Individual posters and backgrounds taken down for certain artwork makes sense for DMCA violations and wasn’t uncommon. I’ve run into that before with Plex but it wouldn’t wipe out all art available.
When it would happen the movie poster would either automatically flip to one of the other posters (if I was using the default poster) or would show the screen capture and I’d go in and pick one of the other posters that were listed from TMDB or TVDB.
This situation with “no artwork at all” is a new one for me after more than 10 years of using Plex with thousands of titles. Refusing to load other options from TMDB or TVDB is something I haven’t seen before and it’s not how copyright works. There isn’t a “block all images even remotely related to this movie” DMCA function.
I say “not how copyright works” but I also realize Plex knows that as well and is probably taking an easy way out. Easier to just block it all than to have to spend time on it I suppose. Maybe that’s the new way to go and it’ll happen more now instead of just removing the specific artwork. That’ll mean manually curating artwork… something I haven’t ever had to do with Plex even for titles that had DMCA requests for artwork.
I’m just getting more and more disappointed as Plex decisions result in me having more things to manually manage on my server than I used to have to do (like the actor images now). Didn’t we pick up Plex so we wouldn’t have to manually manage it all with NFO and poster.jpg files?
