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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Seems the title has been editorialised, but "holding it" is a rather low bar when considering ownership. I think of ownership as having the right to modify or destroy something.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
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.
I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things.
The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place.
I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.
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.
> 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.
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.
You must be able to hold it in your hand.
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.
>you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty.
You mean legal ownership, right? Because people can illegally take your physical belongings.
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.
This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
They need to wake up.
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.
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.
Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS?
I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin
No, but I found a link for it
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
When buying isn't owning...
Exactly. I pirate eBooks and buy a physical copy when I come around to reading them.
Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags
You wouldnt train a llm to swede movies...
If you can't play it you don't own it either. Support of playback of physical media is not guaranteed by the industry.
Regardless, I definitely think the all-u-can-eat, 24-7-365, instant, ephemeral media has run its course and has become... tiring?
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.
[1]: https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/
[2]: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
> 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.
That “Thank you” comes off as a strong “Fuck you”.
As an ex-Sony employee, that is deeply held cultural belief: Sony doesn’t do anything wrong. It is absolutely a fuck you.
I purchased it, and you're taking it away? Then either I didn't actually purchase it (despite the word appearing in the notice), or you're stealing it from me.
Which is it, Sony?
The legal reality is that you probably purchased a license, tied to your PlayStation account, and revocable at any time for any reason. You don't buy a movie, you buy access to watch it as many times as you want during the period in which it is licensed to you. This is, of course, bullshit; this doesn't or can't apply to a physical DVD, or even a DRM free digital copy, so it is a measurable step backwards for consumers.
These content agreements would have end dates when they are negotiated so they should be required to disclose those at the time you "purchase your license".
If they renegotiate and extend the arrangement then update the UI with the new date.
Sony couldn't seriously believe they were going to be able to renew these licenses forever given how many streaming services are out there who need to fill their catalogues.
Instead it's better for sales to show a "buy" button with no date[1] so customers don't back out when they realise they'll be spending close to the retail purchase price to only rent it for a few years.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvJSpB9cb6Y
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.
This isn’t that difficult. You purchased the ability to use it while they let you, and yes, it was in the terms.
They said they were selling it, all over their site. The button said "buy". They can put whatever crap they like in a section that they know nobody ever reads, that doesn't negate what they said in large print up front and no sane court will entertain the notion that it does.
So is the refund they give for the original amount or inflation adjusted?
The inflation-adjusted amount of a $0 refund comes out to... $0.
Thousands of dollars worth of games in some PSN accounts. Madness if this ever happens to games as well.
Even if you _can_ hold it, you may not own it if the player is internet-connected or even receives a firmware upgrade during maintenance or from a disc. New discs may not play unless you upgrade, and an upgrade can also remove keys, blocking you from watching discs you already have.
https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/windows-gene...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070430070403/https://www.aacsl...
I have a large collection of DVDs that I've amassed over the years.
There's something nice about physical media; the bits are physically stamped into the medium. They're DVD-encrypted but I lawfully extract these bits and view them regularly.
When streaming services start on-the-fly editing for content[1] and revoking licenses, they can absolutely shove it up their butts. My old man take is that if a TV show or movie or whatever isn't worth putting onto a physical medium and distributing it to people who will buy it, I won't miss it if--I mean when[2]--it's gone. I mean, these huge movie studios act like pirates are going to ruin their massive profits, when they won't.
[1] And yes, they will absolutely on-the-fly, 1984-style edit films and TV shows for content.
[2] And it will go [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age] along with lots of other things into the memory hole of the digital dark age.
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.
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”
It's a very different thing to stop serving a download link to a purchased good from blocking access to the user's local copies altogether.
> 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.
I'm not sure how BG3 Collector's Edition might be different, but the game is DRM-free on Steam.
It's disgusting how a previously open platform for gaming (PC) was turned into what it's become with Steam. Young people either don't know or don't care that it used to be the norm to buy and install a game without a middleman "service".
That argument has been harder to make with time. A couple years ago I made the difficult decision to get rid of some old game copies. I wasn't realistically going to use them ever again, and the sentimental value for me is entirely about the memory, not the media. Part of my steam collection is nearly as old and it is on track to greatly outlast. It is also significantly easier to own and use in just about every aspect, even if it is technically just a revocable license.
Beyond that, Steam and the digital media model allowed a great many people to publish games that wouldn't otherwise have been able to publish games. It made the indie world of games possible. It also did more than anyone to bridge the platform gap between windows and linux.
I'm really worried about what will happen to Valve when Gabe retires.
I can see a bean counter making a very convincing case that it's cheaper to go back to Windows and avoid all this Linux reverse engineering gubbins which isn't bringing in an immediate profit, especially when they're giving away all theirs efforts by open sourcing Proton.
Is that how things work at valve? I thought employees do whatever they want and there's minimal structure.
Gabe allegedly (nobody knows because it's a private company) owns 50.1%, it's not majority employee owned. It's possible he might turn it over to the employees or some kind of co-op style board but who knows if he's offered the right price by a cashed up investor.
He's got children to consider and could reasonably want to set them and his grandchildren up for generational wealth.
Which just further highlights the importance of actual DRM free ownership. Even in the face of a relatively benevolent corporation, that corporation won’t be that way forever. Leaders and cultures change, sometimes overnight (look at what happened when Broadcom bought VMWare, they started extorting customers immediately). Adobe is another good example that pulled the rug out from underneath creatives and started renting software instead of selling it.
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.
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.
The problem today it's hard to convince even myself to pay the storage premium, but I 100% agree with you.
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.
My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.
https://delistedgames.com/oxenfree/
I 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.
If you can't hack it, you don't own it.
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.
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.
Arr, aye there be!
No need for piracy. Since they gave him a refund, he could just buy a copy.
If they refused to refund his money, then... yeah, it does make you want to hoist the black flag, doesn't it?
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.
Since he already owns a copy, I don't think he can buy another, unless it's a physical book.
It's time we change the economy for digital products and services.
* The current economy is bad: The company that can require or lure the most money from people wins.
* This would be better: The company that is liked by most people wins.
That one change would solve sooo many problems. We could get rid of a lot of laws that wouldn't be needed any more.
What do you mean by "wins"?
Because if the company is publicly traded, "win" means "value for stockholders", and that doesn't necessarily translate to "liked by customers."
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.
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.
I recently passed on some of my favorite books to a nephew. Probably nobody will break into his house and take the books off of his shelves when a license agreement expires. I'd like to be able to do the same with GTA 6 if it's good, but it looks like that would require hacking.
Does having a hard drive full of mp4s count as holding it?
If they have no DRM, I would say it does!
Given my memory these days, I can't keep that either.
In some cases, even if you hold it you don't own it.
I tend to purchase a lot of blu-rays, in fact if I don't buy the movie on Apple iTunes then it's almost always the case that I buy the blu-ray; then once I have the blu-ray I go to the torrent sites and download a version of the movie.
Why? Because I earn enough money that I feel like I have no excuse not to buy my media: but I also want it to be my media; and torrenting is more convenient than using blu-rays.
The blu-rays have one more major benefit than iTunes or the torrents though: if I'm ever without internet or my NAS dies... well, I can just dump a disc into my console and watch whatever movie I was going to watch anyway.
One time I was moving apartments, there was no internet and I hadn't set up my computers yet; decided to watch a movie with my girlfriend, grabbed a disc and set up the playstation.
Lo-and-behold... it didn't work.
Why? -- not because the disk was broken, not because the playstation had broken: but because I didn't have internet access.
The playstation has to connect to the internet to play blu-rays.
I didn't know of this because I always just used torrents and had the disks as a "license"...
So I tried my laptop: no dice either, VLC refused to play, Linux had a really bad time.
I tried with my macbook, of course no macbook came with a blu-ray player, and the one I had needed two USB-A slots, so it was a ball-ache to get the thing hooked up and I finally got something working by hotspotting my phone and googling around.
Anyway, what the fuck.
It was at that moment I realised; even physically owning things isn't actually owning them anymore.
I still don't technically pirate, but I no longer feel even the slightest derision for those that do, and I work in the entertainment industry where piracy puts people out of work (I've seen it).
For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.
My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.
Doesn’t feel very reliable, the time I needed it- it didn’t work.
What happens when those servers go offline?
What happens if I reinstall the PS4?
Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
Blu-Ray players don’t have access to the internet, do they?
Also, yeah, my PC not working was part of the issue.
> What happens when those servers go offline?
Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?
> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).
I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.
Keeping anything at an old version requires perfect foresight (in the face of diminishing capabilities).
It's not like original PS4's can continue playing games as they're released, new releases assume later and later PS SDKs, you're only meant to certify against "latest".
And since downgrading is not possible on most "appliance" class devices (phones, consoles)... :\
Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.
Why were you watching movies when you should have been setting up your apartment
Are you pretending like you just unpack non-stop for days whenever you move?
A little break after moving all our stuff to another country.
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.
> Streaming services rent you access. Digital stores sell you a license that can be taken away. Physical media gives you an object that is yours, offline, and in your hands. > > Physical media can be given away, inherited, or found at a thrift store decades from now. A digital license becomes inaccessible when an account is closed or deleted. A vinyl record or printed book can remain usable across generations.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
Or, for certain content, buying the CD, DVD, or book.
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.
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.
> The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
Frank Herbert, Dune
I can destroy my smartphone in a second, yet I still don't control it.
Yes you do, you control your access. If you destroy it, you’ve lost access.
So like large asteroids have absolute power over us?
I think we do what we want come hell or high water.
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.
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)
however - we can be idealistic - but when the rubber touches the road, a lot of things happen.
indie games only exploded due to being digital only, if Indies were to publish physical copies they would go out of business or they would be less of them.
a lot of people complain about amazon - but It has provided an avenue for out of print books to continue being sold - through on demand printing. yeah physical products gets extinct too.
the era of the cheap dvd movie financed a lot of independent films - streaming killed that.
so like everything in life - you win some, you lose some.
& yeah - if you can't hold it - you don't own it.
My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore
https://xkcd.com/1150/
I don't like this sentiment. There's plenty of things you can hold but you don't really own. You're probably holding one right now!
There are also things you can hold and not own!
[Deleted note about submitter editorializizing title]
For transparency: That was the previous title of the page. I since changed many things on that site and reworded some fluff. Cheers.
My personal definition is if you can't resell it, you don't own it.
As they say, piracy is the only true ownership.
And if you can hold it, sometimes you still don’t own it.
As a tangent, I'd like to point out that the world is realizing the same is true with respect to Currencies, especially the US Dollar. It used to be better than gold, lighter, easily transportable, and convertible to actual gold coin, up until FDR ended that in 1933.[1] He added insult to injury by devaluing the dollar shortly thereafter.
We still had our silver coinage, though... and that lasted until after JFK was assassinated by groups still unknown[2] 60+ years later. The subsequent decision to remove silver from coinage left us without hard money, that we could hold, and instead substituted the "Johnson Sandwich".[3]
Worldwide, however, there was still convertibility to gold, at FDR's reduced value. This was ended by Nixon in 1971.[4] Since then, the value of the dollar, relative to gold, has fallen from $38 per ounce, to ~$4000 per ounce today. That's a decline of more than 99%.
The only thing holding the dollar up at this point is the PetroDollar System[5] that Nixon helped create in which Oil is exclusively priced in Dollars, and the dollars are recycled into US markets.
It's my Personal opinion that Trump is speedrunning the destruction of this system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1965
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency
The sad thing is that it's also true for money.
Cash that you can hold in your hand it's yours, whereas the cash that you own at the bank is a IOU subject to the contract that you sign .
Seems the title has been editorialised, but "holding it" is a rather low bar when considering ownership. I think of ownership as having the right to modify or destroy something.
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
>our entire society exists because of intellectual property
Are you sure that's true? If so, in which century did it start being true?
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.
So Neanderthals had copyright law and if they didn't, their society would have fallen apart?
Is that why it did fall apart?
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.
> but every time we do that we also take from the artist
No, every time we do that, we do not give to the artist. But not giving is not the same as taking.
Well, we take from the artist a motivation for a buyer to purchase their work.
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.
I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things.
The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place.
I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons
1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself
2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article
3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity
4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.
I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.
If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.
If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.
It was a good time though.
Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.
>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it
> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?
Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.
I would guess its a bit unfair to call me young and then just repeat what I said instead of adding anything novel to the discussion
Are you young? If so, why would it be unfair to state that fact?
What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.
> youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere
A spectacular number of publishers region-block all their music videos on YouTube for copyright reasons
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.
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book cannot be remotely erased, edited, or deactivated. It is a physical object you can own, resell, lend, archive, or play offline indefinitely.
Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.
Blu ray discs can only (legally) be played in licensed devices, and some of the decryption keys can and have been revoked.
Key revocation only affects future disc releases.
AIUI every disc is mastered with the latest revocation list. When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself.
> When your device sees that it is revoked by any disc, it bricks itself.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it, partly because I can imagine the sort of class action it would engender.
There are reports of bricked players on the internet, and unbricking, but those mostly seem to have been caused by bad firmware updates.
The wikipedia page on AACS only mentions revocations affecting future content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System
TIL I don’t own my thoughts :(