Back in the days of buying DVDs there was always a legal subculture of lending movies to friends. I think it would be hard for even the MPAA to argue that loaning a DVD to a friend is illegal. Plex allows us to loan movies to friends via the internet, but if I only ever bought one copy of a movie, it is reasonable to think that I could only lend out one copy at a time.
I think Plex should have a feature for those of us who want to abide by the rules-of-the-overlords to only allow a certain number of streams per individual file at a time. So if my friend Mike is watching Superbad my friend Jessica can’t watch it until Mike stops watching it. I know it sounds silly, but it really would add some extra legitimacy to the Plex platform.
If you wanted to be legitimate, you wouldn’t rip your collection. Sure, it’s incredibly convenient, but it’s also a bit of a gray area. The DVR portion of Plex is perfectly legal, though.
I’d also love this feature. I have my plex library shared to a few people and circumstantially I’m not seeing multiple people watch the same but this would make for a legal system.
If I hand you a physical disc(movie, TV show, etc.), I no longer have possession of it, you do. Once returned, I resume possession and you concede it. This I view as an ethical and legal(as far as I know) way of sharing media and keeping any license to view solely with said media.
So here is the question, would a lock out function on a individual media be possible on Plex should someone(shared or local) be using media on my server? This would create a digital form of the above example.
