run your neighborhood branch. Don’t let Ron DeSantis near it, either.
When it comes to corporations, the problem is there are no good actors. They are required by law to do what ever maximizes shareholder value.
When you buy something from a streaming service you’re only buying the right to stream it, nothing more.
You can’t compare it to owning physical media because there are ongoing costs involved for Amazon to host it and ever changing contracts with media companies outlining what they are allowed to host.
Then what do you call a video rental?
…A temporary right to stream? What even is the point of this question that’s asked as some sort of gotcha?
What’s it to you?
Thanks for the reply, I kinda wanted to downvote you again.
Ouch! My feelings are hurt… Lol don’t. Be a turd plz
It’s just a long term licence to watch it
Strictly speaking, so is a DVD or other physical media, per the EULA they flash across the screen for half a second before starting the show and therefore makes it legally binding.
The big difference is that nobody’s running around trying to claw back DVDs. Whereas, with Amazon, its trivially easy to just click “Remove License” from the repository and snatch back an arbitrary number of licenses. Purely a question of convenience.
Of course, if you have a… uh… backup copy stored conveniently on a PLEX server, then they can’t claw that back either.
They did try to do expiring dvds thank god it didn’t work
While it’s shitty that they can take it away like that, at least they seem to have paid back the cost plus an extra gift card. Idk if cost was refunded or added to the account as credit, but either are at least something.
It says it’s a gift card balance equivalent to the purchase price that’s automatically applied on their next purchase (+an extra £5 to sweeten the deal), so not really the same thing as the cash they originally paid for it.
shocked Pikachu face
Did customers really forgot the ebook 1984 event or assume they’d “just” get “better”?
Honestly kind of deserved, don’t buy from Amazon! Wondering why? Read Chokepoint capitalism but TLDR their business model is monopoly and monopsony. They’re terrible.
As I said(probably) in another post, you own nothing since you sing up and accept the terms. They can change the terms when ever they want, they can remove videos when ever they want or the rights for a movie or series end. If you want to have something, find a provider that sells and lets download files, so you don’t lose what you buy.
At least in Germany there are Limits to t&c’s. To put it simply, there musn’t be any ugly surprises.
The merchant retroactively cancelling your purchases would be an ugly surprise of that nature.
Ianal, but I assume they might get into trouble for the use of words like buy and own, if this is how they treat the purchases.
You’ll buy a limited license to access content (Top Gun) which is owned by a publishing entity (Paramount) and which will be served through an intermediary (Amazon Prime Video) and delivered from a content network (Akamai) and you’ll like it!
Arrrr maty!
They’ve done this previously with books, music, and other media purchased through them and they aren’t alone. Apple and Google have also been on the hook for this. This usually happens when they lose the right to sell some form of media (they make deals with record labels, artists, movie companies, publishers etc to license the right to sell that media for the purpose of streaming). You’re buying the right to stream/enjoy that media indefinitely (until they lose the rights to sell it to you and then they have to remove it from their library of streamable media). You can absolutely download that media and keep it somewhere not connected to the internet. But they can absolutely remove it.
The one exception used to be Google Play Music. Their terms were such that you actually owned the music you purchased. I assume that’s part of the reason they sunsetted that app and their music selling altogether. The cost was too high vs the number of paid users.
Apple has also done this and it was a big deal because they didn’t notify customers at all at the time.
Edit: I’m gonna add that this licensing agreement is similar to the one made when we bought physical media from retail stores. They have the right to sell it until their licensing agreement runs out. When or if it runs out they send back their remaining inventory and proof that they sold everything else. And the only reason a company isn’t requesting that media back in this event is because it’s cost prohibitive for them.
Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.
Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.
Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.
BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.
This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.
Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.
Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.
“I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.
What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.
Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.
So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.
You’re really over complicating the whole piracy thing. There’s websites easier to navigate than netflix to stream anything you want, often with better resolution. It takes about twenty minutes of research to find a VPN that would meet your needs. I would recommend anyone on the internet to use one for everything anyways.
Wow I didn’t mind purchasing content before… My pirate hat is now officially glued to my fucking head.
Hellz yeah! And buy physical SSDs to store them forever. Fuck the sys.
You guys, your account is just a collection of records in a database. Literally any service that you make digital purchases from – Amazon, Steam, Sony, Microsoft, GOG, etc., can remove purchased content from your account. They just delete a single line from a database.
Y’all need to stop being surprised when digital companies are able to do digital shit to your digital stuff.
It’s been well documented that Amazon does this with eBooks all the time. A publisher pulled a copy of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE from Amazon over a contract dispute in the earlier days of the Kindle. So Amazon reached out and delete that copy from all Amazon customers who bought it through the Amazon Store.
Students who were annotating it for class lost all their notes. Amazon refunded the cost of the eBook. But those notes are toast.
It’s what prompts me to copy non-DRM’ed files to my Kindle and read them without Amazon having a record of purchase. It won’t stop them from logging in remotely and wiping the device, but I have backups and programs to convert them to non-Kindle format for another eReader.
I only have a handful of books through them, but it might be time to get those locally.
Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.
I cancelled Netflix and prime and went back to piracy a few months ago, it’s been a nice blast from the past
In addition to piracy, I’ve also been checking out DVDs from my local library. It’s kinda fun.
Surprised myself because I half expected I’d miss the convenience of Netflix, but I haven’t missed it even a little.
“Was I a good streaming platform?”
“No.”
The benefit of the library DVD is it takes away the “What will we watch tonight?” conversation. You’re going to watch the DVD.
It just switches the question to the library: “What will we borrow tonight?”
Source: experience from my Blockbuster days.
“your” library
