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).
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 [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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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...
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