“If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”
reddit.comI think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)
When my wife and I did our estate planning we had the lawyer put specific terms in to help ensure that our future (and now current) kids would assume ownership of all digital accounts. At the time there was only one example from another state we were able to use that had been proven successful in court, so that’s what we adopted.
Now that we’ve moved to California I need to update the documents to fit our laws as well the current understanding of the law is. Point being I’m seeing a lawyer soon for this specific case alone and the wording MUST be tested in court for us to even know where to start. For anyone studying law, IP law will make some money for now and quite a while still.
P.S. if anyone can recommend a Bay Area estate attorney with this experience please let me and others know!
Yes, it's going to be an interesting up hill legal battle that will either need a lot of expensive court cases or some really smart people in legislatures, and in this climate it feels like we can count on the former a lot more than the latter.
Many terms of service agreements terminate with the "owner" and are very explicit that accounts are "nontransferable", and both are problems that are going to be big fights.
Uptake of subscription services might make this a non-issue, if it is sizable enough to make a minority of people who want to own media. If the providers of subscription services can solve the disappearing and exclusive content problems. Maybe fights over rights will be there instead, with 'exclusive' distribution rights to media being limited and a right to buy. I tend to think that a change such as requiring copyright holders to sell to everyone or no-one under the same terms would mean us consumers would no longer be stuck needing to hoard, and most of us would be happy to pay our monthly fees to have access to everything delivered to our TVs.
I'm more afraid that uptake of subscription services will hit that worst case scenario problem of prolonging the fight just long enough that people give up on the fight in a war of attrition before subscription services simply prove again why (digital) landlords cannot be trusted and (digital) renters have no rights.
A big part of my concern here is that copyright terms are so long today that any subscription/rental-focused world is a multi-generational digital feudalism. With a larger and "closer" to the current generation public domain it might be much easier to trust competition among subscription companies. You allude to this indirectly in trying to open the market, but there will always be "exclusive" distribution rights so long as copyright casts such a long shadow from the big castles on all the lowly consumer sharecroppers.
While I doubt we'd see much legislative interest in shortening copyright terms and enlarging the public domain, fighting for digital asset rights from digital retailers that use words like "own" and "purchase", given long histories of consumer protection laws and consumer protection court cases, seems a lot more plausible, and a lot more worth fighting. I worry that a lot of people won't care to fight so long as the castles make subscription services seem like good sharecropping just long enough for most people to give up, and then it will be too late and there won't be a big enough public domain to protect us.
I think it reduces the risk to consumers, but it won’t eliminate the need. It’ll be a long while before my entire Steam library will be available via subscription.
If you can rent out a purchased copy (one for the courts, jurisdiction specific), then Steam/Microsoft/GOG/Humble could offer things as a subscription quite easily. If publishers are required to sell to them and not allowed to create roadblocks. Given the concurrent player counts for most games the subscription service wouldn't need to purchase many copies to allow almost-always access. The interesting games to consider are the 'always online' ones, where the software could be given away for free, because it is useless without access to the game servers. Which pretty much operates like a subscription ('lifetime' or monthly), and is expected to stop working one day.
I'm not going to debate ethics or local legalities here, but I believe that pirating (where feasible) is perfectly fine as an alternative to preserving what these sellers impose restrictions on. Where it does get tricky is, in addition to pirating, whether to pay for the DRMd walled garden items and voting with one's wallet that what they're doing is fine, so that the artists/developers behind the content get something. I don't have a black and white answer to this. Sometimes it seems like supporting these evil corporations is evil.
This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).
The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.
i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was.
companies came and went, my torrents are still with me.
sharing is caring.
As someone who was a teen in the early '00s when torrenting became quite mainstream, I was surprised to see it fall away entirely in favour of streaming services, despite the lack of ownership of the content, and needing to subscribe to multiple services to get the shows you wanted.
I never really stopped either, but as I got older and had more money, I find that I watch/listen to a fraction of the shows/bands I used to, so I'm happy to support them by purchasing digital assets (DRM-free MP3s) and physical (vinyl, DVD).
The DVDs will be ripped to my HDD; they are mine after all.
I use put.io to avoid endangering my residential connections.
That looks quite expensive and doesn't disclose details about the kinds of disks used (upfront) and the connection speeds allotted. The seed times are also too short with the ratio "or" time clause. Anyone wanting to seed to maintain an archive of content for the future may find this tedious. There seem to be many others that provide more (cheaper, faster and more features/flexibility).
put.io isn't a traditional seedbox. They do caching + dedup + transcode + chromecast etc. It's sort of like seedbox + plex and the UI is quite clean. It's not geared towards the private tracker crowd. It's for casual users who use public trackers, and it's a pretty good service for that. Casual users don't care about ratios. They just don't want to get notices from their ISPs.
Now I get what put.io is for.
I was commenting earlier from the perspective of preserving content for longer and also making sure that it can be available for people in the future. From that angle, this service doesn’t help. For example, there are many people building and maintaining content archives for the long term.
I don't get it. You delete or close the account you use to access the digital content, what is the expectation here? That you can keep accessing it without an account? How would they know what you own?
See, the problem is with the word "own".
If I buy a cheese sandwich and there's no cheese in it, then I'm entitled to my money back. Same here, give the "purchaser" their money back.
Some things work like that. If I buy tickets to a concert, then decide not to go to that concert, I'm not entitled to my money back.
>If I buy tickets to a concert, then decide not to go to that concert, I'm not entitled to my money back.
that's not some universal truth, that's a loss-reduction scheme that certain live event ticket sales groups adhere to.
In some cases it isn't even loss-reduction, it's just a means to increase profit; there may not be a loss associated with refunding a ticket to a venue that isn't sold out and has unassigned seating other than some virtual infrastructure loss like "they used the bandwidth of our service without creating a profit this session ", which is basically the equivalent of a restocking fee at a small pawnshop where an already hourly (otherwise idle) paid employee just throws the product back on a shelf (aka : bullshit).
There isn't an issue with the purchase being somehow bad. The issue is they're intentionally destroying the means to authenticate they were the ones who purchased it.
I'm totally on board with purchases being tied to a single company being an issue, but for a lot of people the value of digital books and music is the online availability. You're going to need some sort of auth for that to work.
I have this problem right now, sort of. I purchased dozens of Kindle books through my personal Amazon account over the years. Now I prefer to do so through my business account. Yet, I want all of them available through the same device. Well, that’s a pain in the behind. I have to call Amazon support for help and have been procrastinating because I know it will be a one hour ordeal.
This is why I prefer to purchase digital books as PDF files. I keep them on Dropbox and my local drive and they are great to handle and read.
Calibre. Convert those books to DRM-free formats asap and you're good to go. They become completely yours. I do it by default for all my Amazon kindle format purchases. It's "forbidden" but if I paid near physical book retail pricing for it, as far as i'm concerned, that copy of digital content deserves to be mine.
I was unable to do this for any recent purchase. Calibre could strip DRM only from very old books, like 7-10 years old.
I had this same problem and what worked for me was to download an old version of Kindle for PC, regardless of the age of the books. I think version 1.17 works. Have copies download to it and then try the Calibre conversion again.
This is why pirating is alive and popular, because it makes people's lives convenient, while the real sellers do many things to make people's lives difficult. You as a buyer are expected to bend and give in to their way of usage and their restrictions.
Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft, apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand. Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?
If there's one thing I've learned with all these app stores and digital stores, a better way to handle this when you move countries is to create a new account for that country and also retain the older account (if possible, without a payment method, just to have access to older purchases and to free items).
Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across countries as long as you can attach the appropriate payment methods. They don't do this even for content that's not controlled by giant corporations that are stuck in the past.
What if you owe the apps on your phone?
What lesson did she learn?
Anyone remember Microsoft's Zune?
Yeah, super-irritating. I bought about a dozen movies through Google Play before I realized that their platform was going to fail.
(IANAL) This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are licensed being deleted.
Contra: First-Sale Doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
See also, "The Right to Read":
> We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view.
(IANAL) That part is the same even if you buy a music CD or a Blu-Ray disc. You're only granted a license to play it for your personal use (and you're not even allowed to play at a public event or broadcast it). But, you're legally allowed to make backups for yourself and (in certain instances) encode them for use with a different mechanism. That's one of the things that iTunes (taking a popular example) helped revolutionize, with CD ripping and place-shifting the content for convenience. DRM, along with making the breaking of DRM illegal (is it still illegal for all kinds of content? I haven't kept up) is what messed this whole thing up.
> This is fairly pedantic
Congrats on reaching self-awareness, HN!
I was going to pedantically point out his spelling error, but it seemed a bit over the top.
I've been eye-ing a lot of movies on Google Play recently. Wasn't sure about making the jump, but now I'm curious. What makes you think they're going to fail? Any big warning signs?
That was too aggressive. Better to say that it's failed for me, and I suspect it will fail for others. YMMV.
In my case, I lost access to one of my Google accounts, for no apparent reason, and I have been unable to regain access. The movies I have are actually attached to my other account, but the message seems clear--they can go away at any time with no recourse.
In principle this is true for Amazon, Apple, and other Play competitors. In practice, I haven't heard of such cases, and because their economic model is different, this seems a lot less likely, to me.
More broadly, Google has a track record of discontinuing services, which also makes me nervous.
I'm curious about your account loss. Was it a Gmail address that was your Google account? Did it have a verified phone number linked to it?
Yes to the first, and pretty sure about the second. And the two accounts were intertwined in many other ways: one was the recovery address for the other, one forwarded its email to the other, they were both accessed at the same time from the same IP over the years.
The only trigger I could see was that I had not logged into the account I lost for a while (months).
Baffling, but it clarified that relying on a single company for multiple services was quite foolish, and I've since spread my accounts around to multiple vendors. Highly recommended.
It looks like Google's current focus has been moving things out of Google Play sub-brands to YouTube sub-brands with their own new apps. Or at least that's what ads and upsells in YouTube itself keep trying to tell me? No idea if Google has made any public announcements one way or the other, but the growing confusion certainly doesn't help anyone figure out what Google's strategy here is (or if it even has one or even if this is just like that "new messenger app every year, X% chance one dies this year" russian roulette thing they do).
You may be able to sync those onto Movies Anywhere. I know that fixing DRM with more/different DRM isn't great but they're sort of trying.
They are very trying, aren't they. I find it's the dishonesty that is most trying.
Full cash refund is honest. Anything else is fraud.