If you download something from a torrent, that's digital ownership too, and it doesn't suck. The "digital" is not the issue here, the "ownership" is.
If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.
And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).
I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.
Let's sketch a "law" for digital goods. This law is entirely about how digital products are labeled and advertised.
If the seller uses "ownership" words like "own", "buy", or "purchase", then the product must be usable _indefinitely_. If at any time it becomes not usable, e.g. due to a server shutting down, a full refund must be provided to everyone who "purchased" the product. Also, there must be some way to lend the product; it's OK if this lending deprives the original owner of the product while it is lent.
One way to satisfy the "ownership" clause is to sell the product without DRM. Another alternative would be to sell it with DRM initially, but remove the DRM when you want to shut down your hosting servers. An online-only multiplayer game that requires a central server cannot feasibly be sold by "ownership", because the seller would eventually lose all their money when they shut down the server.
So the next option is "rental", where the seller can use the word "rent" along with a clear time period like "for 1 year" or "through 2024". The product must be usable through this time period, or you get a full refund. No requirements about it being lendable to friends.
I imagine almost all companies would pick the second option. This is fine! Consumers still get two benefits: (i) clear labeling, including knowing how long they can expect to use the thing for, and (ii) a full refund in case the content gets removed before that time period.
As for getting banned from an online game: this is completely allowed via the "rental" option. The company just needs to give the player a full refund.
Labeling and advertising is definitely a good angle to ensure that customers aren't hit by surprises:
I would also require a standardized disclosure box that must be included in the promotional materials. The disclosure box could contain information such as ownership period and so on, and consumers will get used to reading that box before purchasing digital goods.
The way the law is currently structured, there is no such thing as digital ownership, only licensing. And since there is an enormous disparity in negotiating power between consumers and massive copyright owners, the prevailing licensing terms overwhelmingly favor the copyright holders.
The solution is to change the law. But the disparity in power between corporate copyright holders and consumers manifests itself in politics just as it does in the market.
As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
Note the use of "purchased" (not "licensed"). To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing". US consumer protection law sucks goat ass - language around digital content licensing could easily be "fixed" (but won't because our government is a revolving door with industry insiders).
Nothign about the law precludes you from owning anything digitally. I can sell you a digital copy of a photograph, giving you the copyright and everything. No need for a license. What makes you think otherwise?
This is why I download fitgirl repacks. I bought an eBook 10 years ago and it disappeared. Moral, Legal or not, I personally favor consistency and predictability.
Nothing is forever. PirateBay died how many times now? Less than Limewire, that's for sure.
even fitgirl repacks will die one day. be it a legal issue, lack of interet from the pirates providing content, or a change in ownership crashing the site to the group. Change is the only constant
I agree, in principle, but "ownership" is almost too nebulous. To get down to brass tacks, to look for unambiguous features that cannot be weasel-worded away, we're really looking at remote revokability or, the Bizarro cousin to that, the ability of any other party to suspend or cease playable activation via DRM.
Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.
We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline. If I go and buy a set of LEGOs, i get that set of legos, i can lend them to someone, can resell them, can use them after 10 years, etc. Having a "buy" button for a movie should mean the same (as it does when you "buy" a dvd). LEGO can't come to your house and demand the bricks you bought and paid for back, why should sony?
If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.
Ownership isn’t fuzzy though, it has a clear definition. The problem is that clear definition makes pirates angry because they want it to mean something other than what it does, so they try to make the situation cloudy.
If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.
Suppose I "buy" a piece of digital media, which let's agree for the sake of argument actually means "bought a license for". Suppose I also then torrent a copy of that same media for the purpose of backup and/or offline access. Is it still piracy? After all, I have a license for it.
Agreed, imagine if you bought a car and the purchase agreement stipulated having to store that car in the manufacturer's garage, and after six months of minor incremental changes performed during downtime the car was nothing like the product you actually bought, the product you wanted to begin with.
Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.
I think there is a misconception. Most of the time you don't own the digital asset. This is an intentional quirk around money, contracts, etc. You have the right to use it in the present form through the platform as long as the platform has a contract with the IP owner to enable that.
For this to change there either needs to be incentive for the platform and IP owners or there needs to be legal changes to require it.
Also, blockchain means that anyone who has your ID can know you entire catalog of ownership. This removes privacy.
Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.
Why would any content creator (outside of those specifically pushing it on idealogical grounds) want to lose control over the distribution of their content by using blockchain and cloud storage technologies?
I hear about this all the time, but how is the hard side that is content delivery solved? It is really not about ownership, but delivery or then unlocking the local copy? Which gets pretty messy with enforcement and so on...
I keep seeing things that seem like they would be good uses for blockchain security and then I remember that all the investment in that space has gone into trying to print money.
Then for content it will never be possible to "buy" it, according to your view.
(Because it would mean I would be able to lend my copy to the rest of the US population and the original seller would never make more money than from my 1 copy.)
This is where the US Federal Gov should step in. But the pols are too busy counting donations (bribes) from these companies.
If I buy digital content, I should be able to download it on removal media and use it off-line (esp. in the case with movies/music). I should be able to sell it (which is still legal). But these companies want you to "rent" instead of own.
So I never buy digital anything. No wonder many people head to pirate bay because of the rights they loose.
I hope the US Gov (and other govs) wake up to this, but as always donations (bribes) trumps people's rights all the time. (no pun intended).
The government should forbid the labeling of “buy” or “purchase” of anything that can be revoked after the sale.
If it can be revoked, then it should be labeled “rent”, with the appropriate time frame. Even if it means businesses have to label it “rent - until an unknown time in the future when we go out of business or drop the license or decide to ban you”.
I agree completely. Also in practice there is almost no such thing as a perpetual license as companies can go bankrupt or just revoke your license whenever they want. They should make the exact nature of the agreement known visibly before you spend any money.
Eventually prices would have to drop to reflect that you are merely temporarily licensed things. A digital game is not going to be perceived as a $60 value when it is more obviously a temporary license regardless of the length. If a physical copy of a game is valued at $60 that can be sold then a digital temporary license is going to have to be less. In my opinion a lot less.
I'll allow Steam's platform a little room here, but not too much. They've been reliable since 2003, with the promise of backing up games to play offline if the service goes the way of Athenian gods.
However, to your point, I'll easily find my way to (insert a random pirate site - non-disclosed) download something that I own just because it's ONLY available exclusively through a platform like EA Play or Ubisoft. GOG's Galaxy platform is what I wish all gaming platforms to be. I'm getting too old to care about such nuisances, but would like to think that preservation of any game (rather written: any software) culminates into preservation of DRM-free archives.
I love and stand by Steam, but all that needs to happen is that Gabe Newell retires, or the company is purchased. Once that happens, kiss it all goodbye. (And probably also kiss awesome Linux compatibility goodbye as well.)
You can do all that when you buy digital content. The problem is that most stores aren't selling you the content - they're selling you a non-perpetual license to access the content while it's available from the store you bought it from. That's what needs to change. People need to actually buy the content and not rent it.
It’s for this reason that I only rent on Amazon. ˜$2-$5 feels pretty reasonable to me, and I know I’m not owning it. I generally don’t buy any content with DRM in it, since I know I haven’t really purchased it. It doesn’t seem like consumers are very interested actual digital ownership, and smartphones tend to push the boundary even further here. It’s not impossible to put your own digital files on a smart phone and view them, but it seems significantly more difficult and annoying than doing the same on a personal computer. I believe smart phones and embedded devices (smart TVs, Rokus, etc) are doing a lot to set the “rental-only” expectation with consumers. Many consumers may have never experienced a real digital alternative to “rental-only."
> It’s not impossible to put your own digital files on a smart phone and view them, but it seems significantly more difficult and annoying than doing the same on a personal computer.
Plex. It's an app. And you don't even have to put the files on the phone... you just stream to the phone from hardware at home. Problem's already been solved on the technology end of it.
are you kidding? the government LOVES this. Now they can also tell companies to block your content and all of your purchases with the flick of a switch. Say something the US government doesnt like, and all of those youtube movie purchases are gone with 1 ban.
> This is where the US Federal Gov should step in. But the pols are too busy counting donations (bribes) from these companies.
Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.
>Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.
Are we reading the same article?
>ANG: So if we compare it to the standard index, the similarity that we see is that the United States, overall, total corruption is much lower than in China, and that’s totally expected. But what the U.C.I. is able to add is that it unbundles this total score into four categories, and by doing so, we can see more nuance and we can see that first of all, in both countries, the United States is much lower on petty theft, grand theft, and speed money than in China. But they have roughly the same amount of access money.
Almost everyone I know who pirates at this point does so for one of two reasons:
* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.
* content was not able to be purchased.
I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.
People may start out doing it because it’s free, but likely keep doing it for ideological reasons after they’ve seen so many paying customers get screwed over.
I’ll pay for digital music on iTunes, which is DRM free, but won’t buy movies there, as the DRM means it’s only good as long as Apple decides to keep it going. As we move from people maintaining media libraries to streaming, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those digital copies become worthless.
At 50 I pirate because of convenience. Before it was because I could not stand the ads, today it is because I will not go through hoops to get something in country X just because I am in France.
I have ample money and subscribe to netflix, amazon prime and something else I forgot (I hardly watch tv).
I never pirate music anymore - Spotify is perfect. I have a family subscription.
I subscribe to Youtube because I like the content free from ads.
Netflix is getting worse and worse so someday I will stop the subscription and get the content via BitTorrent
I will pirate things I pay for, since there's simply no other way to actually own a copy. One prime example is the latest Star Trek show. The ads on Paramount are absolutely intolerable, despite paying for the service. So we continue to pay and watch ad-free pirated copies.
The exception for me is old stuff. I have exactly zero qualms about not paying for a forty year old movie. Half the actors are dead anyway. The film studio doesn't need or deserve my money for something nobody alive had anything to do with.
I do blanket pirate music, though. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy music without 99.999% of the money going to a label or a studio. Apart from bandcamp and other indie stores, but those typically aren't my jam in the first place. If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.
Oh, and I will gleefully pirate textbooks, of course. Also research papers and most nonfiction in general. Audiobooks and fiction are a hard no unless unavailable or older than I am. Everyone should pirate textbooks always, it's only just.
So yeah, mostly for ideological reasons and the incomparable convenience.
I subscribe to prime video and another streaming service, that basically cover all my streaming needs. However, sometimes their DRM means I cannot screen share on discord or parsec or whatever and watch with my friend. So, I pirate it.
It's impossible to say, but studies have shown that the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on their preferred media, so an unwillingness to spend money doesn't seem to be the biggest reason.
Is this a tangential question? The OP suggests that there’s a utility to piracy beyond ideological reasons and just getting stuff for free. In other words, the categories you posed are not mutually exclusive.
I don’t know what percentage it is, but people in my age range (40-50) that I know who pirate tend to do so for fear of losing the media they love. I don’t even have time to watch 1% of what I have downloaded on my storage drives, but when I want to watch Mrs. Doubtfire in 25 years I want to make damn sure I can watch the original. I have little faith that whatever conglomerate owns that IP in a quarter century is going to make it easy for me to do so. Or make it even possible.
Personally I do it because I travel a lot. I also have Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV and Prime that I never bother looking at. Every new country I go to different movies and different shows are unavailable.
In one country show X is available on service Y - in another it’s available on service Z, in another it’s not available at all.
However, they are always available on Torrentleech and The Pirate Bay.
I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient. Why? Pirating content is inconvenient. Popcorn Time was as close as it got to “convenient” but that was quickly shut down/abandoned.
What percentage globally? I have no idea. I'm not a pollster but I'd hate to try to design a poll that could figure that out. It seems like the sort of thing people will lie about.
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke.
When I got a job and grew older, I would continue to pirate, because it was annoying to shuffle through a DVD collection or for the game the disk to put into the drive bay for a game that was already installed on the computer's hard disk. I regularly downloaded no-cd cracks for games I had legally bought, and if I'm going to be fucking around with shady executables from disreputable corners of the internet anyway, I might as well save myself a car trip to the mall.
When Netflix streaming became ubiquitous and Steam became good, I stopped pirating, because it was more convenient to do media legally than it was to pirate them.
Now that Netflix has been Balkanized into a dozen competing services, all of which are shitty, I pirate TV/movies again, because it is more convenient to always know what site to go to to acquire media. I subscribe to Amazon prime for the free shipping, but even for media which is available on Amazon Prime, I still pirate it because -- wait for it -- the DRM doesn't work.
I still buy games on Steam because it's easy and convenient. If Ubisoft and EA get their way and cut into Steam's market share and make it so there are too few games available to play on Steam, or games that I've already paid for start becoming un-bought from my library, or Steam starts becoming unusable due to onerous DRM, I'll start pirating again.
Music is more complicated. In the '90s I ripped all my CDs into MP3s, and burned them onto data CDs which I put into a big ass CD changer in the trunk of my car. Later on, I could fit all of them on a DVD in the head unit. Later on, I could put them all on a USB thumb stick which I plugged into the console. As time went on, I realized I wasn't engaging with my music in any meaningful way. I'd turn it on and hit random and literally never think about what I was listening to. So I've picked up vinyl specifically because it's less convenient. I have to actually think about what music I want to listen to, and then actively make a decision.
So do I pirate movies and TV because I like free stuff? Not really. I probably spent in the ballpark of $50 on games a month, maybe $200 on music per month. I have the money to pay for video media. But the last thing I watched was the Legend of Vox Machina, which is produced by Amazon Studios specifically for Amazon Prime Video, which I already pay for, and I pirated it anyway because it's more convenient.
So do I pirate movies and TV for ideological reasons? Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, Hollywood is kinda gross, but so is the video games industry and the music industry.
Sorry for rambling. I guess my point is that it's incorrect to set this up as a dichotomy between getting free shit and sticking it to the man. For me at least, it's neither of those things.
I suppose I’d have sympathy if someone previously purchased content, lost it due to this action, and then pirated a copy to continue being able to watch it.
I don’t have much sympathy for people who see these headlines and use it as a blanket justification to pirate anything and everything.
I don't even pirate and I do sympathise and excuse completely.
It's perfectly rational to me to decide to avoid getting burned in the first place, and actually a bit less rational to knowingly allow it, then wait for it to happen, and only then do something about it.
I don't pirate, but I would understand the position of acquiring any object - physical or digital - preferably from the place that won't try to take it back later. Pirated files do not carry the risks that purchased files carry. Risks that range from the files being deleted later, to data breaches exposing PII.
You're much better off getting a copy of everything you buy digitally before some company remotes into your devices and steals your legally purchased media.
You might find certain content much more difficult to find if you wait.
I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common. I pirate when I literally can't give anyone my money, or after something like this happens. Before is just trying to justify not compensating the creators. I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I think supporting them is important, or we’ll end up with media made for the masses, that do pay.
edit: there be pirates in these waters!
edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.
I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.
Ahhh while I've never had specifically purchased media disappear like this, movies that I want to rewatch do often migrate around from streaming service to streaming service, which is fine if you subscribe to all of them but is really a hassle when you start watching something on Netflix and then when you come back to it a month later discover it's not available anymore.
I pirate loads. But if it's a small studio I always buy the BluRay in addition. If it's an excellent film or show but it's made by a large studio, I check to see if it's available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, and if not, I buy the BluRay. Thought process being that it's the job of the streaming service to compensate the creators at that point (which a large point of the writer's strike was to ensure that they do.) If it's something I'm certain I'll only watch once, I just keep the pirated copy. It would be nice if there were some kind of, "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," Venmo-like service. Maybe every studio could just put up a Twitch stream that I could donate some bits to.
But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.
If you buy a defective game on PSN and then get a refund, your entire PSN account is nuked. If you buy a game on Steam and the devs push malware in an update and you get a refund, your entire Steam account is nuked. An example of a defective game you can currently buy on PSN is Kingdom: Two Crowns. An example of a game whose developer pushed malware in an update automatically downloaded by Steam is Street Fighter V.
In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.
Almost all PC games that utilized Games For Windows Live stopped working (new installs and reinstalls could no longer be performed) when Microsoft shut down the service, and AFAIK there are still a couple games that never updated to remove the reliance on GFWL DRM and can only be played by pirating.
Glad you asked. Steam stole my Dungeon Siege content. I doubt there is any language in their TOS that lets them do what they did to people who bought DS which came with the expansion Legends of Aranna, only to remove the expansion from libraries after some kind of licensing dispute. Zero refund.
It's not new that you do not own DRM uncumbered files.
It's true that it was expected that you'll lose access due to drm server disappearing not pure deletion ...
Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.
That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.
Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
Buying discs doesn't protect you anymore. Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.
I have a physical copy of Overwatch 1. When Overwatch 2 came out, it was an "upgrade" to Overwatch 1, and they simultaneously killed all Overwatch 1 servers. Nobody can play Overwatch 1 anymore.
Maybe Nintendo Switch is the way. It seems physical copies only protect you on platforms where offline use is standard.
> Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.
This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.
Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.
There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".
Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
The problem is that so many games ship with day-1 updates since they ship on disc buggy and in some cases unplayable. If you need to play the game on a different console that hasn't downloaded the updates and the servers have been shut down then you're doomed to a worse experience.
Piracy (and a PC) is the only option at that point.
Funnily enough the Nintendo Switch actually fixes this. Consoles can share updates peer-to-peer, and it's actually super nifty for local multiplayer groups.
> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
I used to be in the physical disk camp until during a move my ps4 and media collection was stolen. Bought a new ps4, deactivated the stolen ps4 from the account, activated the new ps4 and was able to download all the digital games. The disk games I had to repurchase which in many cases I never bothered. There were only a handful of games that were worth it. No system is perfect...
I've found Amazon Video to be fairly consistent. I don't buy many movies, nor rewatch them often, but they have done well by me. But the video game companies are fond of planned obsolescence and have happily abandoned their customers for decades. Buying a video from Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony is just asking to have it disappear when they build their next "Store."
"Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming."
> Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.
The Xbox store has been great for me. And their backwards compatibility is amazing; I've bought and played Xbox 360 Lego games with my son on the Xbox One.
>For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital.
the streaming wars more or less solved that problem already. No one is even pretending to sell you content on Netflix, D+, Hulu, Paramount, etc. And that is what's reigning surpreme.
>hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
in theory, sure. They can take control of your accounts. I'm guessing a kid that far off is about as likely to log into my old PSN as they are to hunt down an ancient PS3/4 to play an old disc though.
It's not just video games and music. Adobe Lightroom 6 was sold with a perpetual license, but its mapping and object detection libraries did not have a perpetual license, so even though you can run Adobe Lightroom 6 with your perpetual license today, those features no longer work unless you fiddle with your system clock.
Yeah, I've bought a lot of software that gave me a digital download with no DRM/bullshit. I've bought a comedy central special this way too, as well as dozens of albums and books. It's a perfectly agreeable arrangement, but some companies don't want to sell me a clean no-bullshit product and so I won't buy anything from them at all.
The Rossman quote is very apt. If the "purchase" of a file won't give me ownership of the file, then pirating the file isn't theft.
I don’t completely agree with Rossman here. You are buying the streaming right and not the file. What I agree on though is that they don’t make that clear to their customers.
If I do not end up with an offline-playable artifact in a standard format with no DRM, it needs to be priced as one-off consumption, like a movie ticket. Because duration aside, that's what it is.
"Cloud" service economics cannot work for "sales" of content, that only works for subscription models. The vendor has ongoing costs related to a one-time sale; of course they're going to screw you out of it no matter what lies they tell you.
I mostly buy physical media, although BandCamp got a fair amount of my money before it was eviscerated. The first sale doctrine still exists, as much as rentiers hate it.
If a ticket can be as low as $5-10, I'd gladly pay $3 for years old movies to watch it once or during a limited period of time (72 hours access?). It's rare for me to rewatch the same movie twice in one month. I have the same expectations for games, If I pay for the digital version, I pay for the experience of playing it once or twice, I'm not expecting a lifetime support.
Where I draw the line is for applications, music and books. Because their uses are perpetual. So no DRMs for anything. I'm not asking you to support new hardware (if I purchase an exe file, a wma album or a mobi book, that's what I'm stuck at), but no shutting down access because you need me to pay for the latest version. I should be able to pop up a VM and consume or use what I purchased.
Saas is another story, but that because it's their servers, not my computer.
Again, Stallman was right about the dangers of ownership of "digitally purchased" content like VOD, e-books etc. Of course, there's ways to de-drm content on some platforms, which technically violates DMCA, but having the content locally without DRM (that requires phoning home/encryption) is key.
The DMCA should be reformed to allow de-drming content owned by you. This mostly applies to digital content and cases such as: your account being banned, licensing issues resulting in content being removed, buy in x country which later gets blocked etc. However, cases like making copies to store off-site in case of a fire, natural disaster, robbery or on digital storage (NAS, cloud etc.) should be allowed especially for people who pay. I thought it'll happen though. Perhaps a federal law entailing consumers for refunds for such cases such as Sony's recent actions should be created.
That reform can happen administratively. DMCA 1201(a)(1) empowers the Copyright Office to create new 1201 exceptions for specific acts of breaking DRM. As far as I'm aware, nobody's specifically brought up just format-shifting to the Office[0], but there's already favorable precedent for format-shifting media you own being legal (e.g. RIAA v. Diamond). Furthermore, DMCA 1201 is specifically written to avoid creating new copyright restrictions beyond "don't break DRM to infringe copyright". Breaking DRM to make a fair use is perfectly legal. If a judge so chose they could decide that format-shifting is not only legal, but that breaking DRM to do it is fine, too.
This will never actually happen, however, because getting individual plaintiffs into court to sue them for ripping their own DVDs is hideously expensive. You would never actually see someone sued under DMCA 1201 for merely ripping their own media. The only people who actually need to worry about violating this half of DMCA 1201 are large corporations' software licensing departments. So this reform would be useless and this argument is purely academic.
There's, of course, another half of DMCA 1201 that is far more insidious, and is the real reason why DRM seems unbreakable. Subsection (a)(2) forbids the production of DRM breaking tools, and this section has no exceptions whatsoever. This is what actually makes DRM ironclad - otherwise, companies would sell DRM breaking tools for people to use for legal purposes, and then everyone would use them to pirate everything. Everything but the most insidious, consumer-hostile, backstabby DRM[1] would be completely devoid of value.
What might work would be a mandate to provide lawful access to decryption tools or unencrypted copies of a work for any case that the Copyright Office would otherwise say is legal to break DRM for. If the DRM vendor doesn't comply, then subsection (a)(2) no longer applies to their system and it's legal to sell the tools to break it. So they either have to come up with a way to format-shift works that you purchased, or I can just sell a decryption tool and their shit gets pirated 12 ways to Sunday.
[0] To be clear, bunnie keeps asking for a rather wide 1201 exception that keeps getting denied every three years, I'm not sure if that counts.
1) Sony refunds the price. This is the least that should happen.
2) Else, the purchase should be honored by Discovery and it should provide an alternate means for users to access this content by transferring the purchase OR provide download for use without restriction.
In parallel, there should be a class action filed.
Readit News
Playstation removing previously purchased Discovery content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492747 - Dec 2023 (174 comments)
If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.
And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).
I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.
If the seller uses "ownership" words like "own", "buy", or "purchase", then the product must be usable _indefinitely_. If at any time it becomes not usable, e.g. due to a server shutting down, a full refund must be provided to everyone who "purchased" the product. Also, there must be some way to lend the product; it's OK if this lending deprives the original owner of the product while it is lent.
One way to satisfy the "ownership" clause is to sell the product without DRM. Another alternative would be to sell it with DRM initially, but remove the DRM when you want to shut down your hosting servers. An online-only multiplayer game that requires a central server cannot feasibly be sold by "ownership", because the seller would eventually lose all their money when they shut down the server.
So the next option is "rental", where the seller can use the word "rent" along with a clear time period like "for 1 year" or "through 2024". The product must be usable through this time period, or you get a full refund. No requirements about it being lendable to friends.
I imagine almost all companies would pick the second option. This is fine! Consumers still get two benefits: (i) clear labeling, including knowing how long they can expect to use the thing for, and (ii) a full refund in case the content gets removed before that time period.
As for getting banned from an online game: this is completely allowed via the "rental" option. The company just needs to give the player a full refund.
I would also require a standardized disclosure box that must be included in the promotional materials. The disclosure box could contain information such as ownership period and so on, and consumers will get used to reading that box before purchasing digital goods.
The solution is to change the law. But the disparity in power between corporate copyright holders and consumers manifests itself in politics just as it does in the market.
As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
Note the use of "purchased" (not "licensed"). To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing". US consumer protection law sucks goat ass - language around digital content licensing could easily be "fixed" (but won't because our government is a revolving door with industry insiders).
even fitgirl repacks will die one day. be it a legal issue, lack of interet from the pirates providing content, or a change in ownership crashing the site to the group. Change is the only constant
Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.
If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.
If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.
No, that’s possession. That’s why they call it piracy; you have it but you definitely don’t own it.
This could apply just as much to "buying" something from the Playstation store.
With torrents, you always have possession, even without title.
With, e.g. Playstation, for a while "title" gave you "possession" (as it should) and then it didn't, breaking the whole thing.
Dead Comment
For this to change there either needs to be incentive for the platform and IP owners or there needs to be legal changes to require it.
Also, blockchain means that anyone who has your ID can know you entire catalog of ownership. This removes privacy.
Why would any content creator (outside of those specifically pushing it on idealogical grounds) want to lose control over the distribution of their content by using blockchain and cloud storage technologies?
(Because it would mean I would be able to lend my copy to the rest of the US population and the original seller would never make more money than from my 1 copy.)
If I buy digital content, I should be able to download it on removal media and use it off-line (esp. in the case with movies/music). I should be able to sell it (which is still legal). But these companies want you to "rent" instead of own.
So I never buy digital anything. No wonder many people head to pirate bay because of the rights they loose.
I hope the US Gov (and other govs) wake up to this, but as always donations (bribes) trumps people's rights all the time. (no pun intended).
If it can be revoked, then it should be labeled “rent”, with the appropriate time frame. Even if it means businesses have to label it “rent - until an unknown time in the future when we go out of business or drop the license or decide to ban you”.
Eventually prices would have to drop to reflect that you are merely temporarily licensed things. A digital game is not going to be perceived as a $60 value when it is more obviously a temporary license regardless of the length. If a physical copy of a game is valued at $60 that can be sold then a digital temporary license is going to have to be less. In my opinion a lot less.
Buy = forever (can download and use offline)
License = Implied forever, but streaming only and revokable
Rent = Streaming only, time period made explicit (day, week, whatever)
There's already regulation we can use to combat what digital "ownership" is: bait and switch.
However, to your point, I'll easily find my way to (insert a random pirate site - non-disclosed) download something that I own just because it's ONLY available exclusively through a platform like EA Play or Ubisoft. GOG's Galaxy platform is what I wish all gaming platforms to be. I'm getting too old to care about such nuisances, but would like to think that preservation of any game (rather written: any software) culminates into preservation of DRM-free archives.
A DRM medium that claims to be DRM free? That's a weird thing to want.
Plenty of games that GOG sells will refuse to run, or disable features, if Galaxy isn't running in the background.
You can do all that when you buy digital content. The problem is that most stores aren't selling you the content - they're selling you a non-perpetual license to access the content while it's available from the store you bought it from. That's what needs to change. People need to actually buy the content and not rent it.
Yes they are, the stores are just not delivering on what they're selling.
> People need to actually buy the content
People are buying the content, then discovering that they no longer have it.
This is actually the sort of thing that a properly-functioning consumer defense bureau would go after.
Plex. It's an app. And you don't even have to put the files on the phone... you just stream to the phone from hardware at home. Problem's already been solved on the technology end of it.
Do you not think companies were smart enough to plan for this??
Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-u-s-really-less-corr...
Are we reading the same article?
>ANG: So if we compare it to the standard index, the similarity that we see is that the United States, overall, total corruption is much lower than in China, and that’s totally expected. But what the U.C.I. is able to add is that it unbundles this total score into four categories, and by doing so, we can see more nuance and we can see that first of all, in both countries, the United States is much lower on petty theft, grand theft, and speed money than in China. But they have roughly the same amount of access money.
Pirated copies do not get erased due to the whims of the copyright owner.
* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.
* content was not able to be purchased.
I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.
I’ll pay for digital music on iTunes, which is DRM free, but won’t buy movies there, as the DRM means it’s only good as long as Apple decides to keep it going. As we move from people maintaining media libraries to streaming, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those digital copies become worthless.
I have ample money and subscribe to netflix, amazon prime and something else I forgot (I hardly watch tv).
I never pirate music anymore - Spotify is perfect. I have a family subscription.
I subscribe to Youtube because I like the content free from ads.
Netflix is getting worse and worse so someday I will stop the subscription and get the content via BitTorrent
The exception for me is old stuff. I have exactly zero qualms about not paying for a forty year old movie. Half the actors are dead anyway. The film studio doesn't need or deserve my money for something nobody alive had anything to do with.
I do blanket pirate music, though. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy music without 99.999% of the money going to a label or a studio. Apart from bandcamp and other indie stores, but those typically aren't my jam in the first place. If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.
Oh, and I will gleefully pirate textbooks, of course. Also research papers and most nonfiction in general. Audiobooks and fiction are a hard no unless unavailable or older than I am. Everyone should pirate textbooks always, it's only just.
So yeah, mostly for ideological reasons and the incomparable convenience.
In one country show X is available on service Y - in another it’s available on service Z, in another it’s not available at all.
However, they are always available on Torrentleech and The Pirate Bay.
I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient. Why? Pirating content is inconvenient. Popcorn Time was as close as it got to “convenient” but that was quickly shut down/abandoned.
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke.
When I got a job and grew older, I would continue to pirate, because it was annoying to shuffle through a DVD collection or for the game the disk to put into the drive bay for a game that was already installed on the computer's hard disk. I regularly downloaded no-cd cracks for games I had legally bought, and if I'm going to be fucking around with shady executables from disreputable corners of the internet anyway, I might as well save myself a car trip to the mall.
When Netflix streaming became ubiquitous and Steam became good, I stopped pirating, because it was more convenient to do media legally than it was to pirate them.
Now that Netflix has been Balkanized into a dozen competing services, all of which are shitty, I pirate TV/movies again, because it is more convenient to always know what site to go to to acquire media. I subscribe to Amazon prime for the free shipping, but even for media which is available on Amazon Prime, I still pirate it because -- wait for it -- the DRM doesn't work.
I still buy games on Steam because it's easy and convenient. If Ubisoft and EA get their way and cut into Steam's market share and make it so there are too few games available to play on Steam, or games that I've already paid for start becoming un-bought from my library, or Steam starts becoming unusable due to onerous DRM, I'll start pirating again.
Music is more complicated. In the '90s I ripped all my CDs into MP3s, and burned them onto data CDs which I put into a big ass CD changer in the trunk of my car. Later on, I could fit all of them on a DVD in the head unit. Later on, I could put them all on a USB thumb stick which I plugged into the console. As time went on, I realized I wasn't engaging with my music in any meaningful way. I'd turn it on and hit random and literally never think about what I was listening to. So I've picked up vinyl specifically because it's less convenient. I have to actually think about what music I want to listen to, and then actively make a decision.
So do I pirate movies and TV because I like free stuff? Not really. I probably spent in the ballpark of $50 on games a month, maybe $200 on music per month. I have the money to pay for video media. But the last thing I watched was the Legend of Vox Machina, which is produced by Amazon Studios specifically for Amazon Prime Video, which I already pay for, and I pirated it anyway because it's more convenient.
So do I pirate movies and TV for ideological reasons? Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, Hollywood is kinda gross, but so is the video games industry and the music industry.
Sorry for rambling. I guess my point is that it's incorrect to set this up as a dichotomy between getting free shit and sticking it to the man. For me at least, it's neither of those things.
Simple as.
I don’t have much sympathy for people who see these headlines and use it as a blanket justification to pirate anything and everything.
It's perfectly rational to me to decide to avoid getting burned in the first place, and actually a bit less rational to knowingly allow it, then wait for it to happen, and only then do something about it.
i really don't try to justify my piracy much anymore. i like free shit and it's easy. but things like this really make it hard to feel guilty.
edit: there be pirates in these waters!
edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.
But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.
In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.
That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E...
That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.
cough kindle... cough
I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?
I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.
That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.
Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
I have a physical copy of Overwatch 1. When Overwatch 2 came out, it was an "upgrade" to Overwatch 1, and they simultaneously killed all Overwatch 1 servers. Nobody can play Overwatch 1 anymore.
Maybe Nintendo Switch is the way. It seems physical copies only protect you on platforms where offline use is standard.
This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.
Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.
There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".
Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Edit: and duh. When you buy a game that's only played online you're dependent on the servers staying up. It's logical.
There are other kinds of games though.
Piracy (and a PC) is the only option at that point.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490#:~:text=Ava....
"Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming."
The Xbox store has been great for me. And their backwards compatibility is amazing; I've bought and played Xbox 360 Lego games with my son on the Xbox One.
the streaming wars more or less solved that problem already. No one is even pretending to sell you content on Netflix, D+, Hulu, Paramount, etc. And that is what's reigning surpreme.
>hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
in theory, sure. They can take control of your accounts. I'm guessing a kid that far off is about as likely to log into my old PSN as they are to hunt down an ancient PS3/4 to play an old disc though.
Isn't the same happening with video games? I've seen video games remove some music from their soundtracks as their limited-time licenses lapsed.
Deleted Comment
To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if this Playstation move ends in a lawsuit.
The Rossman quote is very apt. If the "purchase" of a file won't give me ownership of the file, then pirating the file isn't theft.
"Cloud" service economics cannot work for "sales" of content, that only works for subscription models. The vendor has ongoing costs related to a one-time sale; of course they're going to screw you out of it no matter what lies they tell you.
I mostly buy physical media, although BandCamp got a fair amount of my money before it was eviscerated. The first sale doctrine still exists, as much as rentiers hate it.
Where I draw the line is for applications, music and books. Because their uses are perpetual. So no DRMs for anything. I'm not asking you to support new hardware (if I purchase an exe file, a wma album or a mobi book, that's what I'm stuck at), but no shutting down access because you need me to pay for the latest version. I should be able to pop up a VM and consume or use what I purchased.
Saas is another story, but that because it's their servers, not my computer.
The DMCA should be reformed to allow de-drming content owned by you. This mostly applies to digital content and cases such as: your account being banned, licensing issues resulting in content being removed, buy in x country which later gets blocked etc. However, cases like making copies to store off-site in case of a fire, natural disaster, robbery or on digital storage (NAS, cloud etc.) should be allowed especially for people who pay. I thought it'll happen though. Perhaps a federal law entailing consumers for refunds for such cases such as Sony's recent actions should be created.
This will never actually happen, however, because getting individual plaintiffs into court to sue them for ripping their own DVDs is hideously expensive. You would never actually see someone sued under DMCA 1201 for merely ripping their own media. The only people who actually need to worry about violating this half of DMCA 1201 are large corporations' software licensing departments. So this reform would be useless and this argument is purely academic.
There's, of course, another half of DMCA 1201 that is far more insidious, and is the real reason why DRM seems unbreakable. Subsection (a)(2) forbids the production of DRM breaking tools, and this section has no exceptions whatsoever. This is what actually makes DRM ironclad - otherwise, companies would sell DRM breaking tools for people to use for legal purposes, and then everyone would use them to pirate everything. Everything but the most insidious, consumer-hostile, backstabby DRM[1] would be completely devoid of value.
What might work would be a mandate to provide lawful access to decryption tools or unencrypted copies of a work for any case that the Copyright Office would otherwise say is legal to break DRM for. If the DRM vendor doesn't comply, then subsection (a)(2) no longer applies to their system and it's legal to sell the tools to break it. So they either have to come up with a way to format-shift works that you purchased, or I can just sell a decryption tool and their shit gets pirated 12 ways to Sunday.
[0] To be clear, bunnie keeps asking for a rather wide 1201 exception that keeps getting denied every three years, I'm not sure if that counts.
[1] see also: any Apple ][ game
1) Sony refunds the price. This is the least that should happen.
2) Else, the purchase should be honored by Discovery and it should provide an alternate means for users to access this content by transferring the purchase OR provide download for use without restriction.
In parallel, there should be a class action filed.