I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it.
I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.
I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.
> I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
Files on a hard disk that you own are still files that you physically own. The only difference between those files and, say, a DVD, is that the encoding is more space-efficient.
The parent's point is that possession of a physical good is a bright line separation. For digital files, there's a huge difference between [Files you own] on a hard disk, and files [on a hard disk you own]. There are files you can put on a hard drive that you don't own and will ultimately kill themselves when specified criteria are met, like DRM'd ebooks.
I would argue that the files on your hdd that can expire or made unusable by some remote third party are as incomplete as a book that is missing half the pages. For example a keepass file without the password/key-file is incomplete, the same goes for Audible aax files that can not be played without per-user 'activation bytes.' You have possession of the file but you never owned its contents.
Which does not depend on the data being on a DVD at all, but the details of contract of purchase. When you buy the data on a harddisk, the exact same terms would apply.
In my country I can legally make copies of for example books, movies, CDs etc, as long as the copies are only for personal use.
I can even legally privately share copies with family and close friends. As in close real life people that I have a personal relationship with.
A copy made for personal use cannot later be used for a different purpose. And a copy made for personal use must be made from a legal source in the first place.
The copy of The Matrix that a friend burned on a CD (DivX encoded file under 700 MB, that I would watch on the computer) and gave to me years ago, would have been illegal today because he got that movie from his brother who got it from a torrent tracker.
But if instead of downloading the movie from a P2P network his brother had borrowed The Matrix on DVD from the local library, and ripped it himself, and given a copy to his brother, who then gave me a copy, then my understanding is that this would have been completely fine and legal today in my country.
My understanding is the laws you describe are mostly limited to a few European countries, while most of the rest of the world are more restrictive?
Also, with with the limited right to make copies like that comes quite high fees on recordable media that is paid to the music and movie industries as compensation through organizations like CopySwede here in Sweden.
I would emphatically not do this, because you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty.
Honestly, I'm continually surprised at how badly people miss this even as, e.g. Sony et al just take away stuff you "bought."
So, to put directly. Do not reword it, you will screw it up.
Sony can only take it away because you didn't own it.
I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.
Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.
As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.
On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.
So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
When I brought half life 2 there was a lag of about 2-4 years before I could play it for the first time - I didn't read the fine print, and on a dial up connection I couldn't get past the steam client updating in a reasonable amount of time, mind you I was able to download much larger Linux ISOs over time frames of a month+ through resumable downloads.
Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day
Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of business at any time and all your games would simply stop working.
I'm aware, and I'm choosing GOG when I can now, though even then I see phoning home (or attempts to) happening (opensnitch is useful for that https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) - I've paid for some titles 2-3x over which is frustrating, admittedly I don't have the physical media from the first time which is on me, but it's frustrating seeing single player games wanting to phone home
AFAIK Steam really has three things you could consider part of the DRM strategy.
- The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup.
- Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator.
- And then finally the ticketing system, which allows third-party servers to validate that a user owns a given game according to Steam.
Of them the ticketing system is the most serious: it's something you can't really bypass easily. However, it also is only applicable to things that require servers. I know in Valve's own games, its only something that comes up with game servers, and I don't even know if it's forced on in their dedicated server. It seems like a stronger version of dedicated servers that used to have CD key checks.
DRM is DRM, and these mechanisms impact your ability to use things the way that you should be able to. That I would never deny. However, I will say that because it's relatively lightweight, for software that sticks to just what Steam offers and doesn't try to get creative, they're mostly only going to prevent casual piracy, and I think the main purpose of these mechanisms is mostly to just clear the technical bar for being a copy protection mechanism by law. When it comes to preserving these games beyond the end of the Steam service, it probably won't be a big deal, and it will actually be third-party DRM options like Denuvo and SecuROM that are harder to deal with and could potentially pose a threat for preservation and keeping access to games you own.
So while I don't really like Steam DRM, severity matters. If "no DRM" was just simply not on the table, I'd take Steam-native DRM as a good second choice. It is still a problem that it is technically illegal to break those locks to just be able to use something you bought with your own cash, but I think that's something we need to fix in the law, and I think we can, and honestly, despite the direction things are going, I do believe we will. Just a shame that I'm less sure I'll live to see the day at this point.
ultimately it means that all of the games in your library will stop working as soon as your computer has been offline for whatever length of time steam feels is "too long". I recommend getting a cracked copy of every game in your library to make sure that you will still have access to what you paid for if steam shuts down or you lose your internet connection.
Well, the Steamworks DRM simply poses no threat: a skiddie can crack that one. There are tools that can do it automatically. For stuff that depends on the Steam API, you can probably keep a copy of one of the popular emulators; normally it's enough to drop them next to the EXE. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, I could go into my steam apps folder and fix the problem immediately.
Having to crack things at all just to play them is bad. But, if it's easy to do it yourself, it is still better than going the route of downloading stuff from dubious sources. There's a whole ecosystem you have to understand to know what you can trust with piracy and not everyone knows where to look.
For the ticketing system, it's kind of a non-issue because that's a server-side mechanism. If a game requires that, it requires a server and won't work offline at all anyway.
For Denuvo, SecuROM, Themida, VMProtect and others... Yes, that stuff is an actual threat, but Valve doesn't make people use those. (Valve also doesn't make people use Steamworks for DRM either, and there are in fact games in my library whose Steam depots are free of any DRM at all and happily run outside of Steam with no Steam needed.)
The reason this is a worthwhile point is because it means games on Steam are not automatically DRM-encumbered and the steam apps folder for the game may just work as-is.
How big of a difference this makes definitely depends on the kinds of games you play. Obviously the triple A games on Steam are, with rare exception, DRM'd to the gills. The older games and indie games, a lot less so, sometimes none at all.
You have to check of course, but probably a good idea to do so before trying to find cracked/pirated versions.
I think you’re confusing your own file backup practices with ownership. If you purchase a DRM-free piece of software (say, a game from GoG), I’d say you own it just as much as if you bought the same game on a CD (assuming the CD was also DRM-free).
If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.
I thing the word you are looking for is possession. When something is physically in your possession, it does not mean, that you have "physical ownership", that requires you to have actual ownership, which is defined by the law, so "legal ownership".
For some reason the user can't remove games from their account and it has to be done by support. A while ago they had an "anti-censorship" promotion with several games. I wanted Postal, but I didn't know I'd get all the games in the promotion added to my account at the same time, and it was like a dozen porn games I didn't want.
They just released four games yesterday and looking at the news reel it seems they release a bunch of games every day. They're also running a summer sale right now. I doubt they're anywhere close to being dead.
They are known to take their time when it comes to developer submissions (and that time can be quite long) but that was the case since pretty much forever, not something that happened with the new/original owner.
> I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically.
I mean sure, but you can think of it analogously that if the file lives on a hard disk/SSD that you own and can hold in your hand AND the file is in some open format that can be used with open source software (as opposed to some proprietary player that checks some external license to work), only then you own it.
> people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth.
Passkeys are still your keys. You can put them on hardware authenticators you control entirely offline separate of other services. You can store them in software vaults you manage.
that's not true. Passkeys have an optional remote attestation capability, which second parties can use to completely enforce aspects of your keys, such as them being non-transferrable or not usable without a screen touch etc.
There are also non-transferrable passkeys which can't be copied between two secure devices, so it'd be hard to get some passkeys onto your yubikey in the first place.
Furthermore, I personally feel that if you can't actually access the bits, you don't truly "own" it.
We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to data. When I own data, sometimes it refers to data I created. Other times it refers to data about me. Other times it's something I've been sold. Other times it's my responsibility to ensure that data's accuracy. There are probably a few I'm missing.
I happen to like the notion of ownership that you're describing, but I think we'd all have more fruitful discussions about data if we dispensed with: "_____ is not ownership because of _____" and instead just came up with entirely different words for each kind of relationship one can have to data. Then stasis could move away from arguing what words mean and closer to doing something about the problems that arise around data "ownership".
Agreed. I'd go further. This obsession with ownership has always struck me as a peculiarly American thing, perhaps related to the absolutely central role of private property in the USA's history. In other cultures the concept of private property is often diluted somewhat by social obligations and counter-obligations. But that aside, the term is already very imperfect for the reasons you describe.
As I mentioned, "ownership" is not always such an absolute concept outside the USA, which began as a freewheeling frontier society. For example, the French translation of "company" is "société", and the thing is understood to be a bundle of obligations rather than a discrete object to be bought and sold. Even in England, houses are commonly sold on leases rather than the "freehold" which is intrinsic to ownership in the US.
IMO the verb "own" is only fully unambiguous in the case of non-fungible physical goods. Which clearly data is not.
These are different things, and this is precisely the point here. You do have the possession of the data when you stream a movie, but you do not have the ownership. When someone makes a picture of you, they do posses it, but they do not necessarily own it, that would be you.
I also don't agree with your parent, because ownership is precisely the correct term here.
> We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to data. When I own data, sometimes it refers to data I created. Other times it refers to data about me. Other times it's something I've been sold. Other times it's my responsibility to ensure that data's accuracy.
We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to food. When I own food, sometimes it refers to food that I harvested for myself. Other times it refers to food from me. Other times it's food I have bought from someone. Other times it's about my responsibility to ensure the edibility of food I sold.
You can still share pre-DRM copyrighted work without running afoul of any laws. Stuff like lending out or selling VHS tapes. Copyright is concerned about copying, not about moving. Digital media just makes the line between copying and moving sufficiently blurry that companies get away with making moving impossible under the guise of making copying impossible.
But I think there's more nuance here. I can buy a copyrighted book, read it, and then sell it or give it to you for free. The copyright holder's rights have not been violated: I've not copied it, the clue is in the name copyright.
It's not legal for me to go into a library, borrow a book, and then make a copy of it. It's a larger breach to then share that copy more broadly by making more copies.
In the digital era copying is cheaper, and distribution is broader. This caused panic within publishers of all media - they wanted to provide the convenience of digital distribution and consumption (and realise the cost savings), but noted that without DRM, copying would mean there was a risk they'd only ever sell one copy of a game, film, album or book.
This is a snap back to the extreme interpretation of enforcing copyrights. Publishers could structure their DRM and licensing to mimic physical media better. For example, the license could be irrevocable and provide a right to the user of a copy in perpetuity, so it can't be withdrawn. The license could be transferred to other owners: I could lend you my copy, you could then return it to me, digitally; I could donate it to a charity; I could sell my license to another individual; it could be part of my estate and bequeathed at my death.
Physical media has flaws, so does digital media. With a little vision and not much technology we could make digital media as awesome as physical media while retaining copyright to drive investment.
Or, we could go the way OP seems to be nudging towards: we try and grow the copyleft media industry to something economically viable and put the entire economic model of controlled distribution into a place of no longer being viable as a business. Big ask.
Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use.
There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline.
These rips can be freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.
This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
Despite paying for Netflix and Disney+ and Prime and etc, I have pirtated 1080 copies, with subtitles, of all our favorites because network access is unreliable and service provides add and remove media without warning.
As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.
Disney+ is notorious for this. Disney also has a number of shows that they refuse to provide on physical media. If they are removed from their platform and not licensed elsewhere they effectively become lost media.
There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.
Somehing like, make sure your DVD
- has unskippable advertisment
- long intro, also unskippable
- ...
If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.
I actually remember getting so frustrated that I ripped some of my DVDs, made a copy without that, and put it in the same case so that I could just enjoy the movie. VHS you could always fast forward, which is not something I thought I would miss as much as I do. Physical goods that work offline are my default.
When you watch on vhs or laserdisc the loss of resolution only bothers you til the movie sucks you in.
At that point it’s irreverent because your eyeballs are not watching a long sequence of pretty still pictures, but rather your brain is watching a story in a way similar to reading a good book.
Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.).
You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.
Not really. If the discs you have play today, they may or may not continue to work offline depending on the player, but every so often discs are released your player won't have the right keys for and those won't play until you connect your player to the internet so it can download the newest set of keys. Some keys will expire after a certain amount of time (for example the PS3 warned they'll only last 12 to 18 months https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/vide...) and you'll have to connect the player to the internet to watch content that used to work. The manufacturer of your player could also shut down their server and stop providing updated keys and then you'd have to buy a new player to play any new discs. New discs can also break your old players (https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/vcaniv/help_wi...). The capability is also there for them to revoke keys entirely which will stop your old discs from working even if you connect to the internet and you'll be forced to repurchase your movies, but I haven't seen that used so far.
I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.
I borrow my Criterions from the library or a local movie rental place run by a film fan. I used to use SwapACD for music but activity there has really died off - regret declining titles offered to me after I started streaming music as they were rare one-offs.
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.
Not gp, I want to pay the creators. I also want to own what I pay them for. When I have this option (bandcamp, physical media etc.) I'm going for it without even thinking. It's not about the money. It was about the money when I was 13. Now it's simply about owning my stuff. Renting is not for me. If I don't have any other alternative than pirate, what should I do?
Sharing is caring. If I can share my money with creators I go for it every single time, especially when these creators are simply making my life better with their art.
It's more complex than "want stuff for free". Usually I hate free stuff as they cost in time or worse.
Your values are outdated and impractical. You've obviously stalled at the "law and order" phase of moral development which enables the parasites who are abusing copyright law in order to extract every cent from us.
I don't think the idea of "paying creators for things I want" is outdated or impractical. Law and order is the foundation of civilization, and just because some dumb companies charge more than you want does not mean you are righteous for breaking the social contract.
I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.
You call my comment word salad, but the model you present of supply-and-demand is so shallow it can't be used to explain why copyright was first created, and what problem it solved.
Something that legislation about copyright usually does get right.
This Santa Claus version of reality is exactly the kind of mainstream ignorance I was complaining about.
"As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations."
I honestly just don't know what your are trying to say and what it has to do with boomers. Are you just talking about physical media copying of books, CDs, DVDs, etc.?
Since that's not what the world was like before copyright, and since copyright is more often used to rip people off than protect them, this seems unlikely.
We got the PC only because the clone market got in on the action and the courts found that the only thing copyrightable was the PC BIOS. The PC got better because dozens of companies were able to copy and improve.
Imagine how many new remixes and takes on music and films we could have if you didn't have to worry about a corp breathing down your neck if your chords are a bit too similar to something from 50 years ago.
Have a look at Chinese factories borrowing manufacturing processes from each other in order to work more efficiently. They don't give a shit that someone else is using their process, since wanting to protect that and not having everybody else be able to use it is literally backwards thinking (towards the past!).
Actual important research, like medical stuff and whatnot, should be government funded either way. Even the US does this, did it more in the past, and it was good work.
You can look up Gabe Newell's quotes on this, but the reason for piracy often has more to do with the fact that the pirate product is better (or more respectful to the user, or less hoops to jump through) than economic reasons.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
My issue is not understanding "why people are frustrated", it's that people think that frustration entitles them to take things they do not need from artists and creators who are trying to make a living.
If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
I'm sorta in the same boat there. There are plenty of people willing to give their work away, sell it DRM free, or sell it at a lower cost (offsetting the fact it is licensed). Plus you have things like libraries and the public domain. There are more than enough alternatives, in many cases, to avoid supporting sketchy business practices. But a lot of people become fixated on getting a particular thing.
Mind talking me through the ethical problems of copyright infringement? I'm not a fan of copyright in general, and from that perspective, I fail to see the problem in copying files.
Sounds like we need economic and/or social reform if people are starving.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).
It is impossible to having to have a meaningful discussion with someone living in fantasy land. Good day. I'm here if you wish to discuss reality and not some imagined communist utopia.
There are some cases, such as the "I purchased this and then they removed the media I had purchased" cases being discussed in other parts of the thread, where the artist has already been compensated for the media they created. In those cases (specifically those cases), I feel like the people who then say "F it, I'm not buying it twice just to make Sony/Apply/Disney/whoever richer" and go download a pirated copy are ethically in the right: they compensated the creators in return for the right to watch the movie as many times as they wanted, and a third party (the middleman/distributor) then took that away from them. That the legal terms of the purchase said (in the fine print) "this is a license that can be revoked at any time" does not make what the distributor did ethical. What the distributor did was legal but not ethical.
Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
This is an international website. Many people here come from countries where pirated CD and DVD stands were part of the local marketplace or mall. Your harping on ethics just won't be relevant to those fellow readers.
Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
I had a FreeNAS I bought around ~2010 and didn't use it for a couple of years at one point and when I went to use it again I could no longer update it, which meant I was on an ancient version of FreeBSD and none of the modern software ran on. So this literally happened to me already.
A NAS, yes, but why bother with a backup process? I know it's sacrilege for most admins, but if you're already pirating the media you can just pirate it again if your storage breaks. Yes it takes a while but so would restoring from regular backups.
> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).
I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.
Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.
> You need to keep your NAS up to date.
My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.
I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.
> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now
I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)
> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.
I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.
And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.
> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.
Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.
> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).
On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.
On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.
And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?
Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.
Or you just buy a random NAS from a store, and do none of that. Sure, that's more expensive and less featurefull, but you do not need to know anything.
This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this bad?
I tried this with Halt and Catch Fire (and some others). I was able to get season one, but it turns out they don’t produce a lot of stuff on physical media anymore, and if they do, it’s often only briefly.
Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.
I’d be in favour of a law that if a product cannot reasonably be purchased legally obtaining it via other means is not piracy (e.g. in my country 80% of movies are not available simply because the market is too small, even though I would be ok with English - I still don’t want to pirate so I buy physical media)
That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
Since I don't see it mentioned yet in the comments:
In 2011, movie studios created a digital ownership service called Ultraviolet. You could own titles in your "UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker" and access them from multiple devices via third-party streaming services. [1]
"The UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker will keep track of all of the consumers’ UltraViolet digital purchases, whether they bought a movie or television show on Blu-ray disc or digital download. UltraViolet does not store the actual content. When a consumer logs in, UltraViolet will verify that the consumer has purchased a film, and will then allow the consumer to stream or download their movies from a participating UltraViolet service." [2]
This was an attempt to separate the technology of streaming from the legal ownership of the asset.
But Disney never signed on, and the member studios eventually got tired of it for some reason. The whole service was shut down in 2019.
Extremely minor technicality, but one worth bringing up:
Ultraviolet shut down, but mainly because studios had already signed onto a shared locker service called "Movies Anywhere" that Disney did join. Ultraviolet libraries could be migrated over, for the most part.
That being said, it was a manual and voluntary process most consumers likely ignored or didn't participate in, so in essence it could be seen as a revocation of licenses. I did the migration and lost no titles, but it was the final nail in my personal arc that made me move wholesale to Plex + NAS (now Jellyfin + NAS).
Sony's one sentence notice is pretty grim considering how much money they made from these sales (sorry licensing).
From September 1, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.
Thank you,
PlayStation Store</i> [1]
At least in 2023 it was two sentences and then they somehow negotiated new licencing arrangements after the massive backlash 10 days before the end date. [2]
Guess we'll see if this clawback has the same backlash.
It drives me nuts that Sony makes some of the absolute best cameras on the market while being douche canoes in every other aspect. Bambu Labs has definitely taken that lesson to heart in producing great hardware that crushes consumer rights.
Disney is the same way. They hire some of the most talented and creative people on Earth to make wonderful works of art and then act like complete assholes in every other aspect of their business.
I purchased it, and you're taking it away? Then either I didn't actually purchase it (despite the word appearing in the notice), or you're stealing it from me.
The legal reality is that you probably purchased a license, tied to your PlayStation account, and revocable at any time for any reason. You don't buy a movie, you buy access to watch it as many times as you want during the period in which it is licensed to you. This is, of course, bullshit; this doesn't or can't apply to a physical DVD, or even a DRM free digital copy, so it is a measurable step backwards for consumers.
These content agreements would have end dates when they are negotiated so they should be required to disclose those at the time you "purchase your license".
If they renegotiate and extend the arrangement then update the UI with the new date.
Sony couldn't seriously believe they were going to be able to renew these licenses forever given how many streaming services are out there who need to fill their catalogues.
Instead it's better for sales to show a "buy" button with no date[1] so customers don't back out when they realise they'll be spending close to the retail purchase price to only rent it for a few years.
When the legal reality does not align with actual reality, there is injustice of the worst kind.
The button says "buy" not "rent" or "license".
That should be enough to defeat all the fine print, click wrap hidden clause clever maneuvering bs. The merchant is lying to the buyer. The merchant should bear liability for deceiving the buyer. The merchant (Sony) knew what they were selling. They lied to make it seem like you'd have that video in your library forever. Sony needs to give a refund with interest. Simple as that.
I agree. I'm sure someone will try to split hairs and say that "well, buying a license is buying something, just maybe not the thing you wanted," to which I say, it should be disclosed up front. Simple as.
They said they were selling it, all over their site. The button said "buy". They can put whatever crap they like in a section that they know nobody ever reads, that doesn't negate what they said in large print up front and no sane court will entertain the notion that it does.
> due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content
So when they 'sold' the content, they were already aware that they were selling something with an expiry date. Why would you even agree to a license to resell something with a time limit?
There should be some kind of law that says that any license agreement intended for reselling to the public should be a perpetual license.
And if the license is not perpetual, there needs to be laws that stop companies from using the terms “buy.” They should have to state it for what it is: a long term rental. Sony could have up front disclosed “You are paying $x.yz to rent access to this media until [date]”
I think it’s important for consumers that this verbiage is applied to everything where the license is non-transferable and not perpetual. Stop calling it “Buy/Own” and start calling it “Renting.” This applies to software too. I didn’t “buy” access to the Adobe Creative Suite, I’m renting it.
Alternately, we could have some regulation that says that if you license your content to anyone in a way that allows them to provide access with a "buy" button, the license automatically becomes perpetual and irrevocable.
The same with movies, TV shows, and video games using licensed music. If you agree to let a song be in a work you should expect that song to be in that work forever. I'm tired of media never seeing the light of day because of the expense of re-licensing the music or even having it re-released but with all the music removed or replaced by generic tracks.
Such contracts can and have been negotiated. It's simply - as logic would dictate - more expensive. Just like buying a house is far more expensive than renting it for a few years.
Adobe did this with their perpetually licensed software. If you install Lightroom 6 today, the face detection and maps features do not work because they didn't pay for perpetual licenses for the libraries they used.
Learned helplessness? Maybe I'm wrong and it'll still happen. I'm sure that everyone who got screwed after buying those movies would love waiting years to eventually get a coupon code for the playstation store while lawyers rake in millions though.
Tangential, but a few days ago I started some Steam games I hadn't played in some years. I was surprised to be met with updated user agreements, which I had to agree to if I wanted to play the games I bought years ago. These were all single-player games.
> If you can't hold it, you don't own it.
Didn't some game consoles require online connectivity to play even games in physical media?[1]
It's possible for a game disc to require connecting online and forcing updates or even just updated licensing agreements.
Correct bright line might be to be able to permanently use it without online connectivity.
> So just to be clear, most games now are not actually on the disc. Most discs just contain a license that tells the store it's okay to download this game. It is Very rare that you can just put in a disc and play these days regardless of if it is on Playstation or xbox but it does still happen.
You don't even remotely own Steam games. Their shitty launcher has to open to let your game run since it checks DRM, and it'll force updates (see gta4). You also can't transfer your license, so no second hand games.
This article is quite right, but there's even more to it than that. Why should we need to hold ANY kind of relationship with the seller/provider of an article we bought? You certainly don't need a bookstore account to buy a paperback book. Nor do they get to keep your contact information. You get your article and a ticket. They get your money. End of story.
Goods / services. You probably need a relationship to use a warranty.
The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between. Especially when the delivery mechanism is streaming, and/or DRM keys that need to be renewed.
Sure, many people want a one-time download with no promise or obligation to re-deliver it in the future. Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
This whole thing is basically just “different people want different models of commerce for digital content”
> The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between.
That's the thing. If they are truly goods, they cannot be in between! Otherwise they are being handled as services and as such they will be terminated at some point. So unless we redefine the word, a true "purchase" can never depend on future actions from the provider (like renewing some DRM).
> Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
Agree that people want this - but this is an undue burden on the provider side. You have to perpetually maintain and provide access to content FOREVER including all the systems and support staff to auth.
In a world of monopolization, where there become fewer and fewer companies because they buy out their competition... If they can't pay for basic storage and delivery of goods, then who can?
If I can individually pay for and maintain an NAS with TB's of data on it, I think these multinational megacorps can afford to do the same. Maybe scale for delivery will cost them a bit of profit, but really it's a shame how individuals say this is some how an undue burden on these corporations...
You know what is the real undue burden? 100 year long IP/copyright law. It actively diminishes our culture, making it bland and hardly changing. Humanity is created by the stories we tell, and retell, and with every retelling - the stories change and evolve... But you can't do that and make a living in modern capitalism... That is the true undue burden, and I think forcing these companies to at least provide access to the stories we paid for is the least they can do for a nigh 100 year monopoly on the stories of our society.
I have a fantasy of an alternate history where we as a society got our shit together and subsidized local libraries and ISPs so that they could offer cheap and even free NAS for everyone. Economies of scale and all that. It would have been a worthwhile public investment, but it's hard to justify spending public money on that and our politicians are so blinkered that cannot comprehend what "investment" means. Like...making it easier for kids to get smart? Why would we want that?
Instead we have the private marketplace fulfill all those needs for the low low price of ad infestation. Imagine how smart our kids would be if instead of 20 minutes of unsolicited ads a day, they saw 20 minutes of educational content and were required to pass a math quiz to access YouTube?
you can do it stop killing games style. publishers can decide to stop access any time they want but they have to give you a drm free download to compensate.
Unfortunately many game disks only contain a downloader nowadays and you often need to bind them to an account to play. Plus the version on disk without updates is probably buggy. Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's edition is an example that has a disk, but isn't really any better than a Steam key.
On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download.
So overall I don't think the physical form matters that much compared to DRM.
It's disgusting how a previously open platform for gaming (PC) was turned into what it's become with Steam. Young people either don't know or don't care that it used to be the norm to buy and install a game without a middleman "service".
That argument has been harder to make with time. A couple years ago I made the difficult decision to get rid of some old game copies. I wasn't realistically going to use them ever again, and the sentimental value for me is entirely about the memory, not the media. Part of my steam collection is nearly as old and it is on track to greatly outlast. It is also significantly easier to own and use in just about every aspect, even if it is technically just a revocable license.
Beyond that, Steam and the digital media model allowed a great many people to publish games that wouldn't otherwise have been able to publish games. It made the indie world of games possible. It also did more than anyone to bridge the platform gap between windows and linux.
I'm really worried about what will happen to Valve when Gabe retires.
I can see a bean counter making a very convincing case that it's cheaper to go back to Windows and avoid all this Linux reverse engineering gubbins which isn't bringing in an immediate profit, especially when they're giving away all theirs efforts by open sourcing Proton.
Gabe allegedly (nobody knows because it's a private company) owns 50.1%, it's not majority employee owned. It's possible he might turn it over to the employees or some kind of co-op style board but who knows if he's offered the right price by a cashed up investor.
He's got children to consider and could reasonably want to set them and his grandchildren up for generational wealth.
Which just further highlights the importance of actual DRM free ownership. Even in the face of a relatively benevolent corporation, that corporation won’t be that way forever. Leaders and cultures change, sometimes overnight (look at what happened when Broadcom bought VMWare, they started extorting customers immediately). Adobe is another good example that pulled the rug out from underneath creatives and started renting software instead of selling it.
PC game piracy was pretty mainstream back then. It was a real problem for video game creators.
But Steam is also more annoying than it needs to be, especially forcing updates and not letting you transfer games so it's not comparable to owning a disc.
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book generally cannot be removed from a shelf by a remote policy change.
It may not be able to be removed from a shelf, but if it is protected by DRM they can still remotely revoke your ability to consume it, or prevent you from consuming it to begin with (for example geolocking on blu-ray disks). And in some cases a game cartridge, or other medium for software (including games) is either actually just an access key granting access to something on a digital store, or has software that "phones home" and is unusable if it can't contact a server.
I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem.
In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at least I was able to watch it before they removed it".
Sometimes I feel that's a lost battle. People were put to boil just like the frog in the anecdote and keep swearing it's a hot bath.
The battle is alive and well, pirating has never been easier and of this high quality.
Support the creators however you want but go foster an environment around your friends and family that there are alternatives to paying evil companies who will remove your access to content willy nilly.
Premium? Sure things are more expensive but you can get 1TB hdd for 25-30 eur. You don't need an ssd and I'm sure you can find second hand drives even cheaper (or larger).
You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want. I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!
That’s an excuse, not universally applicable, and not even well supported by your own link.
> Herzog continued. “I don’t like it because I would like to earn some money with my films. But if someone like you steals my films through the internet or whatever, fine, you have my blessing.
He’d rather you didn’t. And I bet you’re not checking every artist. Just be honest and say you don’t want to pay, don’t act like you’re Robin Hood.
Not sure why you are directing this at me personly, I dont pirate anything. However I have had experience with many people in the industry who would rather their media reached a wider audience, regardless of how much money it makes.
If you dont like my link, you can always google your own. Or here, have a few more from a quick google:
This perspective has been beaten down to death but, just so you know, whenever you went to see a movie at friend's house, you also didn't contribute and were in fact pirating the content.
People rarely change their habits due to logical arguments, or ideological stances. Real change for normies happens when the current system becomes more painful than the alternative. Even with the potential to lose access to your media, there’s not enough friction yet. More fragmentation and more enshittification will eventually reach a threshold where normies start to find it inconvenient enough to consider an alternative.
The other side of it is people have short term memories. They’ll eventually forget about that time Sony took away their purchased content when there’s something else they really want to watch on the platform. We need laws that prevent companies from using the word “Buy” or “Purchase.” If we want real change, it’ll happen when the verbiage by law is “Rent” on everything and the blinders are pulled off so people can see that they own nothing and rent everything. For now the illusion of ownership is too strong.
I think part of it is also that young people are just not as attached to specific media units, so to speak. It's more like everything on tap, on a stream, curated by algorithms. Things are ephemeral in this way. Years ago, an album by a band was a major thing and you had a limited number of those, you looked at the cover art in detail, read the booklet attentively etc. Owning it was a personal attachment like this. People nowadays don't really want to hoard it this way. Having convenient access on any device is more important than a stash at home.
Also at the end of the day, it's all super first world problems. Oh no, you can no longer play some video game or watch some Hollywood movie... I don't think people will get angry enough about this to care because at the end of the day it's just some entertainment.
The media industry has been training the public to accept whatever they are given, however it is given to them. They want you to pay them forever while giving you nothing but what they choose to give you. "You'll own nothing and be happy" really is the goal.
It's not a battle that's important to me personally. I think to some extent it's a personality trait, since I feel like I see echoes of this conversation where my Mom wants to hold onto things endlessly "in case" we'll need it whereas I would rather get rid of it. Or my mother in law who takes far more photos than she'd ever be able to look at and worries about how store them all and back them up and so on.
Basically, I don't have much attachment to things so the prospect of losing something isn't such a big deal. Physical things can break down or be lost or stolen after all. Not much different from that to my mind.
There probably is something about how you come across. It's a hard sell when any principles you hold around intellectual property or commerce sound like post rationalizations for a grudge or a hoarding hobby or that you think people who stream are stupid--I experience one or more of these in typical IRL conversations about this. I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's a sensible-sounding rhetorical style that's more effective. And you do kind of have to start with understanding that, for most people, these purchases or subscriptions don't mean much.
the "physical" part is stressed too much. in today's landscape, it is no longer the only feasible way to address the different grievances made by the op.
if the content is going to be digital* anyway, despite fitting in on physical media, buying media online without drm is the way to go for most people. the bandcamp, gog of the lot that is. then your responsibility is usually just to download and find a way to self-preserve your collection.
physical media is easy on the latter part, but mostly painful on the former. in some cases, it is no longer feasible anyway. the new gta game will be digital-only, and if the nail is not on the coffin yet, this would be the "apple" moment to kill of any major publication ever supporting the medium again.
*i.e. all except vinyls which is still the "best" medium available for music
I love physical media as a ritual, but loathe it as a storage medium - it's fragile, it rots, and manufacturers can't be trusted to create long-lasting products anymore. Not to mention the fact that UHD drives used to rip modern content are almost entirely defunct, with the remaining few going for nearly half a grand in the current climate.
Personally, in light of AI getting a hand-wave on massive piracy for training data purposes, I think we're ripe to redo copyright entirely. Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date, allowing consumers to transcode content freely for personal use, and finally stripping copyright from abandoned (i.e., no longer sold) content such that "lost media" can be freely shared without legal consequence. There's so, so many reforms we need to make to reflect how content works in the modern era, in a way that rewards content creators but creates a more permissive environment for archiving, sharing, and modifications.
>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,
That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.
Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.
I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.
The tags at the start mean almost nothing, there are many cases where they make no sense in the context.
The whole page is disorganized and lacks cohesion. Coupled with the fact that there is a mix of different levels of “badness” but they are all presented equally.
This reeks of LLM.
I fully agree with highlighting this topic, but I feel this page/blog/whatever weakens the argument by being so scatterbrained and using bad examples at times. It would benefit greatly from some kind of “scale” (selling licenses vs stopping sales vs refunding vs lost access).
And lastly “If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it” doesn’t make sense at all, I get what they were trying to do/say but many games on disc these days aren’t even the game (just a key that can be revoked) and/or require backend servers for updates or gameplay.
I think there a simpler way to summarize this list:
Digital Purchases are non-transferable licenses to access "content" from a "provider". The terms of the deal are alterable and revocable at the provider's discretion with no obligation to maintain pricing, quality, availability, or editorial/artistic integrity nor must they provide any advance warning of such changes nor is there any legal recourse in case of disagreement.
Written out plainly it sounds pretty hostile when compared with an immutable Bluray whose limitations and capabilities are known in advance.
Even if you _can_ hold it, you may not own it if the player is internet-connected or even receives a firmware upgrade during maintenance or from a disc. New discs may not play unless you upgrade, and an upgrade can also remove keys, blocking you from watching discs you already have.
My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.
I bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.
It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!
Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.
There is actually no legally available English version of this ebook now, so if you want the ebook piracy is the only option. Presumably Amazon still has the rights to sell it, but due to a technical glitch and disinterest, they aren't.
I have about 2500 CDs in my garage, with all of them ripped to my laptop. I'll never lose access to them. (My only regret is that I can't look through the jewel case covers and booklets.)
I think DRM and streaming are the issues here, not digital vs physical.
For example, I can buy DRM free music from the iTunes Store, download the files, and they’re mine. I can play them back on anything that supports the file type, convert the files, back them up, etc.
Meanwhile, if I check a book out from the library, I can hold it, it’s physical, but it’s not mine and I can’t do whatever I want to it.
> I can buy DRM free music from the iTunes Store, download the files, and they’re mine.
If you hold the copyright they are yours, but most files downloaded from iTunes and similar services are unlikely to be yours. A license to use the content, even where there are few restrictions, is not ownership.
If holding the copyright is the bar, then physical media doesn’t give that either. Buying a physical book doesn’t transfer the copyright to me. I can start producing more copies and selling them, at least not legally.
The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one.
But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay for it, I sure want a non-DRM copy to sit on my hd at the end of the transaction. If the store won't supply, the pirate sites will.
In some cases, even if you hold it you don't own it.
I tend to purchase a lot of blu-rays, in fact if I don't buy the movie on Apple iTunes then it's almost always the case that I buy the blu-ray; then once I have the blu-ray I go to the torrent sites and download a version of the movie.
Why? Because I earn enough money that I feel like I have no excuse not to buy my media: but I also want it to be my media; and torrenting is more convenient than using blu-rays.
The blu-rays have one more major benefit than iTunes or the torrents though: if I'm ever without internet or my NAS dies... well, I can just dump a disc into my console and watch whatever movie I was going to watch anyway.
One time I was moving apartments, there was no internet and I hadn't set up my computers yet; decided to watch a movie with my girlfriend, grabbed a disc and set up the playstation.
Lo-and-behold... it didn't work.
Why? -- not because the disk was broken, not because the playstation had broken: but because I didn't have internet access.
The playstation has to connect to the internet to play blu-rays.
I didn't know of this because I always just used torrents and had the disks as a "license"...
So I tried my laptop: no dice either, VLC refused to play, Linux had a really bad time.
I tried with my macbook, of course no macbook came with a blu-ray player, and the one I had needed two USB-A slots, so it was a ball-ache to get the thing hooked up and I finally got something working by hotspotting my phone and googling around.
Anyway, what the fuck.
It was at that moment I realised; even physically owning things isn't actually owning them anymore.
I still don't technically pirate, but I no longer feel even the slightest derision for those that do, and I work in the entertainment industry where piracy puts people out of work (I've seen it).
For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.
My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.
Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?
> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).
I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.
Keeping anything at an old version requires perfect foresight (in the face of diminishing capabilities).
It's not like original PS4's can continue playing games as they're released, new releases assume later and later PS SDKs, you're only meant to certify against "latest".
And since downgrading is not possible on most "appliance" class devices (phones, consoles)... :\
Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.
I've never heard of a blu-ray that requires an internet connection. My Sony UHD blu-ray player has an ethernet port but I've never connected it to the internet. A few of my late 2000s era big studio discs advertise online gimmicks like polls, new movie trailers, etc. but I assume all of those servers are now dead.
get the box that says kitchen, bring it into the kitchen turn it upside down, because the bottom is where you find all the things you put in first, the things most often used. basically flip the stack so that its now FIFO.
as you use a required item return it not to the packing box, but to the drawer shelf place your muscle memory prompts.
Physical things take up space and degrade over time. In a world where operating systems and software control licensing owning physical media is barely better than digital except for potentially reselling it.
Enjoy something when you enjoy it, however you enjoy it. In the end you can’t keep anything but that.
I recently passed on some of my favorite books to a nephew. Probably nobody will break into his house and take the books off of his shelves when a license agreement expires. I'd like to be able to do the same with GTA 6 if it's good, but it looks like that would require hacking.
Discs can rot, but I would still take a large blu-ray collection over a large MKV collection stored digitally. The odds that your entire blu-ray collection will all rot are much lower than a catastrophic data loss.
And most people are not good enough sysadmins to keep a collection of digital files from being lost over decades. And even more so when the digital files are pirated, which makes them more or less fungible, they can be redownloaded so investing in backups is not a priority.
There are many books available older than any of the existing tech companies are likely to exist for. I'd bet those books will remain readable until that time as well, and there's nothing stopping people from making copies of them. Making such copies is in fact also completely legal in a lot of places.
I agree with the intent of the article but for what it's worth does not have to be physical. I have digital music and movies that can not be remotely disabled, censored, changed to fit current societies norms. The problem is when the dependency is on servers that belong to someone else or are controlled by someone else. I can self host my own instances of Ampache or just plain old HTTPS with auto-index enabled or SFTP or anything of my choosing. I qualify those as ownership assuming the digital media does not have some embedded code to reference a remote server and anything resembling an embedded license is stripped out. For sure I will hold onto my CD's and DVD's forever. I regret selling off a lot of vinyl.
So pirating is the answer? I don't think so. It's unethical and illegal. Buy the physical media of the books, movies, and music that you consume. Quit screwing the creators. I've seen numerous complaints on HN about one's code being stolen. What's the difference?
I have a large collection of DVDs that I've amassed over the years.
There's something nice about physical media; the bits are physically stamped into the medium. They're DVD-encrypted but I lawfully extract these bits and view them regularly.
When streaming services start on-the-fly editing for content[1] and revoking licenses, they can absolutely shove it up their butts. My old man take is that if a TV show or movie or whatever isn't worth putting onto a physical medium and distributing it to people who will buy it, I won't miss it if--I mean when[2]--it's gone. I mean, these huge movie studios act like pirates are going to ruin their massive profits, when they won't.
[1] And yes, they will absolutely on-the-fly, 1984-style edit films and TV shows for content.
Usually you create shorthand rules because you want to Have a heuristic to detect things that you don’t want to do lots of thinking for. So the rule has edges it doesn’t match well on and so on.
That’s all very well. But was this rule necessary? I don’t need to do a lot of computation in most cases to tell where I land and the edge cases are worsened by the rule. So it’s not helping me make decisions.
So I own a DVD but someone (Amazon, the government) can delete something out of my Kindle library. Fine, but I didn’t need the rule to help me with that. It’s very apparent.
And then there’s the question of owning not conferring all rights. I own my body but I can’t sell parts of it. Are the embryos my wife and I have made ours? Transferring them without the clinic approving isn’t really feasible.
So the word “own” doesn’t mean much to me on its own and I don’t need to use this rule because I can somewhat tell where I have power no one can take from me and where I don’t.
Holding it on your hand is insufficient. Using it may require an external server or certain chosen proprietary software that could be taken from you at any time or itself requiring an external server.
The bits you want to own must be entirely self-contained, and able to be screwed using whatever software you may choose, especially open source (though if the format is fully documented so that anyone can create and distribute a viewer, the software need not be open source.)
It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media, I'm seeing more blu-rays and DVDs at retailers. There are just too many streaming services, each with distinct catalogs which creates two problems: it's too difficult to find specific titles when you know what you want to watch, and it's too difficult to find anything worth watching when you don't.
I'm not someone who keeps the TV on in the background, so I'd much rather spend $100 a month on physical media even when I don't plan on watching them immediately, than spend $100 a month on five different streaming services that I barely even use when I did subscribe to them.
>It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media,
Your physical media should be hard drives. The 20tb drives are at my sweet spot, I don't feel like I'm wasting a bay to put one of those in it. haugene/transmission-openvpn in docker is bulletproof, you'll never get an ISP email. Stream it with Plex/Emby to any device anywhere, yours or friends'. Use RAID for some redundancy if you can afford it. Upgrade and expand. Build a library that will outlive you.
> Streaming services rent you access. Digital stores sell you a license that can be taken away. Physical media gives you an object that is yours, offline, and in your hands.
>
> Physical media can be given away, inherited, or found at a thrift store decades from now. A digital license becomes inaccessible when an account is closed or deleted. A vinyl record or printed book can remain usable across generations.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.
Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?
But the apartments which people can afford has gotten smaller now and also with the rise of the minimalistic culture, I have no space to put movie and games discs. I am ok with renting media. Like most people I don't re-watch movies and re-play single player games often.
imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers.
> imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers
It's not clear that there is large value, to consumers as a whole, to physical media or DRM-free media.
I am aware of the benefits, but the few cases of "losing your licence" are a rounding error, unimportant to many, and maybe even better than their success at durably storing their own physical media or DRM-free digital media.
I exclusively (?) buy games from GOG. It's important to me. I wish it were the norm, but I just don't think it's actually important to others. Perhaps we might imagine some dystopian future where a temporary licence was the only option, but ultimately media providers face competition from other leisure activities. They are incentivised to make it less onerous, and in practice today, it is!
It is important to weigh the transient nature of any purchase. A physical copy may be lost, damaged, stolen, become unusable due to lack of hardware, or just start to take up enough space that you decide its time to let it go.
In real life, as revocable as they may be, my digital purchases have withstood the test of time far better than my physical copy purchases. It matters who you buy from. It is understandably different for something you find value in having a physical collection.
This is a wonderful collection. Portions of this, especially subscription bits, apply to SaaS and AI as it is currently served. Maybe now that B2B relationships have similar risks, more lobbying pressure will come on the side of permanent access to the things we buy.
As long as we're nitpicking every sense of the word "own", the strongest legal sense means you're the copyright holder, and every sense downstream of that is some lesser license. Buying a disc is a license to view the intellectual property, subject to various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home.
If the disc is an abstract license, surely the seller will replace the disc if it's scratched. I already bought the license, so what is the real purpose of the physical token?
Somehow the concept of ownership has been twisted to so that obligations only flow in one direction. Rules for thee, not for me.
The point OP is making is that it's not the concept of ownership that has been twisted, there just never was ownership of media beyond owning the actual copyright. Everything else is licensing.
> various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home
Are you implying that lending the disc to a friend so they can watch in their own home is forbidden? Or taking the disc to the friend's place to watch together?
No, those aren't the restrictions. But there are restrictions. First-sale doctrine allows lending. But you are not allowed to play the movie in, say, a restaurant, theater, or other public place.
Dog eat dog Amped album is not present on Apple music and I suspect several streaming platform, and Remedy never again is not present on it as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(album)
There definitely seems to be a trend with Gen Z and younger to go back to iPods and physical media. Vinyl record sales are continuing to climb, and CDs seem to be climbing too, now that vinyl records are no longer cheap.
however - we can be idealistic - but when the rubber touches the road, a lot of things happen.
indie games only exploded due to being digital only, if Indies were to publish physical copies they would go out of business or they would be less of them.
a lot of people complain about amazon - but It has provided an avenue for out of print books to continue being sold - through on demand printing. yeah physical products gets extinct too.
the era of the cheap dvd movie financed a lot of independent films - streaming killed that.
so like everything in life - you win some, you lose some.
It's a naive heuristic but if you are a not a technical expert you should provide use this until you understand enough to provide and follow a better one.
Many things are confused here. Why would you want to "own" media, physical or otherwise? What you actually want is
a.) to be able to use the media however you wish. no ownership is required, just download it
b.) to give back to the content creator to thank for his creation. no ownership is required here either, you can send him money, go on a concert, etc
trying to merge those two points into one (=>purchase the media) is not necessarily the best way as you might end up with something you cannot properly use (DRM, etc) while not really giving that much to the creator anyway (90% for the label, wtf?)
There's another factor to consider: If what you physically own requires a proprietary platform to play or operate, then you don't actually own it. Sure, the disc with version 1.0.0 of the media/game may be in your possession, but that doesn't matter. The platform can change the rules at any time, requiring an arbitrary number of steps or payments before playing the media, or limiting features through forced updates as soon as the media is inserted.
Ultimately, technology cannot solve what is fundamentally a legislation problem. The only way to win this is to ask for laws to change.
My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore
> A 2020 lawsuit raised the same issue, but a California judge dismissed it in 2021 because the plaintiff had never actually lost access to her purchased videos, leaving her without standing.
Seems kinda off. They’re pointing a knife at you menacingly and have promised that in a variety of circumstances they will stab you, but because they haven’t actually stabbed you yet, you’re not allowed to complain. Feels like maybe (maybe; I’m not entirely convinced) that threat should be standing enough, just as conspiracy and attempted murder can be criminal matters, and not just a successful murder.
I think DRM is frankly a lot more of a consumer education/rights thing than some kind of outright evil.
Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not. It's a bargain I'm happy to strike, or at least I appreciate the option.
The issue starts when:
- vendors don't make it clear that they can pull the rug
- or indeed can pull the rug for no reason. A bank can close my bank account, but not for no reason - and they can't hold on to my money just because. It should be the same with DRM-protected assets
- people don't understand the tradeoff they're making. It's like complaining about reckless overspending in credit cards leading to insane interest. Yes, it's partly to do with the product, equally credit cards totally have their use when used responsibly, and a healthy society has people understanding the differences.
> Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not.
One the one hand, yes, on the other hand, the DRM-free option is often non-existent (and if you want to include DVD and blu-rays in that pile, because they too do have DRM, just that you can bypass it with ease these days, DRMed media is probably the default).
If I could buy a copy for X, a DRMed copy for X minus Y, and a rug-pullable version for X minus Y and Z, then I might even buy the cheapest option every now and then if it's just throwaway. As it is though, a plain DRM-free copy is often completely unavailable (unless you sail the high seas).
I suppose you can't force people to sell you the license you want. Someone might reasonably develop some land, build flats and only rent them out, no obligation to sell them.
But then you regulate what the landlord can and cannot do.
I'm reading "Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" by Byung-Chul Han, who has things to say about it. "Things" are naturally possessions to be owned; the non-things that we as a society are moving towards are information to be consumed. If you have a physical book, you can pass it along to someone else, margin notes and dogears and all, but the experience of an e-book is fundamentally different. You might feel like you 'own' the bits because they're on your local computer and have no DRM, but your relationship to the actual item is not one of ownership. Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
> Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
It's not unthinkable to me, but it would have to include your own personal notes or something. The plain example though is nonsense, your're correct in that.
That said, what about leaving an entire NAS media collection to someone in your will? Sure, it's just hard drives with bits on them, but it's probably curated and high quality. There's a technical barrier though, so it makes little sense to leave to anyone who isn't already deeply interested, while if you're left with a collection of vinyl or blu-rays, even if you don't actually care about them, the cultural knowledge of what they are and represent is still around.
Cool page, it lists a bunch of compelling arguments. It's always good to see more and more people realising these things and start insisting on actual ownership.
Meanwhile, did you know defectivebydesign.org has been around for 20 years now? Makes me feel old.
Right now even physical things have digital interlocking. Example you might purchase a watch but it requires you to purchase a subscription for it to function.
Since all the sheep are thinking "why do I need this junk wasting space in my attic or worse in my living room shelves? I need to get rid off it all as quick as possible, so I have more room for my mega inch TV with Netflix and so on...", I get those collection for almost nothing if I'm lucky. I resell the stuff I don't need and even make a profit.
Expanding your archive of physical media wasn't easier because of the people falling for the streaming trap.
As a tangent, I'd like to point out that the world is realizing the same is true with respect to Currencies, especially the US Dollar. It used to be better than gold, lighter, easily transportable, and convertible to actual gold coin, up until FDR ended that in 1933.[1] He added insult to injury by devaluing the dollar shortly thereafter.
We still had our silver coinage, though... and that lasted until after JFK was assassinated by groups still unknown[2] 60+ years later. The subsequent decision to remove silver from coinage left us without hard money, that we could hold, and instead substituted the "Johnson Sandwich".[3]
Worldwide, however, there was still convertibility to gold, at FDR's reduced value. This was ended by Nixon in 1971.[4] Since then, the value of the dollar, relative to gold, has fallen from $38 per ounce, to ~$4000 per ounce today. That's a decline of more than 99%.
The only thing holding the dollar up at this point is the PetroDollar System[5] that Nixon helped create in which Oil is exclusively priced in Dollars, and the dollars are recycled into US markets.
It's my Personal opinion that Trump is speedrunning the destruction of this system.
Good examples, but this one didn't make sense to me:
>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game disappeared from Xbox and PlayStation stores in December 2014 when a license expired. Players campaigned for years before a remastered edition arrived in 2021.
I mean, physical stores can also stop selling a certain game. Existing sold games were unaffected. Why does this matter?
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game was digital-only, so nobody could buy a copy of the game if they wanted to, since the only places which sold the game stopped doing that, and used copies by definition don't exist.
Physical games can still be bought even if stores stop selling them, since the used marked will still be around (the game might be rare and command a high price on the used market, but at least it's possible).
It's a bit more subtle than that, I'm afraid. In many instances lately, physically owning a product no longer means that you own it: the fact that BMW tried to introduce subscriptions for heated seats, VW blocking out Graphene users from connecting their phones to their cars, Insta360 asking you to install their app to use their camera, which does not need to be connected to a cloud service to function, bambu labs trying to shutdown open source projects, the list goes on - that's manufacturers openly denying you from owning the products you paid for(and can hold).
There's another side to that as well: many people (contentiously or not) realized that when something is free, then you are the product. Now look at penai, anthropic, google, etc. Anyone that has basic GCSE level math skills can work out that their pricing does not cover their costs. Some people are in denial about it, some don't care and some truly believe that they are not the product cause they pay what is effectively a symbolic subscription. Or all three, but still, you are paying for something you don't own.
I don't come from a wealthy family and when I was a kid, all the software I used for making dumb games like flash, photoshop, etc were pirated. Same with music and movies. Eventually I switched over to Linux and open source projects. When I grew up and could finally afford those things, it only felt right to pay for a netflix subscription, spotify and whatnot. But due to the vile invasion in my personal space and the 0 guarantee that I'll have access to my favourite song the next morning, I got fed up and went back to self-hosting and pirating(to a degree). One of my best friends is a musician and I know that spotify is a big f-u to most artists since they have a winner-takes-all policy which makes me feel a lot less guilty. And frankly, if it is something I enjoy, I'll just head on over to the artist's website and buy a digital copy as a form of gratitude(even though I have often already downloaded the music): an album which I had very high hopes for dropped yesterday, I listened to it, liked it, downloaded it and bought a digital copy about an hour ago. Despite having it on my navidrome library since last night. At the end of the day, the artist will get a better compensation that way compared to what they'd get if I was listening to them on spotify, even on repeat.
So while the author has the right idea, sadly it's only part of the story.
The big greedy corporations try to milk the customer here.
The US government either tolerates it, or benefits from it
via kick-backs. The orange king is the ultimate tool box
for others - corruption has never been more rampant than
now.
I also see the attempts to eliminate physical media or deny
right-to-repair, as associated with the age sniffing requirement
or the fight by governments against VPNs. They want more control,
at the expense of the end user. And they also lie about their
goals, although in really stupid ways - age sniffing as fake-rationale
to "protect the children", as means to disown and devalue freedom
of citizens.
That's true but not instantaneously , but I get your point.
Gasoline, diesel, bullets, firearms, explosives, water, canned food, lubricants, soil, seeds are the only thing that are truly yours and cannot be taken from you or diluted into irrelevance
Seems the title has been editorialised, but "holding it" is a rather low bar when considering ownership. I think of ownership as having the right to modify or destroy something.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
There was a touch of hyperbole ;) we live in the Information Age after all.. but to answer your question,
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution
Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.
From the beginning. Ownership is intangible. It exists only because of the collective consent to laws.
The difference between ownership of a physical object and ownership of an intellectual one is a matter of conventional. It's easier to define ownership of an object that is excludable, but that's human convenience, not a physical law.
Some dogs have a concept of items belonging to them. Early humans had weapons and, with our lizard mind, things wouldn't go well when neanderthal B considered neanderthal A's weapon was now is. They also had "homes": caves/camps that belonged to them.
Fighting physically for ownership predates fighting judicially for ownership.
To the extent that you can "own" another animal: the ownership of a female by a male is definitely a thing in the animal kingdom.
And before the first law was ever written, human slavery (estimated to be at least 4000 BC, with mentions in the first law ever written) did exist too.
Ownership predates the law that later on codified the concept of ownership.
Do we really take away from the artist? In what way?
The obvious answer is that you take away a purchase the person to give the gift would have made. One could argue that there is also value in propagating someone’s art and potentially increasing the artists customer/patron base. Think of it as advertising or to put it in the context of a drug deal, the first hit’s free. The gift recipient may then go on to buy another work from that artist and even pass on the one they were given to someone else, continuing the cycle.
I’d also argue that there isn’t widespread agreement on reasonable compensation for artists. Personally, I don’t consider artists to be special enough in the context of people that make and produce goods, that they should get unique treatment. Why does a family deserve the financial benefits of trademarks and copyrights decades after the artists death. That’s just one example, but in a time when many’s artists view their livelihoods to be at risk because of AI, it’s not popular to engage in any debate that undermines the artist in any way.
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book cannot be remotely erased, edited, or deactivated. It is a physical object you can own, resell, lend, archive, or play offline indefinitely.
Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.
A standalone offline player that can play Movie A today will be continue to be allowed to play Movie A forever.
Subsequently-purchased movies B, C, and/or D may or may not work (because of shenanigans like key revocations systems), but Movie A still plays fine even after these later titles have been introduced.
It's ugly, but it's not quite a brick.
The ugly part is shaped like this: A person buys a new movie and it doesn't work. They can't return the movie to the store because it's been opened, so now they're left with a disc they can't use and with less money than they had before. (Solutions include figuring out how to update the player's firmware if it's still supported, spending more money on a newer player, or becoming an Amish leatherworker and forgetting about all of this nonsense for the rest of their days.)
Possible solutions include small claims court. You can't refuse a refund for a defective product just because you had to open the box to find out it was defective.
Yeah, the distributed responsibility might make this difficult, but maybe not impossible.
Is the disc defective because it doesn't play in a labeled player, or is the player defective because it doesn't play a labeled disc?
Can the licensing body be held responsible?
In point of fact, you'd probably get your money back in small claims court just by suing the store, with evidence that your player plays other discs, just not this particular disc.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really fix the problem, so much as show that an angry-enough consumer with time, energy, and money, can usually get a token of recompense.
I think by default it's whichever one you bought later. The judge may tell you it's the other one. But it doesn't matter because either way the store has to issue a refund.
I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things.
The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place.
I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.
With Qobuz (lossless music streaming), you can both pay a subscription and buy individual songs, without DRM. You then own those, supposedly forever (at least good luck getting my songs out of my backups, or preventing my airgapped/offline computers from sending them to my stereo amp).
I think it's a good middle ground: you pay a subscription, artists at least get a little something (the biggest issue for artists is the unlimited amount of fully AI-generate slop music), and you get to have actual DRM-free files.
Ripping physical music CDs to bit-perfect FLAC files --and automatically verifying with online databases of other people's rips that your rip is instead bit-perfect-- is kinda a big thing in the audiophile world too.
No. 2 is enough though surely, I've had multiple incidences now where a series we've been watching on a streaming platform has disappeared without warning, running my own little media server alleviates that entirely.
I subscribe to Spotify. I've got a whole galaxy of music available to me just about anywhere I go. It's very convenient and I use it all the time.
But there's music that Spotify doesn't work with. Music that I'd like to listen to, and that I used to own on CD. I've also got stuff in my Spotify favorites list that I have listened to on Spotify in the past, but which is greyed out today.
To pick something specific: Spotify won't play Front 242's album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil. It's present[0], but it won't play.
(I'm not even a tiny bit interested in hearing some rando's rip of that album on YouTube. I like that album because of the way the noises tickle my earbones, and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost with layers of lossy compression.)
I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it.
I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.
I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.
> I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
Files on a hard disk that you own are still files that you physically own. The only difference between those files and, say, a DVD, is that the encoding is more space-efficient.
The parent's point is that possession of a physical good is a bright line separation. For digital files, there's a huge difference between [Files you own] on a hard disk, and files [on a hard disk you own]. There are files you can put on a hard drive that you don't own and will ultimately kill themselves when specified criteria are met, like DRM'd ebooks.
I would argue that the files on your hdd that can expire or made unusable by some remote third party are as incomplete as a book that is missing half the pages. For example a keepass file without the password/key-file is incomplete, the same goes for Audible aax files that can not be played without per-user 'activation bytes.' You have possession of the file but you never owned its contents.
For Audible I use OpenAudible which converts the aax files to m4b when I download them.
> The only difference between those files and, say, a DVD, is that the encoding is more space-efficient.
Also that it's (depending on the format) perhaps not illegal to use the content in the file wit any viewer you choose.
Which does not depend on the data being on a DVD at all, but the details of contract of purchase. When you buy the data on a harddisk, the exact same terms would apply.
I think the idea is that with a book or a DVD you're not allowed to copy it. You're allowed to lend or sell it though.
Is that the state of things? I thought you could copy a legally purchased thing, just not distribute it?
Depends on your country.
In my country I can legally make copies of for example books, movies, CDs etc, as long as the copies are only for personal use.
I can even legally privately share copies with family and close friends. As in close real life people that I have a personal relationship with.
A copy made for personal use cannot later be used for a different purpose. And a copy made for personal use must be made from a legal source in the first place.
The copy of The Matrix that a friend burned on a CD (DivX encoded file under 700 MB, that I would watch on the computer) and gave to me years ago, would have been illegal today because he got that movie from his brother who got it from a torrent tracker.
But if instead of downloading the movie from a P2P network his brother had borrowed The Matrix on DVD from the local library, and ripped it himself, and given a copy to his brother, who then gave me a copy, then my understanding is that this would have been completely fine and legal today in my country.
It’s all pretty weird.
In other countries, the laws are different.
My understanding is the laws you describe are mostly limited to a few European countries, while most of the rest of the world are more restrictive?
Also, with with the limited right to make copies like that comes quite high fees on recordable media that is paid to the music and movie industries as compensation through organizations like CopySwede here in Sweden.
I would emphatically not do this, because you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty.
Honestly, I'm continually surprised at how badly people miss this even as, e.g. Sony et al just take away stuff you "bought."
So, to put directly. Do not reword it, you will screw it up.
You must be able to hold it in your hand.
>you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty.
You mean legal ownership, right? Because people can illegally take your physical belongings.
Sony can only take it away because you didn't own it.
I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.
Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.
As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.
On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.
So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
When I brought half life 2 there was a lag of about 2-4 years before I could play it for the first time - I didn't read the fine print, and on a dial up connection I couldn't get past the steam client updating in a reasonable amount of time, mind you I was able to download much larger Linux ISOs over time frames of a month+ through resumable downloads.
Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day
Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of business at any time and all your games would simply stop working.
I'm aware, and I'm choosing GOG when I can now, though even then I see phoning home (or attempts to) happening (opensnitch is useful for that https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) - I've paid for some titles 2-3x over which is frustrating, admittedly I don't have the physical media from the first time which is on me, but it's frustrating seeing single player games wanting to phone home
Is the GOG client the thing phoning home? I've refused to install it so far and I've just been downloading the installers directly.
No, I'm not using the gog client (I'm on Linux). It's things like the Witcher 3's launcher.
It's the steam version, but Crusader Kings also hangs for a bit if you block it's network access
Steam's DRM is entirely optional. It is up to the game publishers to use it.
AFAIK Steam really has three things you could consider part of the DRM strategy.
- The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup.
- Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator.
- And then finally the ticketing system, which allows third-party servers to validate that a user owns a given game according to Steam.
Of them the ticketing system is the most serious: it's something you can't really bypass easily. However, it also is only applicable to things that require servers. I know in Valve's own games, its only something that comes up with game servers, and I don't even know if it's forced on in their dedicated server. It seems like a stronger version of dedicated servers that used to have CD key checks.
DRM is DRM, and these mechanisms impact your ability to use things the way that you should be able to. That I would never deny. However, I will say that because it's relatively lightweight, for software that sticks to just what Steam offers and doesn't try to get creative, they're mostly only going to prevent casual piracy, and I think the main purpose of these mechanisms is mostly to just clear the technical bar for being a copy protection mechanism by law. When it comes to preserving these games beyond the end of the Steam service, it probably won't be a big deal, and it will actually be third-party DRM options like Denuvo and SecuROM that are harder to deal with and could potentially pose a threat for preservation and keeping access to games you own.
So while I don't really like Steam DRM, severity matters. If "no DRM" was just simply not on the table, I'd take Steam-native DRM as a good second choice. It is still a problem that it is technically illegal to break those locks to just be able to use something you bought with your own cash, but I think that's something we need to fix in the law, and I think we can, and honestly, despite the direction things are going, I do believe we will. Just a shame that I'm less sure I'll live to see the day at this point.
ultimately it means that all of the games in your library will stop working as soon as your computer has been offline for whatever length of time steam feels is "too long". I recommend getting a cracked copy of every game in your library to make sure that you will still have access to what you paid for if steam shuts down or you lose your internet connection.
Well, the Steamworks DRM simply poses no threat: a skiddie can crack that one. There are tools that can do it automatically. For stuff that depends on the Steam API, you can probably keep a copy of one of the popular emulators; normally it's enough to drop them next to the EXE. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, I could go into my steam apps folder and fix the problem immediately.
Having to crack things at all just to play them is bad. But, if it's easy to do it yourself, it is still better than going the route of downloading stuff from dubious sources. There's a whole ecosystem you have to understand to know what you can trust with piracy and not everyone knows where to look.
For the ticketing system, it's kind of a non-issue because that's a server-side mechanism. If a game requires that, it requires a server and won't work offline at all anyway.
For Denuvo, SecuROM, Themida, VMProtect and others... Yes, that stuff is an actual threat, but Valve doesn't make people use those. (Valve also doesn't make people use Steamworks for DRM either, and there are in fact games in my library whose Steam depots are free of any DRM at all and happily run outside of Steam with no Steam needed.)
> Steam's DRM is entirely optional.
Not to the user it isn't.
The reason this is a worthwhile point is because it means games on Steam are not automatically DRM-encumbered and the steam apps folder for the game may just work as-is.
How big of a difference this makes definitely depends on the kinds of games you play. Obviously the triple A games on Steam are, with rare exception, DRM'd to the gills. The older games and indie games, a lot less so, sometimes none at all.
You have to check of course, but probably a good idea to do so before trying to find cracked/pirated versions.
I think you’re confusing your own file backup practices with ownership. If you purchase a DRM-free piece of software (say, a game from GoG), I’d say you own it just as much as if you bought the same game on a CD (assuming the CD was also DRM-free).
If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.
> physical ownership
I thing the word you are looking for is possession. When something is physically in your possession, it does not mean, that you have "physical ownership", that requires you to have actual ownership, which is defined by the law, so "legal ownership".
GOG is totally dead. Try submitting a game there or contacting anyone.
Dead platform. The origina owner got the site back and does literally nothing with it.
Is it? A few weeks ago I had to contact support to remove some games from my account and the response time was decent.
I am curious why you had to remove them. Was it content reasons? Was it you were moving and ownership of them in your new home isn't legal?
For some reason the user can't remove games from their account and it has to be done by support. A while ago they had an "anti-censorship" promotion with several games. I wanted Postal, but I didn't know I'd get all the games in the promotion added to my account at the same time, and it was like a dozen porn games I didn't want.
I had to do a refund earlier this year, gog processed it very quickly.
It could have been automated though.
They just released four games yesterday and looking at the news reel it seems they release a bunch of games every day. They're also running a summer sale right now. I doubt they're anywhere close to being dead.
They are known to take their time when it comes to developer submissions (and that time can be quite long) but that was the case since pretty much forever, not something that happened with the new/original owner.
> I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically.
I mean sure, but you can think of it analogously that if the file lives on a hard disk/SSD that you own and can hold in your hand AND the file is in some open format that can be used with open source software (as opposed to some proprietary player that checks some external license to work), only then you own it.
>I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods.
I fear the opposite is more likely. cars are already getting government-mandated connectivity.
> people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth.
Passkeys are still your keys. You can put them on hardware authenticators you control entirely offline separate of other services. You can store them in software vaults you manage.
that's not true. Passkeys have an optional remote attestation capability, which second parties can use to completely enforce aspects of your keys, such as them being non-transferrable or not usable without a screen touch etc.
This doesn't change the fact it can still be your physical device that remains in your personal control.
I can stash them on a yubikey or similar device and still meet those requirements. It's still only my device, it doesn't rely on other services, etc.
There are also non-transferrable passkeys which can't be copied between two secure devices, so it'd be hard to get some passkeys onto your yubikey in the first place.
Furthermore, I personally feel that if you can't actually access the bits, you don't truly "own" it.
Passkeys (as defined in the spec) by definition don't.
Non-passkey WebAuthn keys can have additional attestations.
You don't consider WebAuthn to be passkeys? Why not?
Passkeys are a subtype of WebAuthn keys, not vice versa.
We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to data. When I own data, sometimes it refers to data I created. Other times it refers to data about me. Other times it's something I've been sold. Other times it's my responsibility to ensure that data's accuracy. There are probably a few I'm missing.
I happen to like the notion of ownership that you're describing, but I think we'd all have more fruitful discussions about data if we dispensed with: "_____ is not ownership because of _____" and instead just came up with entirely different words for each kind of relationship one can have to data. Then stasis could move away from arguing what words mean and closer to doing something about the problems that arise around data "ownership".
Agreed. I'd go further. This obsession with ownership has always struck me as a peculiarly American thing, perhaps related to the absolutely central role of private property in the USA's history. In other cultures the concept of private property is often diluted somewhat by social obligations and counter-obligations. But that aside, the term is already very imperfect for the reasons you describe.
Perhaps the better word is just "control".
Isn't it the same thing?
Stuff you fully control is stuff you own fully.
Stuff you don't fully control is stuff you don't own fully.
Stuff you fully own is stuff you fully control.
Stuff you don't fully own is stuff you don't fully control.
As I mentioned, "ownership" is not always such an absolute concept outside the USA, which began as a freewheeling frontier society. For example, the French translation of "company" is "société", and the thing is understood to be a bundle of obligations rather than a discrete object to be bought and sold. Even in England, houses are commonly sold on leases rather than the "freehold" which is intrinsic to ownership in the US.
IMO the verb "own" is only fully unambiguous in the case of non-fungible physical goods. Which clearly data is not.
In the case of data it should be more aptly described as "possession" rather than "ownership"
These are different things, and this is precisely the point here. You do have the possession of the data when you stream a movie, but you do not have the ownership. When someone makes a picture of you, they do posses it, but they do not necessarily own it, that would be you.
I also don't agree with your parent, because ownership is precisely the correct term here.
> We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to data. When I own data, sometimes it refers to data I created. Other times it refers to data about me. Other times it's something I've been sold. Other times it's my responsibility to ensure that data's accuracy.
We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to food. When I own food, sometimes it refers to food that I harvested for myself. Other times it refers to food from me. Other times it's food I have bought from someone. Other times it's about my responsibility to ensure the edibility of food I sold.
> If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it.
How does pre-DRM copyright affect the picture here? Do you mean it's been impossible to own copyrighted content since the inception of copyright?
You can still share pre-DRM copyrighted work without running afoul of any laws. Stuff like lending out or selling VHS tapes. Copyright is concerned about copying, not about moving. Digital media just makes the line between copying and moving sufficiently blurry that companies get away with making moving impossible under the guise of making copying impossible.
Exactly, which is why the article is right to focus on physical media, it's the only practical way to allow moving without copying.
By OP's framing, it seems so.
But I think there's more nuance here. I can buy a copyrighted book, read it, and then sell it or give it to you for free. The copyright holder's rights have not been violated: I've not copied it, the clue is in the name copyright.
It's not legal for me to go into a library, borrow a book, and then make a copy of it. It's a larger breach to then share that copy more broadly by making more copies.
In the digital era copying is cheaper, and distribution is broader. This caused panic within publishers of all media - they wanted to provide the convenience of digital distribution and consumption (and realise the cost savings), but noted that without DRM, copying would mean there was a risk they'd only ever sell one copy of a game, film, album or book.
This is a snap back to the extreme interpretation of enforcing copyrights. Publishers could structure their DRM and licensing to mimic physical media better. For example, the license could be irrevocable and provide a right to the user of a copy in perpetuity, so it can't be withdrawn. The license could be transferred to other owners: I could lend you my copy, you could then return it to me, digitally; I could donate it to a charity; I could sell my license to another individual; it could be part of my estate and bequeathed at my death.
Physical media has flaws, so does digital media. With a little vision and not much technology we could make digital media as awesome as physical media while retaining copyright to drive investment.
Or, we could go the way OP seems to be nudging towards: we try and grow the copyleft media industry to something economically viable and put the entire economic model of controlled distribution into a place of no longer being viable as a business. Big ask.
Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use.
There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline.
These rips can be freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
Exactly. I pirate eBooks and buy a physical copy when I come around to reading them.
Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags
You wouldnt train a llm to swede movies...
believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
When buying isn't owning...
Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.
This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
They need to wake up.
Despite paying for Netflix and Disney+ and Prime and etc, I have pirtated 1080 copies, with subtitles, of all our favorites because network access is unreliable and service provides add and remove media without warning.
As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.
Disney+ is notorious for this. Disney also has a number of shows that they refuse to provide on physical media. If they are removed from their platform and not licensed elsewhere they effectively become lost media.
AND, if you get hurt ad a Disney park you can't sue them because you agreed to Disney+ TOS.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.
Somehing like, make sure your DVD
- has unskippable advertisment - long intro, also unskippable - ...
If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.
I actually remember getting so frustrated that I ripped some of my DVDs, made a copy without that, and put it in the same case so that I could just enjoy the movie. VHS you could always fast forward, which is not something I thought I would miss as much as I do. Physical goods that work offline are my default.
When you watch on vhs or laserdisc the loss of resolution only bothers you til the movie sucks you in.
At that point it’s irreverent because your eyeballs are not watching a long sequence of pretty still pictures, but rather your brain is watching a story in a way similar to reading a good book.
Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.).
You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.
Can't you use bluray players without a network connection?
Not really. If the discs you have play today, they may or may not continue to work offline depending on the player, but every so often discs are released your player won't have the right keys for and those won't play until you connect your player to the internet so it can download the newest set of keys. Some keys will expire after a certain amount of time (for example the PS3 warned they'll only last 12 to 18 months https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/vide...) and you'll have to connect the player to the internet to watch content that used to work. The manufacturer of your player could also shut down their server and stop providing updated keys and then you'd have to buy a new player to play any new discs. New discs can also break your old players (https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/vcaniv/help_wi...). The capability is also there for them to revoke keys entirely which will stop your old discs from working even if you connect to the internet and you'll be forced to repurchase your movies, but I haven't seen that used so far.
It's also a usability thing.
Downloaded stuff comes into one service on a server I own (Jellyfin or Plex) and I can see _everything_ there. Every movie and TV show.
On the official services, that I pay for, I need to go through a good half dozen trying to see what's where this time.
Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS?
I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin
No, but I found a link for it
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.
I borrow my Criterions from the library or a local movie rental place run by a film fan. I used to use SwapACD for music but activity there has really died off - regret declining titles offered to me after I started streaming music as they were rare one-offs.
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
> The problem
There is no problem, just pirate it.
> its unethical (and illegal)
I guess I'll just keep doing it then, and someone else can keep crying about it on orange computer reddit website
If the best you got is "you can't stop me", that's true, but not really very relevant to what is good and right.
> good and right
For who?
Again, pirating doesn’t stop you or anyone else from sending money to the copyright holder via whatever means the copyright holder prefers.
Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.
That’s a nice way of saying they’re full of shit. They want stuff for free, and that’s the whole of it.
It’s reasonable to not want to do that, even if it’s not the most severe kind of unethical or illegal act.
Not gp, I want to pay the creators. I also want to own what I pay them for. When I have this option (bandcamp, physical media etc.) I'm going for it without even thinking. It's not about the money. It was about the money when I was 13. Now it's simply about owning my stuff. Renting is not for me. If I don't have any other alternative than pirate, what should I do?
Sharing is caring. If I can share my money with creators I go for it every single time, especially when these creators are simply making my life better with their art.
It's more complex than "want stuff for free". Usually I hate free stuff as they cost in time or worse.
Your values are outdated and impractical. You've obviously stalled at the "law and order" phase of moral development which enables the parasites who are abusing copyright law in order to extract every cent from us.
I don't think the idea of "paying creators for things I want" is outdated or impractical. Law and order is the foundation of civilization, and just because some dumb companies charge more than you want does not mean you are righteous for breaking the social contract.
You're not paying creators. You're paying the extraction machine that squeezes artists dry.
Someday you'll pass the 'edgelord' phase of development (hopefully).
Lol, I sincerely hope not.
I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.
Except, in many cases, they will not sell you the superior product, for any amount of money.
You call my comment word salad, but the model you present of supply-and-demand is so shallow it can't be used to explain why copyright was first created, and what problem it solved.
Something that legislation about copyright usually does get right.
This Santa Claus version of reality is exactly the kind of mainstream ignorance I was complaining about.
"As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations."
I honestly just don't know what your are trying to say and what it has to do with boomers. Are you just talking about physical media copying of books, CDs, DVDs, etc.?
It's not that hard to imagine a better system. Abolish all copyrights
It's easy to imagine that as a world where no one funds any thing resembling research or content because it will get instantly ripped off.
Since that's not what the world was like before copyright, and since copyright is more often used to rip people off than protect them, this seems unlikely.
We got the PC only because the clone market got in on the action and the courts found that the only thing copyrightable was the PC BIOS. The PC got better because dozens of companies were able to copy and improve.
Imagine how many new remixes and takes on music and films we could have if you didn't have to worry about a corp breathing down your neck if your chords are a bit too similar to something from 50 years ago.
Have a look at Chinese factories borrowing manufacturing processes from each other in order to work more efficiently. They don't give a shit that someone else is using their process, since wanting to protect that and not having everybody else be able to use it is literally backwards thinking (towards the past!).
Actual important research, like medical stuff and whatnot, should be government funded either way. Even the US does this, did it more in the past, and it was good work.
You can look up Gabe Newell's quotes on this, but the reason for piracy often has more to do with the fact that the pirate product is better (or more respectful to the user, or less hoops to jump through) than economic reasons.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
> The problem is that its unethical
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
My issue is not understanding "why people are frustrated", it's that people think that frustration entitles them to take things they do not need from artists and creators who are trying to make a living.
If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
The vast majority of the money goes to middlemen, rights holders, investors, executives and other suited up parasites.
If you want artists to make a living, you need to end shareholder capitalism, not reinforce it.
I'm sorta in the same boat there. There are plenty of people willing to give their work away, sell it DRM free, or sell it at a lower cost (offsetting the fact it is licensed). Plus you have things like libraries and the public domain. There are more than enough alternatives, in many cases, to avoid supporting sketchy business practices. But a lot of people become fixated on getting a particular thing.
Mind talking me through the ethical problems of copyright infringement? I'm not a fan of copyright in general, and from that perspective, I fail to see the problem in copying files.
I prefer the artists who make the work I enjoy not to starve. That is a moral/ethical principle.
Sounds like we need economic and/or social reform if people are starving.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).
It is impossible to having to have a meaningful discussion with someone living in fantasy land. Good day. I'm here if you wish to discuss reality and not some imagined communist utopia.
Reality can be better.
There are some cases, such as the "I purchased this and then they removed the media I had purchased" cases being discussed in other parts of the thread, where the artist has already been compensated for the media they created. In those cases (specifically those cases), I feel like the people who then say "F it, I'm not buying it twice just to make Sony/Apply/Disney/whoever richer" and go download a pirated copy are ethically in the right: they compensated the creators in return for the right to watch the movie as many times as they wanted, and a third party (the middleman/distributor) then took that away from them. That the legal terms of the purchase said (in the fine print) "this is a license that can be revoked at any time" does not make what the distributor did ethical. What the distributor did was legal but not ethical.
Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
This is an international website. Many people here come from countries where pirated CD and DVD stands were part of the local marketplace or mall. Your harping on ethics just won't be relevant to those fellow readers.
Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
I had a FreeNAS I bought around ~2010 and didn't use it for a couple of years at one point and when I went to use it again I could no longer update it, which meant I was on an ancient version of FreeBSD and none of the modern software ran on. So this literally happened to me already.
A NAS, yes, but why bother with a backup process? I know it's sacrilege for most admins, but if you're already pirating the media you can just pirate it again if your storage breaks. Yes it takes a while but so would restoring from regular backups.
Backup the .torrent files, skip the rest.
Naw.
> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).
I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.
Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.
> You need to keep your NAS up to date.
My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.
I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.
> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now
I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)
> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.
I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.
And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.
> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.
Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.
> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).
On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.
On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.
And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?
Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.
Or you just buy a random NAS from a store, and do none of that. Sure, that's more expensive and less featurefull, but you do not need to know anything.
This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this bad?
You can buy it on DVD. Then you don't need to worry about what streaming service (if any) currently holds the rights.
I tried this with Halt and Catch Fire (and some others). I was able to get season one, but it turns out they don’t produce a lot of stuff on physical media anymore, and if they do, it’s often only briefly.
Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.
I’d be in favour of a law that if a product cannot reasonably be purchased legally obtaining it via other means is not piracy (e.g. in my country 80% of movies are not available simply because the market is too small, even though I would be ok with English - I still don’t want to pirate so I buy physical media)
That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
Since I don't see it mentioned yet in the comments:
In 2011, movie studios created a digital ownership service called Ultraviolet. You could own titles in your "UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker" and access them from multiple devices via third-party streaming services. [1]
"The UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker will keep track of all of the consumers’ UltraViolet digital purchases, whether they bought a movie or television show on Blu-ray disc or digital download. UltraViolet does not store the actual content. When a consumer logs in, UltraViolet will verify that the consumer has purchased a film, and will then allow the consumer to stream or download their movies from a participating UltraViolet service." [2]
This was an attempt to separate the technology of streaming from the legal ownership of the asset.
But Disney never signed on, and the member studios eventually got tired of it for some reason. The whole service was shut down in 2019.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(website)
[2] Interview with CTO Mitch Singer, https://web.archive.org/web/20110717234132/http://www.homeme...
Maybe not mentioned in the comments, but it gets a full entry in the article.
What happens after the service shuts down?
I presume users lost access to everything.
Microsoft did this with its "Playsforsure" program.
Naturally it got shut down and your media no longer plays.
Extremely minor technicality, but one worth bringing up:
Ultraviolet shut down, but mainly because studios had already signed onto a shared locker service called "Movies Anywhere" that Disney did join. Ultraviolet libraries could be migrated over, for the most part.
That being said, it was a manual and voluntary process most consumers likely ignored or didn't participate in, so in essence it could be seen as a revocation of licenses. I did the migration and lost no titles, but it was the final nail in my personal arc that made me move wholesale to Plex + NAS (now Jellyfin + NAS).
Sony's one sentence notice is pretty grim considering how much money they made from these sales (sorry licensing).
From September 1, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.
Thank you, PlayStation Store</i> [1]
At least in 2023 it was two sentences and then they somehow negotiated new licencing arrangements after the massive backlash 10 days before the end date. [2]
Guess we'll see if this clawback has the same backlash.
[1]: https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/
[2]: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
That “Thank you” comes off as a strong “Fuck you”.
As an ex-Sony employee, that is deeply held cultural belief: Sony doesn’t do anything wrong. It is absolutely a fuck you.
It drives me nuts that Sony makes some of the absolute best cameras on the market while being douche canoes in every other aspect. Bambu Labs has definitely taken that lesson to heart in producing great hardware that crushes consumer rights.
Disney is the same way. They hire some of the most talented and creative people on Earth to make wonderful works of art and then act like complete assholes in every other aspect of their business.
I purchased it, and you're taking it away? Then either I didn't actually purchase it (despite the word appearing in the notice), or you're stealing it from me.
Which is it, Sony?
The legal reality is that you probably purchased a license, tied to your PlayStation account, and revocable at any time for any reason. You don't buy a movie, you buy access to watch it as many times as you want during the period in which it is licensed to you. This is, of course, bullshit; this doesn't or can't apply to a physical DVD, or even a DRM free digital copy, so it is a measurable step backwards for consumers.
These content agreements would have end dates when they are negotiated so they should be required to disclose those at the time you "purchase your license".
If they renegotiate and extend the arrangement then update the UI with the new date.
Sony couldn't seriously believe they were going to be able to renew these licenses forever given how many streaming services are out there who need to fill their catalogues.
Instead it's better for sales to show a "buy" button with no date[1] so customers don't back out when they realise they'll be spending close to the retail purchase price to only rent it for a few years.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvJSpB9cb6Y
> they should be required to disclose those at the time you "purchase your license".
they probably do disclose it, but it's in the intentionally verbose and obtuse 20 page T&C that no one reads when they make the purpose
When the legal reality does not align with actual reality, there is injustice of the worst kind.
The button says "buy" not "rent" or "license".
That should be enough to defeat all the fine print, click wrap hidden clause clever maneuvering bs. The merchant is lying to the buyer. The merchant should bear liability for deceiving the buyer. The merchant (Sony) knew what they were selling. They lied to make it seem like you'd have that video in your library forever. Sony needs to give a refund with interest. Simple as that.
I agree. I'm sure someone will try to split hairs and say that "well, buying a license is buying something, just maybe not the thing you wanted," to which I say, it should be disclosed up front. Simple as.
This isn’t that difficult. You purchased the ability to use it while they let you, and yes, it was in the terms.
They said they were selling it, all over their site. The button said "buy". They can put whatever crap they like in a section that they know nobody ever reads, that doesn't negate what they said in large print up front and no sane court will entertain the notion that it does.
Thank you for making a rare valid use of the term "stealing" in regard to intellectual property.
Thousands of dollars worth of games in some PSN accounts. Madness if this ever happens to games as well.
> due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content
So when they 'sold' the content, they were already aware that they were selling something with an expiry date. Why would you even agree to a license to resell something with a time limit?
There should be some kind of law that says that any license agreement intended for reselling to the public should be a perpetual license.
And if the license is not perpetual, there needs to be laws that stop companies from using the terms “buy.” They should have to state it for what it is: a long term rental. Sony could have up front disclosed “You are paying $x.yz to rent access to this media until [date]”
I think it’s important for consumers that this verbiage is applied to everything where the license is non-transferable and not perpetual. Stop calling it “Buy/Own” and start calling it “Renting.” This applies to software too. I didn’t “buy” access to the Adobe Creative Suite, I’m renting it.
Alternately, we could have some regulation that says that if you license your content to anyone in a way that allows them to provide access with a "buy" button, the license automatically becomes perpetual and irrevocable.
The same with movies, TV shows, and video games using licensed music. If you agree to let a song be in a work you should expect that song to be in that work forever. I'm tired of media never seeing the light of day because of the expense of re-licensing the music or even having it re-released but with all the music removed or replaced by generic tracks.
Such contracts can and have been negotiated. It's simply - as logic would dictate - more expensive. Just like buying a house is far more expensive than renting it for a few years.
Adobe did this with their perpetually licensed software. If you install Lightroom 6 today, the face detection and maps features do not work because they didn't pay for perpetual licenses for the libraries they used.
So is the refund they give for the original amount or inflation adjusted?
The inflation-adjusted amount of a $0 refund comes out to... $0.
Why isn't there a class action lawsuit from all the people who bought studio canal content on the Playstation store and now cannot watch it?
Learned helplessness? Maybe I'm wrong and it'll still happen. I'm sure that everyone who got screwed after buying those movies would love waiting years to eventually get a coupon code for the playstation store while lawyers rake in millions though.
Tangential, but a few days ago I started some Steam games I hadn't played in some years. I was surprised to be met with updated user agreements, which I had to agree to if I wanted to play the games I bought years ago. These were all single-player games.
> If you can't hold it, you don't own it.
Didn't some game consoles require online connectivity to play even games in physical media?[1]
It's possible for a game disc to require connecting online and forcing updates or even just updated licensing agreements.
Correct bright line might be to be able to permanently use it without online connectivity.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSupport/comments/1682s60/commen...
> So just to be clear, most games now are not actually on the disc. Most discs just contain a license that tells the store it's okay to download this game. It is Very rare that you can just put in a disc and play these days regardless of if it is on Playstation or xbox but it does still happen.
You don't even remotely own Steam games. Their shitty launcher has to open to let your game run since it checks DRM, and it'll force updates (see gta4). You also can't transfer your license, so no second hand games.
This article is quite right, but there's even more to it than that. Why should we need to hold ANY kind of relationship with the seller/provider of an article we bought? You certainly don't need a bookstore account to buy a paperback book. Nor do they get to keep your contact information. You get your article and a ticket. They get your money. End of story.
Goods / services. You probably need a relationship to use a warranty.
The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between. Especially when the delivery mechanism is streaming, and/or DRM keys that need to be renewed.
Sure, many people want a one-time download with no promise or obligation to re-deliver it in the future. Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
This whole thing is basically just “different people want different models of commerce for digital content”
> The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between.
That's the thing. If they are truly goods, they cannot be in between! Otherwise they are being handled as services and as such they will be terminated at some point. So unless we redefine the word, a true "purchase" can never depend on future actions from the provider (like renewing some DRM).
So no purchasing a warranty or service contract?
Who still purchases a warranty a la carte?
Hasn't it been clearly established for at least a couple decades now that all of these are de facto scams?
> Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
Agree that people want this - but this is an undue burden on the provider side. You have to perpetually maintain and provide access to content FOREVER including all the systems and support staff to auth.
In a world of monopolization, where there become fewer and fewer companies because they buy out their competition... If they can't pay for basic storage and delivery of goods, then who can?
If I can individually pay for and maintain an NAS with TB's of data on it, I think these multinational megacorps can afford to do the same. Maybe scale for delivery will cost them a bit of profit, but really it's a shame how individuals say this is some how an undue burden on these corporations...
You know what is the real undue burden? 100 year long IP/copyright law. It actively diminishes our culture, making it bland and hardly changing. Humanity is created by the stories we tell, and retell, and with every retelling - the stories change and evolve... But you can't do that and make a living in modern capitalism... That is the true undue burden, and I think forcing these companies to at least provide access to the stories we paid for is the least they can do for a nigh 100 year monopoly on the stories of our society.
I have a fantasy of an alternate history where we as a society got our shit together and subsidized local libraries and ISPs so that they could offer cheap and even free NAS for everyone. Economies of scale and all that. It would have been a worthwhile public investment, but it's hard to justify spending public money on that and our politicians are so blinkered that cannot comprehend what "investment" means. Like...making it easier for kids to get smart? Why would we want that?
Instead we have the private marketplace fulfill all those needs for the low low price of ad infestation. Imagine how smart our kids would be if instead of 20 minutes of unsolicited ads a day, they saw 20 minutes of educational content and were required to pass a math quiz to access YouTube?
you can do it stop killing games style. publishers can decide to stop access any time they want but they have to give you a drm free download to compensate.
It's a very different thing to stop serving a download link to a purchased good from blocking access to the user's local copies altogether.
> DRM keys that need to be renewed
The solution to this is to not have DRM
Unfortunately many game disks only contain a downloader nowadays and you often need to bind them to an account to play. Plus the version on disk without updates is probably buggy. Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's edition is an example that has a disk, but isn't really any better than a Steam key.
On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download.
So overall I don't think the physical form matters that much compared to DRM.
It's disgusting how a previously open platform for gaming (PC) was turned into what it's become with Steam. Young people either don't know or don't care that it used to be the norm to buy and install a game without a middleman "service".
That argument has been harder to make with time. A couple years ago I made the difficult decision to get rid of some old game copies. I wasn't realistically going to use them ever again, and the sentimental value for me is entirely about the memory, not the media. Part of my steam collection is nearly as old and it is on track to greatly outlast. It is also significantly easier to own and use in just about every aspect, even if it is technically just a revocable license.
Beyond that, Steam and the digital media model allowed a great many people to publish games that wouldn't otherwise have been able to publish games. It made the indie world of games possible. It also did more than anyone to bridge the platform gap between windows and linux.
I'm really worried about what will happen to Valve when Gabe retires.
I can see a bean counter making a very convincing case that it's cheaper to go back to Windows and avoid all this Linux reverse engineering gubbins which isn't bringing in an immediate profit, especially when they're giving away all theirs efforts by open sourcing Proton.
Is that how things work at valve? I thought employees do whatever they want and there's minimal structure.
Gabe allegedly (nobody knows because it's a private company) owns 50.1%, it's not majority employee owned. It's possible he might turn it over to the employees or some kind of co-op style board but who knows if he's offered the right price by a cashed up investor.
He's got children to consider and could reasonably want to set them and his grandchildren up for generational wealth.
Which just further highlights the importance of actual DRM free ownership. Even in the face of a relatively benevolent corporation, that corporation won’t be that way forever. Leaders and cultures change, sometimes overnight (look at what happened when Broadcom bought VMWare, they started extorting customers immediately). Adobe is another good example that pulled the rug out from underneath creatives and started renting software instead of selling it.
Gabe Newell is estimated at $11 billion net worth. I think his grandchildren are already set.
Granted, his money, he can do as he pleases, but the Newell dynasty already exists, regardless of what happens to his shares.
PC game piracy was pretty mainstream back then. It was a real problem for video game creators.
But Steam is also more annoying than it needs to be, especially forcing updates and not letting you transfer games so it's not comparable to owning a disc.
I'm not sure how BG3 Collector's Edition might be different, but the game is DRM-free on Steam.
Definitely not the case with the PS5 version, which I can install and play offline to my heart 's content.
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book generally cannot be removed from a shelf by a remote policy change.
It may not be able to be removed from a shelf, but if it is protected by DRM they can still remotely revoke your ability to consume it, or prevent you from consuming it to begin with (for example geolocking on blu-ray disks). And in some cases a game cartridge, or other medium for software (including games) is either actually just an access key granting access to something on a digital store, or has software that "phones home" and is unusable if it can't contact a server.
Exactly. Nintendo doesn't sell physical games at all anymore.
That's not true, not all games are Game-Key cards, see https://www.dekudeals.com/switch-2-physical-games
I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem.
In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at least I was able to watch it before they removed it".
Sometimes I feel that's a lost battle. People were put to boil just like the frog in the anecdote and keep swearing it's a hot bath.
The battle is alive and well, pirating has never been easier and of this high quality.
Support the creators however you want but go foster an environment around your friends and family that there are alternatives to paying evil companies who will remove your access to content willy nilly.
The problem today it's hard to convince even myself to pay the storage premium, but I 100% agree with you.
Premium? Sure things are more expensive but you can get 1TB hdd for 25-30 eur. You don't need an ssd and I'm sure you can find second hand drives even cheaper (or larger).
Starting a subscription is money down the drain.
You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want. I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!
Creators are often happy that their art is being watched regardless of the source and whether they are making money from it.
https://www.screendaily.com/news/piracy-is-the-most-successf...
Its the money behind them that cares about restricting access to bleed every penny they can out of it.
That’s an excuse, not universally applicable, and not even well supported by your own link.
> Herzog continued. “I don’t like it because I would like to earn some money with my films. But if someone like you steals my films through the internet or whatever, fine, you have my blessing.
He’d rather you didn’t. And I bet you’re not checking every artist. Just be honest and say you don’t want to pay, don’t act like you’re Robin Hood.
Not sure why you are directing this at me personly, I dont pirate anything. However I have had experience with many people in the industry who would rather their media reached a wider audience, regardless of how much money it makes.
If you dont like my link, you can always google your own. Or here, have a few more from a quick google:
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/hollywood-dir...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/10/hollywood...
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/technology/22iht-godard.h...
This perspective has been beaten down to death but, just so you know, whenever you went to see a movie at friend's house, you also didn't contribute and were in fact pirating the content.
Nah. That’s already accounted for in home vs public performance rules.
> You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want.
No, I don't.
> I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!
I don't actually want to support most of them. The few I care about get donations.
People rarely change their habits due to logical arguments, or ideological stances. Real change for normies happens when the current system becomes more painful than the alternative. Even with the potential to lose access to your media, there’s not enough friction yet. More fragmentation and more enshittification will eventually reach a threshold where normies start to find it inconvenient enough to consider an alternative.
The other side of it is people have short term memories. They’ll eventually forget about that time Sony took away their purchased content when there’s something else they really want to watch on the platform. We need laws that prevent companies from using the word “Buy” or “Purchase.” If we want real change, it’ll happen when the verbiage by law is “Rent” on everything and the blinders are pulled off so people can see that they own nothing and rent everything. For now the illusion of ownership is too strong.
I think part of it is also that young people are just not as attached to specific media units, so to speak. It's more like everything on tap, on a stream, curated by algorithms. Things are ephemeral in this way. Years ago, an album by a band was a major thing and you had a limited number of those, you looked at the cover art in detail, read the booklet attentively etc. Owning it was a personal attachment like this. People nowadays don't really want to hoard it this way. Having convenient access on any device is more important than a stash at home.
Also at the end of the day, it's all super first world problems. Oh no, you can no longer play some video game or watch some Hollywood movie... I don't think people will get angry enough about this to care because at the end of the day it's just some entertainment.
The media industry has been training the public to accept whatever they are given, however it is given to them. They want you to pay them forever while giving you nothing but what they choose to give you. "You'll own nothing and be happy" really is the goal.
It's not a battle that's important to me personally. I think to some extent it's a personality trait, since I feel like I see echoes of this conversation where my Mom wants to hold onto things endlessly "in case" we'll need it whereas I would rather get rid of it. Or my mother in law who takes far more photos than she'd ever be able to look at and worries about how store them all and back them up and so on.
Basically, I don't have much attachment to things so the prospect of losing something isn't such a big deal. Physical things can break down or be lost or stolen after all. Not much different from that to my mind.
There probably is something about how you come across. It's a hard sell when any principles you hold around intellectual property or commerce sound like post rationalizations for a grudge or a hoarding hobby or that you think people who stream are stupid--I experience one or more of these in typical IRL conversations about this. I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's a sensible-sounding rhetorical style that's more effective. And you do kind of have to start with understanding that, for most people, these purchases or subscriptions don't mean much.
the "physical" part is stressed too much. in today's landscape, it is no longer the only feasible way to address the different grievances made by the op.
if the content is going to be digital* anyway, despite fitting in on physical media, buying media online without drm is the way to go for most people. the bandcamp, gog of the lot that is. then your responsibility is usually just to download and find a way to self-preserve your collection.
physical media is easy on the latter part, but mostly painful on the former. in some cases, it is no longer feasible anyway. the new gta game will be digital-only, and if the nail is not on the coffin yet, this would be the "apple" moment to kill of any major publication ever supporting the medium again.
*i.e. all except vinyls which is still the "best" medium available for music
I love physical media as a ritual, but loathe it as a storage medium - it's fragile, it rots, and manufacturers can't be trusted to create long-lasting products anymore. Not to mention the fact that UHD drives used to rip modern content are almost entirely defunct, with the remaining few going for nearly half a grand in the current climate.
Personally, in light of AI getting a hand-wave on massive piracy for training data purposes, I think we're ripe to redo copyright entirely. Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date, allowing consumers to transcode content freely for personal use, and finally stripping copyright from abandoned (i.e., no longer sold) content such that "lost media" can be freely shared without legal consequence. There's so, so many reforms we need to make to reflect how content works in the modern era, in a way that rewards content creators but creates a more permissive environment for archiving, sharing, and modifications.
>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,
That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.
Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.
I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.
The tags at the start mean almost nothing, there are many cases where they make no sense in the context.
The whole page is disorganized and lacks cohesion. Coupled with the fact that there is a mix of different levels of “badness” but they are all presented equally.
This reeks of LLM.
I fully agree with highlighting this topic, but I feel this page/blog/whatever weakens the argument by being so scatterbrained and using bad examples at times. It would benefit greatly from some kind of “scale” (selling licenses vs stopping sales vs refunding vs lost access).
And lastly “If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it” doesn’t make sense at all, I get what they were trying to do/say but many games on disc these days aren’t even the game (just a key that can be revoked) and/or require backend servers for updates or gameplay.
I think there a simpler way to summarize this list:
Digital Purchases are non-transferable licenses to access "content" from a "provider". The terms of the deal are alterable and revocable at the provider's discretion with no obligation to maintain pricing, quality, availability, or editorial/artistic integrity nor must they provide any advance warning of such changes nor is there any legal recourse in case of disagreement.
Written out plainly it sounds pretty hostile when compared with an immutable Bluray whose limitations and capabilities are known in advance.
Even if you _can_ hold it, you may not own it if the player is internet-connected or even receives a firmware upgrade during maintenance or from a disc. New discs may not play unless you upgrade, and an upgrade can also remove keys, blocking you from watching discs you already have.
https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/windows-gene...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070430070403/https://www.aacsl...
My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.
https://delistedgames.com/oxenfree/
I bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.
It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!
Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.
Arr, aye there be!
No need for piracy. Since they gave him a refund, he could just buy a copy.
If they refused to refund his money, then... yeah, it does make you want to hoist the black flag, doesn't it?
Since he already owns a copy, I don't think he can buy another, unless it's a physical book.
There is actually no legally available English version of this ebook now, so if you want the ebook piracy is the only option. Presumably Amazon still has the rights to sell it, but due to a technical glitch and disinterest, they aren't.
I have about 2500 CDs in my garage, with all of them ripped to my laptop. I'll never lose access to them. (My only regret is that I can't look through the jewel case covers and booklets.)
I think DRM and streaming are the issues here, not digital vs physical.
For example, I can buy DRM free music from the iTunes Store, download the files, and they’re mine. I can play them back on anything that supports the file type, convert the files, back them up, etc.
Meanwhile, if I check a book out from the library, I can hold it, it’s physical, but it’s not mine and I can’t do whatever I want to it.
> I can buy DRM free music from the iTunes Store, download the files, and they’re mine.
If you hold the copyright they are yours, but most files downloaded from iTunes and similar services are unlikely to be yours. A license to use the content, even where there are few restrictions, is not ownership.
If holding the copyright is the bar, then physical media doesn’t give that either. Buying a physical book doesn’t transfer the copyright to me. I can start producing more copies and selling them, at least not legally.
> Buying a physical book doesn’t transfer the copyright to me.
Correct. Who was under the impression that it does?
> I can[not] start producing more copies and selling them, at least not legally.
Unless you own it. Someone out there will be the owner. Sometimes that might be you; but typically not.
The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one.
But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay for it, I sure want a non-DRM copy to sit on my hd at the end of the transaction. If the store won't supply, the pirate sites will.
In some cases, even if you hold it you don't own it.
I tend to purchase a lot of blu-rays, in fact if I don't buy the movie on Apple iTunes then it's almost always the case that I buy the blu-ray; then once I have the blu-ray I go to the torrent sites and download a version of the movie.
Why? Because I earn enough money that I feel like I have no excuse not to buy my media: but I also want it to be my media; and torrenting is more convenient than using blu-rays.
The blu-rays have one more major benefit than iTunes or the torrents though: if I'm ever without internet or my NAS dies... well, I can just dump a disc into my console and watch whatever movie I was going to watch anyway.
One time I was moving apartments, there was no internet and I hadn't set up my computers yet; decided to watch a movie with my girlfriend, grabbed a disc and set up the playstation.
Lo-and-behold... it didn't work.
Why? -- not because the disk was broken, not because the playstation had broken: but because I didn't have internet access.
The playstation has to connect to the internet to play blu-rays.
I didn't know of this because I always just used torrents and had the disks as a "license"...
So I tried my laptop: no dice either, VLC refused to play, Linux had a really bad time.
I tried with my macbook, of course no macbook came with a blu-ray player, and the one I had needed two USB-A slots, so it was a ball-ache to get the thing hooked up and I finally got something working by hotspotting my phone and googling around.
Anyway, what the fuck.
It was at that moment I realised; even physically owning things isn't actually owning them anymore.
I still don't technically pirate, but I no longer feel even the slightest derision for those that do, and I work in the entertainment industry where piracy puts people out of work (I've seen it).
For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.
My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.
Doesn’t feel very reliable, the time I needed it- it didn’t work.
What happens when those servers go offline?
What happens if I reinstall the PS4?
Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
Blu-Ray players don’t have access to the internet, do they?
Also, yeah, my PC not working was part of the issue.
> What happens when those servers go offline?
Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?
> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).
I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.
Keeping anything at an old version requires perfect foresight (in the face of diminishing capabilities).
It's not like original PS4's can continue playing games as they're released, new releases assume later and later PS SDKs, you're only meant to certify against "latest".
And since downgrading is not possible on most "appliance" class devices (phones, consoles)... :\
Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.
I've never heard of a blu-ray that requires an internet connection. My Sony UHD blu-ray player has an ethernet port but I've never connected it to the internet. A few of my late 2000s era big studio discs advertise online gimmicks like polls, new movie trailers, etc. but I assume all of those servers are now dead.
Why were you watching movies when you should have been setting up your apartment
Are you pretending like you just unpack non-stop for days whenever you move?
get the box that says kitchen, bring it into the kitchen turn it upside down, because the bottom is where you find all the things you put in first, the things most often used. basically flip the stack so that its now FIFO.
as you use a required item return it not to the packing box, but to the drawer shelf place your muscle memory prompts.
access initiated procedural unpacking !
A little break after moving all our stuff to another country.
Economics 101 - ownership is a bundle of rights. The basic bundle of property rights includes:
Would be nice if this was taught more widely.
Physical things take up space and degrade over time. In a world where operating systems and software control licensing owning physical media is barely better than digital except for potentially reselling it.
Enjoy something when you enjoy it, however you enjoy it. In the end you can’t keep anything but that.
I recently passed on some of my favorite books to a nephew. Probably nobody will break into his house and take the books off of his shelves when a license agreement expires. I'd like to be able to do the same with GTA 6 if it's good, but it looks like that would require hacking.
Does having a hard drive full of mp4s count as holding it?
If they have no DRM, I would say it does!
Given my memory these days, I can't keep that either.
Discs can rot, but I would still take a large blu-ray collection over a large MKV collection stored digitally. The odds that your entire blu-ray collection will all rot are much lower than a catastrophic data loss.
And most people are not good enough sysadmins to keep a collection of digital files from being lost over decades. And even more so when the digital files are pirated, which makes them more or less fungible, they can be redownloaded so investing in backups is not a priority.
Seems to me you could own the disc and rip them to tick all the boxes.
You bought it. You can lend it to someone. You can easily pull it up in the living room. Etc
> Physical things (...) degrade over time
There are many books available older than any of the existing tech companies are likely to exist for. I'd bet those books will remain readable until that time as well, and there's nothing stopping people from making copies of them. Making such copies is in fact also completely legal in a lot of places.
I agree with the intent of the article but for what it's worth does not have to be physical. I have digital music and movies that can not be remotely disabled, censored, changed to fit current societies norms. The problem is when the dependency is on servers that belong to someone else or are controlled by someone else. I can self host my own instances of Ampache or just plain old HTTPS with auto-index enabled or SFTP or anything of my choosing. I qualify those as ownership assuming the digital media does not have some embedded code to reference a remote server and anything resembling an embedded license is stripped out. For sure I will hold onto my CD's and DVD's forever. I regret selling off a lot of vinyl.
So pirating is the answer? I don't think so. It's unethical and illegal. Buy the physical media of the books, movies, and music that you consume. Quit screwing the creators. I've seen numerous complaints on HN about one's code being stolen. What's the difference?
It may or may not be unethical, but I can 100% certainly say it is not universally illegal.
I have a large collection of DVDs that I've amassed over the years.
There's something nice about physical media; the bits are physically stamped into the medium. They're DVD-encrypted but I lawfully extract these bits and view them regularly.
When streaming services start on-the-fly editing for content[1] and revoking licenses, they can absolutely shove it up their butts. My old man take is that if a TV show or movie or whatever isn't worth putting onto a physical medium and distributing it to people who will buy it, I won't miss it if--I mean when[2]--it's gone. I mean, these huge movie studios act like pirates are going to ruin their massive profits, when they won't.
[1] And yes, they will absolutely on-the-fly, 1984-style edit films and TV shows for content.
[2] And it will go [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age] along with lots of other things into the memory hole of the digital dark age.
Disney has stopped physical media sales in some markets:
https://screenrant.com/disney-movies-dvd-physical-media-rele...
And it has outsourced its physical media business to Sony:
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/disney-sony-pysical-media...
Usually you create shorthand rules because you want to Have a heuristic to detect things that you don’t want to do lots of thinking for. So the rule has edges it doesn’t match well on and so on.
That’s all very well. But was this rule necessary? I don’t need to do a lot of computation in most cases to tell where I land and the edge cases are worsened by the rule. So it’s not helping me make decisions.
So I own a DVD but someone (Amazon, the government) can delete something out of my Kindle library. Fine, but I didn’t need the rule to help me with that. It’s very apparent.
And then there’s the question of owning not conferring all rights. I own my body but I can’t sell parts of it. Are the embryos my wife and I have made ours? Transferring them without the clinic approving isn’t really feasible.
So the word “own” doesn’t mean much to me on its own and I don’t need to use this rule because I can somewhat tell where I have power no one can take from me and where I don’t.
It's time we change the economy for digital products and services.
* The current economy is bad: The company that can require or lure the most money from people wins.
* This would be better: The company that is liked by most people wins.
That one change would solve sooo many problems. We could get rid of a lot of laws that wouldn't be needed any more.
What do you mean by "wins"?
Because if the company is publicly traded, "win" means "value for stockholders", and that doesn't necessarily translate to "liked by customers."
Holding it on your hand is insufficient. Using it may require an external server or certain chosen proprietary software that could be taken from you at any time or itself requiring an external server.
The bits you want to own must be entirely self-contained, and able to be screwed using whatever software you may choose, especially open source (though if the format is fully documented so that anyone can create and distribute a viewer, the software need not be open source.)
See also, The Right to Read. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media, I'm seeing more blu-rays and DVDs at retailers. There are just too many streaming services, each with distinct catalogs which creates two problems: it's too difficult to find specific titles when you know what you want to watch, and it's too difficult to find anything worth watching when you don't.
I'm not someone who keeps the TV on in the background, so I'd much rather spend $100 a month on physical media even when I don't plan on watching them immediately, than spend $100 a month on five different streaming services that I barely even use when I did subscribe to them.
>It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media,
Your physical media should be hard drives. The 20tb drives are at my sweet spot, I don't feel like I'm wasting a bay to put one of those in it. haugene/transmission-openvpn in docker is bulletproof, you'll never get an ISP email. Stream it with Plex/Emby to any device anywhere, yours or friends'. Use RAID for some redundancy if you can afford it. Upgrade and expand. Build a library that will outlive you.
> Streaming services rent you access. Digital stores sell you a license that can be taken away. Physical media gives you an object that is yours, offline, and in your hands. > > Physical media can be given away, inherited, or found at a thrift store decades from now. A digital license becomes inaccessible when an account is closed or deleted. A vinyl record or printed book can remain usable across generations.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
Or, for certain content, buying the CD, DVD, or book.
It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.
Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?
But the apartments which people can afford has gotten smaller now and also with the rise of the minimalistic culture, I have no space to put movie and games discs. I am ok with renting media. Like most people I don't re-watch movies and re-play single player games often.
imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers.
> imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers
It's not clear that there is large value, to consumers as a whole, to physical media or DRM-free media.
I am aware of the benefits, but the few cases of "losing your licence" are a rounding error, unimportant to many, and maybe even better than their success at durably storing their own physical media or DRM-free digital media.
I exclusively (?) buy games from GOG. It's important to me. I wish it were the norm, but I just don't think it's actually important to others. Perhaps we might imagine some dystopian future where a temporary licence was the only option, but ultimately media providers face competition from other leisure activities. They are incentivised to make it less onerous, and in practice today, it is!
> The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
Frank Herbert, Dune
So like large asteroids have absolute power over us?
I think we do what we want come hell or high water.
I can destroy my smartphone in a second, yet I still don't control it.
Yes you do, you control your access. If you destroy it, you’ve lost access.
It is important to weigh the transient nature of any purchase. A physical copy may be lost, damaged, stolen, become unusable due to lack of hardware, or just start to take up enough space that you decide its time to let it go.
In real life, as revocable as they may be, my digital purchases have withstood the test of time far better than my physical copy purchases. It matters who you buy from. It is understandably different for something you find value in having a physical collection.
This is a wonderful collection. Portions of this, especially subscription bits, apply to SaaS and AI as it is currently served. Maybe now that B2B relationships have similar risks, more lobbying pressure will come on the side of permanent access to the things we buy.
As long as we're nitpicking every sense of the word "own", the strongest legal sense means you're the copyright holder, and every sense downstream of that is some lesser license. Buying a disc is a license to view the intellectual property, subject to various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home.
If the disc is an abstract license, surely the seller will replace the disc if it's scratched. I already bought the license, so what is the real purpose of the physical token?
Somehow the concept of ownership has been twisted to so that obligations only flow in one direction. Rules for thee, not for me.
The point OP is making is that it's not the concept of ownership that has been twisted, there just never was ownership of media beyond owning the actual copyright. Everything else is licensing.
> various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home
Are you implying that lending the disc to a friend so they can watch in their own home is forbidden? Or taking the disc to the friend's place to watch together?
No, those aren't the restrictions. But there are restrictions. First-sale doctrine allows lending. But you are not allowed to play the movie in, say, a restaurant, theater, or other public place.
That's fine, but that's very different from what the post to which I was responding said.
Ya got me. You can also show it in your friend's personal home.
Dog eat dog Amped album is not present on Apple music and I suspect several streaming platform, and Remedy never again is not present on it as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(album)
If you can't play it you don't own it either. Support of playback of physical media is not guaranteed by the industry.
Regardless, I definitely think the all-u-can-eat, 24-7-365, instant, ephemeral media has run its course and has become... tiring?
There definitely seems to be a trend with Gen Z and younger to go back to iPods and physical media. Vinyl record sales are continuing to climb, and CDs seem to be climbing too, now that vinyl records are no longer cheap.
My personal definition is if you can't resell it, you don't own it.
however - we can be idealistic - but when the rubber touches the road, a lot of things happen.
indie games only exploded due to being digital only, if Indies were to publish physical copies they would go out of business or they would be less of them.
a lot of people complain about amazon - but It has provided an avenue for out of print books to continue being sold - through on demand printing. yeah physical products gets extinct too.
the era of the cheap dvd movie financed a lot of independent films - streaming killed that.
so like everything in life - you win some, you lose some.
& yeah - if you can't hold it - you don't own it.
Can you legally buy a 4k version on a movie and host it yourself?
Since physical media can get damaged, seems like that’d be an ideal solution.
It's a naive heuristic but if you are a not a technical expert you should provide use this until you understand enough to provide and follow a better one.
Many things are confused here. Why would you want to "own" media, physical or otherwise? What you actually want is
a.) to be able to use the media however you wish. no ownership is required, just download it b.) to give back to the content creator to thank for his creation. no ownership is required here either, you can send him money, go on a concert, etc
trying to merge those two points into one (=>purchase the media) is not necessarily the best way as you might end up with something you cannot properly use (DRM, etc) while not really giving that much to the creator anyway (90% for the label, wtf?)
There's another factor to consider: If what you physically own requires a proprietary platform to play or operate, then you don't actually own it. Sure, the disc with version 1.0.0 of the media/game may be in your possession, but that doesn't matter. The platform can change the rules at any time, requiring an arbitrary number of steps or payments before playing the media, or limiting features through forced updates as soon as the media is inserted.
Ultimately, technology cannot solve what is fundamentally a legislation problem. The only way to win this is to ask for laws to change.
My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore
https://xkcd.com/1150/
The same holds true of precious metals, most definitely.
If things really HTF, you're gonna want to not be blocked by a closed bank, etc.
I don't like this sentiment. There's plenty of things you can hold but you don't really own. You're probably holding one right now!
There are also things you can hold and not own!
[Deleted note about submitter editorializizing title]
For transparency: That was the previous title of the page. I since changed many things on that site and reworded some fluff. Cheers.
> A 2020 lawsuit raised the same issue, but a California judge dismissed it in 2021 because the plaintiff had never actually lost access to her purchased videos, leaving her without standing.
Seems kinda off. They’re pointing a knife at you menacingly and have promised that in a variety of circumstances they will stab you, but because they haven’t actually stabbed you yet, you’re not allowed to complain. Feels like maybe (maybe; I’m not entirely convinced) that threat should be standing enough, just as conspiracy and attempted murder can be criminal matters, and not just a successful murder.
I think DRM is frankly a lot more of a consumer education/rights thing than some kind of outright evil.
Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not. It's a bargain I'm happy to strike, or at least I appreciate the option.
The issue starts when:
- vendors don't make it clear that they can pull the rug
- or indeed can pull the rug for no reason. A bank can close my bank account, but not for no reason - and they can't hold on to my money just because. It should be the same with DRM-protected assets
- people don't understand the tradeoff they're making. It's like complaining about reckless overspending in credit cards leading to insane interest. Yes, it's partly to do with the product, equally credit cards totally have their use when used responsibly, and a healthy society has people understanding the differences.
> Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not.
One the one hand, yes, on the other hand, the DRM-free option is often non-existent (and if you want to include DVD and blu-rays in that pile, because they too do have DRM, just that you can bypass it with ease these days, DRMed media is probably the default).
If I could buy a copy for X, a DRMed copy for X minus Y, and a rug-pullable version for X minus Y and Z, then I might even buy the cheapest option every now and then if it's just throwaway. As it is though, a plain DRM-free copy is often completely unavailable (unless you sail the high seas).
I suppose you can't force people to sell you the license you want. Someone might reasonably develop some land, build flats and only rent them out, no obligation to sell them.
But then you regulate what the landlord can and cannot do.
Agreed. If we had regulated and non-insane DRM, we wouldn't be in this pickle.
UI wise I think this page is brilliantly made.
One feedback though: maybe a ToC or dropdown would help see all the points without scrolling?
I'm reading "Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" by Byung-Chul Han, who has things to say about it. "Things" are naturally possessions to be owned; the non-things that we as a society are moving towards are information to be consumed. If you have a physical book, you can pass it along to someone else, margin notes and dogears and all, but the experience of an e-book is fundamentally different. You might feel like you 'own' the bits because they're on your local computer and have no DRM, but your relationship to the actual item is not one of ownership. Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
> Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
It's not unthinkable to me, but it would have to include your own personal notes or something. The plain example though is nonsense, your're correct in that.
That said, what about leaving an entire NAS media collection to someone in your will? Sure, it's just hard drives with bits on them, but it's probably curated and high quality. There's a technical barrier though, so it makes little sense to leave to anyone who isn't already deeply interested, while if you're left with a collection of vinyl or blu-rays, even if you don't actually care about them, the cultural knowledge of what they are and represent is still around.
If you can't hack it, you don't own it.
And if you can hold it, sometimes you still don’t own it.
As they say, piracy is the only true ownership.
Cool page, it lists a bunch of compelling arguments. It's always good to see more and more people realising these things and start insisting on actual ownership.
Meanwhile, did you know defectivebydesign.org has been around for 20 years now? Makes me feel old.
Right now even physical things have digital interlocking. Example you might purchase a watch but it requires you to purchase a subscription for it to function.
It is just the way most of the things are.
A lot of cars also suffer from this.
Since all the sheep are thinking "why do I need this junk wasting space in my attic or worse in my living room shelves? I need to get rid off it all as quick as possible, so I have more room for my mega inch TV with Netflix and so on...", I get those collection for almost nothing if I'm lucky. I resell the stuff I don't need and even make a profit.
Expanding your archive of physical media wasn't easier because of the people falling for the streaming trap.
As a tangent, I'd like to point out that the world is realizing the same is true with respect to Currencies, especially the US Dollar. It used to be better than gold, lighter, easily transportable, and convertible to actual gold coin, up until FDR ended that in 1933.[1] He added insult to injury by devaluing the dollar shortly thereafter.
We still had our silver coinage, though... and that lasted until after JFK was assassinated by groups still unknown[2] 60+ years later. The subsequent decision to remove silver from coinage left us without hard money, that we could hold, and instead substituted the "Johnson Sandwich".[3]
Worldwide, however, there was still convertibility to gold, at FDR's reduced value. This was ended by Nixon in 1971.[4] Since then, the value of the dollar, relative to gold, has fallen from $38 per ounce, to ~$4000 per ounce today. That's a decline of more than 99%.
The only thing holding the dollar up at this point is the PetroDollar System[5] that Nixon helped create in which Oil is exclusively priced in Dollars, and the dollars are recycled into US markets.
It's my Personal opinion that Trump is speedrunning the destruction of this system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1965
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency
Good examples, but this one didn't make sense to me:
>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game disappeared from Xbox and PlayStation stores in December 2014 when a license expired. Players campaigned for years before a remastered edition arrived in 2021.
I mean, physical stores can also stop selling a certain game. Existing sold games were unaffected. Why does this matter?
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game was digital-only, so nobody could buy a copy of the game if they wanted to, since the only places which sold the game stopped doing that, and used copies by definition don't exist.
Physical games can still be bought even if stores stop selling them, since the used marked will still be around (the game might be rare and command a high price on the used market, but at least it's possible).
It's a bit more subtle than that, I'm afraid. In many instances lately, physically owning a product no longer means that you own it: the fact that BMW tried to introduce subscriptions for heated seats, VW blocking out Graphene users from connecting their phones to their cars, Insta360 asking you to install their app to use their camera, which does not need to be connected to a cloud service to function, bambu labs trying to shutdown open source projects, the list goes on - that's manufacturers openly denying you from owning the products you paid for(and can hold).
There's another side to that as well: many people (contentiously or not) realized that when something is free, then you are the product. Now look at penai, anthropic, google, etc. Anyone that has basic GCSE level math skills can work out that their pricing does not cover their costs. Some people are in denial about it, some don't care and some truly believe that they are not the product cause they pay what is effectively a symbolic subscription. Or all three, but still, you are paying for something you don't own.
I don't come from a wealthy family and when I was a kid, all the software I used for making dumb games like flash, photoshop, etc were pirated. Same with music and movies. Eventually I switched over to Linux and open source projects. When I grew up and could finally afford those things, it only felt right to pay for a netflix subscription, spotify and whatnot. But due to the vile invasion in my personal space and the 0 guarantee that I'll have access to my favourite song the next morning, I got fed up and went back to self-hosting and pirating(to a degree). One of my best friends is a musician and I know that spotify is a big f-u to most artists since they have a winner-takes-all policy which makes me feel a lot less guilty. And frankly, if it is something I enjoy, I'll just head on over to the artist's website and buy a digital copy as a form of gratitude(even though I have often already downloaded the music): an album which I had very high hopes for dropped yesterday, I listened to it, liked it, downloaded it and bought a digital copy about an hour ago. Despite having it on my navidrome library since last night. At the end of the day, the artist will get a better compensation that way compared to what they'd get if I was listening to them on spotify, even on repeat.
So while the author has the right idea, sadly it's only part of the story.
This list is extremely biased and only lists negatives and fails to argue anything.
You're free to write your own media-conglomerate boot-licking post if don't agree.
The big greedy corporations try to milk the customer here.
The US government either tolerates it, or benefits from it via kick-backs. The orange king is the ultimate tool box for others - corruption has never been more rampant than now.
I also see the attempts to eliminate physical media or deny right-to-repair, as associated with the age sniffing requirement or the fight by governments against VPNs. They want more control, at the expense of the end user. And they also lie about their goals, although in really stupid ways - age sniffing as fake-rationale to "protect the children", as means to disown and devalue freedom of citizens.
The sad thing is that it's also true for money.
Cash that you can hold in your hand it's yours, whereas the cash that you own at the bank is a IOU subject to the contract that you sign .
Cash in hand can be rendered equally worthless by an adverserial government that drives down its value by printing more.
That's true but not instantaneously , but I get your point.
Gasoline, diesel, bullets, firearms, explosives, water, canned food, lubricants, soil, seeds are the only thing that are truly yours and cannot be taken from you or diluted into irrelevance
Seems the title has been editorialised, but "holding it" is a rather low bar when considering ownership. I think of ownership as having the right to modify or destroy something.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
>our entire society exists because of intellectual property
Are you sure that's true? If so, in which century did it start being true?
There was a touch of hyperbole ;) we live in the Information Age after all.. but to answer your question,
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution
Which empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Scientists and the artists and their "exclusive rights" have built quite a lot over the centuries.
From the beginning. Ownership is intangible. It exists only because of the collective consent to laws.
The difference between ownership of a physical object and ownership of an intellectual one is a matter of conventional. It's easier to define ownership of an object that is excludable, but that's human convenience, not a physical law.
Some dogs have a concept of items belonging to them. Early humans had weapons and, with our lizard mind, things wouldn't go well when neanderthal B considered neanderthal A's weapon was now is. They also had "homes": caves/camps that belonged to them.
Fighting physically for ownership predates fighting judicially for ownership.
To the extent that you can "own" another animal: the ownership of a female by a male is definitely a thing in the animal kingdom.
And before the first law was ever written, human slavery (estimated to be at least 4000 BC, with mentions in the first law ever written) did exist too.
Ownership predates the law that later on codified the concept of ownership.
The geese at my pond also seem to think it belongs to them :)
So Neanderthals had copyright law and if they didn't, their society would have fallen apart?
Is that why it did fall apart?
Do we really take away from the artist? In what way?
The obvious answer is that you take away a purchase the person to give the gift would have made. One could argue that there is also value in propagating someone’s art and potentially increasing the artists customer/patron base. Think of it as advertising or to put it in the context of a drug deal, the first hit’s free. The gift recipient may then go on to buy another work from that artist and even pass on the one they were given to someone else, continuing the cycle.
I’d also argue that there isn’t widespread agreement on reasonable compensation for artists. Personally, I don’t consider artists to be special enough in the context of people that make and produce goods, that they should get unique treatment. Why does a family deserve the financial benefits of trademarks and copyrights decades after the artists death. That’s just one example, but in a time when many’s artists view their livelihoods to be at risk because of AI, it’s not popular to engage in any debate that undermines the artist in any way.
> but every time we do that we also take from the artist
No, every time we do that, we do not give to the artist. But not giving is not the same as taking.
Well, we take from the artist a motivation for a buyer to purchase their work.
(Article title and submission title originally was "If You Can't Hold It, You Don't Own It" - it's since been changed, so we updated the title above.)
Now let’s apply this to money and digital finance
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book cannot be remotely erased, edited, or deactivated. It is a physical object you can own, resell, lend, archive, or play offline indefinitely.
Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.
Blu ray discs can only (legally) be played in licensed devices, and some of the decryption keys can and have been revoked.
Key revocation only affects future disc releases.
AIUI every disc is mastered with the latest revocation list. When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself.
> When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it, partly because I can imagine the sort of class action it would engender.
There are reports of bricked players on the internet, and unbricking, but those mostly seem to have been caused by bad firmware updates.
The wikipedia page on AACS only mentions revocations affecting future content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System
AFAICT, you're right.
A standalone offline player that can play Movie A today will be continue to be allowed to play Movie A forever.
Subsequently-purchased movies B, C, and/or D may or may not work (because of shenanigans like key revocations systems), but Movie A still plays fine even after these later titles have been introduced.
It's ugly, but it's not quite a brick.
The ugly part is shaped like this: A person buys a new movie and it doesn't work. They can't return the movie to the store because it's been opened, so now they're left with a disc they can't use and with less money than they had before. (Solutions include figuring out how to update the player's firmware if it's still supported, spending more money on a newer player, or becoming an Amish leatherworker and forgetting about all of this nonsense for the rest of their days.)
Possible solutions include small claims court. You can't refuse a refund for a defective product just because you had to open the box to find out it was defective.
Yeah, the distributed responsibility might make this difficult, but maybe not impossible.
Is the disc defective because it doesn't play in a labeled player, or is the player defective because it doesn't play a labeled disc?
Can the licensing body be held responsible?
In point of fact, you'd probably get your money back in small claims court just by suing the store, with evidence that your player plays other discs, just not this particular disc.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really fix the problem, so much as show that an angry-enough consumer with time, energy, and money, can usually get a token of recompense.
I think by default it's whichever one you bought later. The judge may tell you it's the other one. But it doesn't matter because either way the store has to issue a refund.
I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things.
The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place.
I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
It was a good time though.
Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
I would guess its a bit unfair to call me young and then just repeat what I said instead of adding anything novel to the discussion
Are you young? If so, why would it be unfair to state that fact?
What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.
With Qobuz (lossless music streaming), you can both pay a subscription and buy individual songs, without DRM. You then own those, supposedly forever (at least good luck getting my songs out of my backups, or preventing my airgapped/offline computers from sending them to my stereo amp).
I think it's a good middle ground: you pay a subscription, artists at least get a little something (the biggest issue for artists is the unlimited amount of fully AI-generate slop music), and you get to have actual DRM-free files.
Ripping physical music CDs to bit-perfect FLAC files --and automatically verifying with online databases of other people's rips that your rip is instead bit-perfect-- is kinda a big thing in the audiophile world too.
No. 2 is enough though surely, I've had multiple incidences now where a series we've been watching on a streaming platform has disappeared without warning, running my own little media server alleviates that entirely.
> youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere
A spectacular number of publishers region-block all their music videos on YouTube for copyright reasons
I subscribe to Spotify. I've got a whole galaxy of music available to me just about anywhere I go. It's very convenient and I use it all the time.
But there's music that Spotify doesn't work with. Music that I'd like to listen to, and that I used to own on CD. I've also got stuff in my Spotify favorites list that I have listened to on Spotify in the past, but which is greyed out today.
To pick something specific: Spotify won't play Front 242's album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil. It's present[0], but it won't play.
(I'm not even a tiny bit interested in hearing some rando's rip of that album on YouTube. I like that album because of the way the noises tickle my earbones, and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost with layers of lossy compression.)
[0]: https://open.spotify.com/album/1moLnvmMDvUQa1Dp0loJDf
TIL I don’t own my thoughts :(