I have three grandsons ranging from 3 to 7. They have managed to destroy 4 Blu-Ray movies I purchased specifically for them as well as many others. So I have taken to ripping the main movie of my Blu Ray collection to my hard drives as a means of backup. I have also ripped some of the movies to a very low file size (about 2G) for use on the eldest grandson’s iPad.
Being a Plex Pass member, I thought I would give the cloud sync service a try with one of these files (about 1.7 Gb). So I optimised the movie Minions and waited for Plex to upload it. Well, it has been doing this since last night (over 14 hours ago). At one stage, it was showing that 17% was uploaded. Later, it was waiting to upload. Now, it has started uploading again not from the 17% mark but from the 0% mark. Sigh.
I have read in the forums that many others are experiencing problems with this sync feature. However, this post is not about fixing this issue (though I wouldn’t mind someone telling me how). This post is about the legality of uploading this movie.
I own the Blu-Ray movies. I do NOT pirate movies. My question is does Amazon check the files we store in our accounts? Will they delete any movies from my account? Is this legal?
When you use Cloud Sync, if you were to look at the file names on amazon, they are obfuscated. The names only mean something to your system. The names are generated at time of encoding and only linkage to the real file is in your database. Should you reset / rebuild your PMS library but leave files on Amazon, they would be meaningless.
That having been said, even if they did look at files, they would need a lot of CPU power to create a static frame image and match it to anything meaningful. With all the cpu power they do have, they don’t have enough to do that so they don’t bother. nobody does.
To the OP: This is the entire theory behind the critically failing Plex Cloud beta now underway. That you would have your movies up on the Cloud someplace, and already converted to a pretty much 100% streamable file, and codecs, and your users would be able to stream from there, instead of streaming from your local machine.
There has also been a number of others requesting the same legal definitions you have asked for. And I guess it comes down to the laws in your country. Some countries allow you to make a digital backup of your media. Others do not. For those that do not, you could be in violation of the letter of the law by hosting that on a service such as this.
Do they define the country in question by where you are located? Or is it defined by the country the service’s hardware is located? There have been prosecutions done for both instances within recent years. (Someone doing something that is legal in their home country, hosting it on a server located in a country where it’s not legal and facing jail time.) As you can see it’s a can of worms.
Plex supposedly has some sort of agreement with Amazon about the Plex Cloud beta and then (sometime) the future roll out to everyone. What that agreement is, we really aren’t sure. Since this “feature” is also reported to support Amazon’s hardware doing any required transcoding, the “static frame image” referenced earlier would be a given, and any “questionable” material could be marked in this manner.
It comes down to one thing, I guess… Do you trust Big Brother (Amazon) more than you trust your own hardware?
