I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
Due to the DMCA by circumventing the copyright to rip your DVDs you are technically breaking the law. You would most definitely be considered a pirate.
I guess that depends on your definition of “piracy”… is it “breaking the law” or is it “stealing”?
In any case, the point I was making is that some people use Plex with non-stolen media. I mostly see assumptions that it’s only used for stolen media, so I wanted to offer a counter-example.
Piracy is infringing on copyright. Ripping DVDs is most definitely consider a form of piracy. Although without sharing it, I think a jury could see it as non-infringing personally.
I do agree there is a huge difference between ripping media and downloading/sharing it as far as civil liability goes.
I take some umbrage with calling either ripping or downloading stealing though as it does not deprive the owner of their property. The correct term would be commercial copyright infringement.