I had this idea, and it’s probably dumb, but hear me out and let me know what you think.
I really like movies. Streaming services are currently the best legal option to watch movies afaik, but often they don’t have that specific and maybe also old movie I want to watch - even with 3 different streaming services. Then I could rent it, but paying like 8 bucks every time I want to watch a movie is too much.
If I could buy and download a free (free as in no drm or other bullshit shenanigans) digital copy of a movie for a reasonable price I would be all over that shit.
But as we all know the greedy capitalists can’t keep milking the same old cashcows if the users have a permanent copy that they can potentially also distribute so that won’t happen any time soon.
So my idea was what is we as a public group (movie enthusiasts) joined and made a company funded by something like gofundme or similar. The sole purpose of the company would be to buy rights to movies and hosting digital copies free to download for anyone.
Wouldn’t that be something. Legal digital movies by the public for the public.
But the the greedy capitalists are the ones you’d need to buy the rights from if you wanted to do this above board. Typically a company will only either sell you a license that lets you stream it to your customers, with requirements to make the film unavailable if your license is revoked, or the company will sell you DVDs, and let you sell those as is with no rights to rip or otherwise make the DVD available for download. It’s not impossible, GoG sells some pretty big name video game titles DRM free, and you could probably get smaller independent films onto the platform, but I doubt true media giants like Warner Bros or Disney would go for it. You’d have to target movies too obscure to be on Netflix basically.