DVDs purchased online, ended up with pirated copies

Shopping
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So, after many years of purchasing DVDs and Blu Ray discs online to legally watch various movies and TV shows, we finally got burnt and today opened up a package that was advertised by the seller as brand new, factory sealed, only to discover a box full of DVD -R discs packed in plastic CD sleeves.

We’re always very cautious whenever we make online purchases and I always check for online reviews and online histories for any place we’ve never shopped at before. This particular one tvshowsdvdset.com didn’t set off any alarm bells. No bad reviews we could find and was showing as operational for a number of years, so you’d expect at least one bad review in all that time if they were dodgy.

So we’ve basically spent around $150 Australian (including postage costs) on six season’s worth of pirated copies packaged in a hard cover cd folder and sent to us from Canada with no return address on the package. Had a look at the first disk and it looks like they’ve simply copied the original discs outright including the menus and anti-piracy warning at the beginning.

Looks like we’ll have to write it off and chalk it up to experience.

Update: As in the comments.

Turns out things aren’t quite what they seem.

Apparently Warner Bros actually distributes their back catalogue this way, known as the Warner Archive Collection, which is a manufactured on demand using DVD-R material. Using recordable DVDs, they custom burn discs for each order sold directly to the consumer, rather than the traditional business model of pressing batches of discs that ship to “brick and mortar” retailers. This saves on the costs of storing unsold stock in a warehouse and mitigates the risk of a retailer being stuck with unsold merchandise, especially since the majority of the films in the archive do not have widespread public demand.

It just would have been nice if they’d actually include information about this on the packaging and in the online stores so the consumer would know what to expect.

Information obtained from Warner Archive Collection - Wikipedia

So, in order to save costs, Warner is distributing media in the same format as would otherwise be distributed by media pirates. This makes it very difficult to be able to tell if what you’ve purchased is the real deal or not.

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Turns out things aren’t quite what they seem.

Apparently Warner Bros actually distributes their back catalogue this way, known as the Warner Archive Collection, which is a manufactured on demand using DVD-R material. Using recordable DVDs, they custom burn discs for each order sold directly to the consumer, rather than the traditional business model of pressing batches of discs that ship to “brick and mortar” retailers. This saves on the costs of storing unsold stock in a warehouse and mitigates the risk of a retailer being stuck with unsold merchandise, especially since the majority of the films in the archive do not have widespread public demand.

It just would have been nice if they’d actually include information about this on the packaging and in the online stores so the consumer would know what to expect.

Information obtained from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Archive_Collection

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Well, so much for it being a legit boxed set from the Warner Archive Collection. About midway through the set the episodes turn into pixelated copies downloaded from Youtube or somewhere similar, complete with a TV channel logo in the corner of the screen. Obviously pirated. The website responsible for selling it says they can’t check if every supplier is legitimate or not and has promised a refund. We’ll see if it happens. In the meantime, I’ve notified the piracy division of the FBI seeing as it’s pirating an American owned show, complete with copies of all emails and email header info for them to look into.

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Well. Refund went through surprisingly. Ended up making an extra $10 due to currency conversion rates being in our favour compared to the rates when we made the original purchase. Just have to wait and see if the FBI decide to look into the piracy issues now.

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Phew! Glad that you managed to get a refund and good work doing the right thing. Thanks for sharing the experience here too

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What do you plan to do with the piracy version…hope either destroy or give to authorities…and then by a legitimate version?

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Awaiting to hear from the authorities still. They’ll probably want it as evidence. And yes, we do want a legit copy, which is what we thought we were purchasing in the first place.

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