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.
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.
Many countries other than the US are comprised of a federation of states. And also those that aren’t are generally considered nation states or sovereign states, which are still definitively states. The United States of America do not have an exclusive right on statehood.
Plus even though it may be implied that the original replier intended the context to mean the United States of America… it is a valid response with further implication that one should check their local jurisdiction’s laws if they were so inclined to do so.
TBH I would expect stronger consumer protections in the UK…but I definitely don’t know about this type of refund specifically.
Wait a minute, the US doesn’t have a blanket consumer law federally?
This sounds like a pain.
Federally this is against Australian Consumer Law. Didn’t offer the service you paid for? Better believe that’s a refund.
And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?
They removed books from your Kindle in the past. Who could have seen this comming?
Yeah seriously. The day news of this broke, I switched my book library over to Calibre+DeDRM and put my device in airplane mode.
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 was nice when you could actually watch almost everything on it. Once everyone else started taking peices of the pie it just feels like cable with more hoops now
The only reason I keep Netflix is kids.
We don’t really watch it otherwise.
Even my in-laws are now pirates using hacked amazon fire sticks that are being hawked around their retirement community.
My mother in law is like “I get every streaming service and channel for 1 dollar a day, isn’t that great”.
I’m all “if it’s simple and works for you yeah, absolutely. “
The thing that sucks is that a lot of new stuff isn’t on physical media at all.
Use yts.mx, if you use any other site, try checking comments first if they have them, if not you can use torrent file viewer to check the download is actually a video file before downloading
Lastly you could try anti virus, but don’t rely on it to do your job for you, they can catch most but not always all viruses
Paying 0.99 per song was how a better user experience? Music piracy was pretty big till Spotify. No service was even close before.
Being able to easily purchase a single song from a reputable source in the comfort of your home instead of going out to physically buy an entire album and then rip it to your computer was a better user experience, yes. Most users are technologically illiterate, and trying to pirate stuff just lead to them getting viruses.
Because you were guaranteed that what you were downloading was what it said it was, and was high quality, and would have the correct tagging and album art and all of that.
It’s been shown repeatedly that a large part of piracy isn’t about cost, it’s about convenience. It was easier to pay $0.99 and get what you wanted when you wanted it, than download 8 files off of Napster and hope that one of them was actually a decent bitrate and was the song the title said it was.
Back when eMule was a thing, it was super common to spend an entire day downloading a 700MB video file at 5kb/s, only for it to be Fight Club instead of whatever you thought you were downloading. It’s the same thing with music.
It’s been shown repeatedly that a large part of piracy isn’t about cost, it’s about convenience. It was easier to pay $0.99 and get what you wanted when you wanted it, than download 8 files off of Napster and hope that one of them was actually a decent bitrate and was the song the title said it was.
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
-Gabe Newell
Or, with Napster, the person you’re downloading from signs off when you’re 40% done with the download.
Music piracy was big till spotify apprared. iTunes had a limited selection, music remixes, small band stuff were not available. iTunes only had what Sony and some other music distributors supplied. I understand what you are saying but still, piracy was there and iTunes was not primary source. Spotify came and now music piracy is basically limited to high quality audio albums which is a niche market.
If you have the local MP3 file you can do just about anything you want with it. Use it in just about any device. Transfer it anywhere. And never lose it.
I have Mp3s that are over 20-30 years old and have never needed to get them again.
And yes I go to piracy almost immediately if I can’t get a local file. Just because of how many different ways i’ve used them over the years.
That was my first thought too. A seedbox, Sonarr & Radarr and a Usenet site and I’ve got everything I need for $15/month.
Yeah that’ll happen for anything streamed and licensed.
If you want to own something, you need to own it physically. Buy an actual disk. People won’t and I’ll be surprised if they are still making blurays at all in ten years but that’s the only way you can actually buy media now.
I’m actually still kinda surprised about this. My understanding is that the licenses from rights holders to streaming platforms generally included an indefinite right to stream to people who’d purchased content, even if they may not offer it for continued purchase or as part of the general included streaming library.
Unless you bought after-market keys like on G2A and it turned out to be stolen/keygen’d. Valve will remove your game if your key is found to be stolen (whether you knew it or not). I imagine you know this but just felt it bore mentioning.
You can read the subscriber agreement here but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case with Steam.
If you want to own something, you need to own it physically.
Minor sticking point: it’s still a “limited license.” You don’t really “own” anything and if that physical copy is damaged or destroyed you’re just SOL.
Streaming, digital, physical, everything has a drawback! Backups are your friend.
Yes, you don’t own the copyright. You do own the physical disk, and you also have a right to backup a personal copy.
It’s not a sticking point, it’s a feature. Take care of your shit just like all your other shit. No one says it’s a sticking point to say that a kettle you buy could break, that’s just normal part of ownership of a thing.
You will own nothing and be happy about it!
