The "if buying doesn't mean owning, piracy isn't stealing" take drives me nuts.
IP licensing is, has been and always will be gross, but you can't just use your misunderstanding of what you get with your purchase to link those two completely disparate ideas together. Yes, you own the paper that book is printed on, the plastic that DVD is made from or that MP4 file, but you do not "own" the contents of those things.
You can say that IP licensing shouldn't be a thing, or that all information should be free, whatever, but you can't just decide for yourself the terms of a purchase.
@nyquildotorg i think its not owning in terms of "owning the ip" but more like "owning as in I now own this book until it falls apart and can backup my cd collection"
maybe its more clear to say owning the media vs. requesting a stream or downloading content via drmed player which might be abandoned when the service is EOLed
@nyquildotorg its really not, books last centuries, do you think amazon is going to still serve that movie you bought from them and have no legal way to back it up? the nintendo eshop had less than 20years before closing and people still have functional games from the year it first came out
physical and preferrably lacking any phone home style drm has proven time and time again one of the only practical and generally legal ways to resell or keep through out your lifetime
@castironflower you're kind of accomplishing the point of my thread...
I'm trying to get people to realize that they don't own these things at all. DRM is an important part of it, but DRM itself doesn't really impact that you have never "owned" a copy of a movie you bought. Just a license to consume it for the life of the medium. (Disc, paperback, Amazon prime video, whatever.)
@nyquildotorg but my point is that its the relative life of the medium that drm threatens and again no one here really means owns as in ip
Doctorow, the original quotation, was saying it relative to enshittification and services you paid for losing features
the issue isnt about black and white good or bad, simply industry wide decreases in value per $ that drm and mainly relevant laws have allowed to take place
I have pirated things in the past, will probably pirate things in the future. My intent is not to say how awful piracy is or to support the idea of IP rights, it's to help make everyone understand that they're using the word "owning" inaccurately when talking about licensed IP.
You do not own that film you "bought a DVD of."
When talking about IP, "buying" and "owning" are just not the same thing, and they never have been.
You'd probably be well-served to think of consuming licensed IP as a rental, because that's really what it is.
You purchase the right to consume the content for the life of the distribution medium. If it's a DVD, you own the right to consume the film for as long as the DVD remains playable. As soon as the DVD gets stepped on or scratched or worn out, you're out of luck.
With digital "purchases" it's exactly the same thing, except that it gives the seller the ability to end the life of the medium whenever they want. Which is absolutely gross, but it's a grossness you should understand.
@nyquildotorg Right! Not even before this was an issue did we ever OWN the product itself. To be fair, advertisements made it sound as though we did though: Get YOUR copy now. Own YOUR own copy on VHS or DVD.
That said, it didn't take much brain power to figure out the power of YOUR COPY only last until, as you pointed out, the copy (medium) failed.
This reminds me of a favorite late-stage capitalism effect from the early 2000s: FlexPlay rentals.
It was essentially a DVD out of a vending machine like RedBox, except the DVD came in an airtight package. When you open it, it comes into contact with oxygen which immediately starts degrading the disc leaving it unplayable after ~48 hours.
It was a disposable Rental DVD.
Edit: turns out DivX was a different shitty rental scheme, what I'm remembering was called FlexPlay. Thanks @nytpu!
@nyquildotorg I believe what you're remembering with the degrading discs is “FlexPlay”. DivX required you to have a special DVD player that would phone home to a server to charge you for a watch before it would play a DivX “rental” DVD. Gotta keep the scummy DRM measures straight :P
@nytpu
DivX was the worst scheme. I had to explain to so many people that they would have to pay a fee every time to watch the disk they had purchased. @nyquildotorg
@nyquildotorg I keep trying to explain to people that we've never owned the contents of physical software, audio, or video media - your purchase always represented only a usage license.
Literally the only difference now is that the always-on internet gives rightsholders the ability to enforce these draconian licenses by cutting off your access - where previously this would have required barging into your home and ripping a disc out of your hands.
@HunterZ@nyquildotorg Ownership is often not absolute. You may own a house, but you have conditions like right of ways. You may own a pet, but there are rules on mistreatment. Etc. In the case of DVD, ownership of the media does not include the right to replicate the art, let alone sell copies. That much is fair. On the other end, the expectation if you bought it outright is that you can play it whenever you like. And breaking that does not seem fair. Not at all.
@huitema@nyquildotorg there's a subtle but important difference here: When you buy a disc, you don't own the disc or anything on it - all you own is a license to access the contents of the disc under specific conditions.
When you pay for the ability to watch a movie via Amazon streaming or whatever, the license is very similar, but they now have much greater control over your access.
The laws were always draconian; the real difference is they can be enforced more easily and arbitrarily now.
@nyquildotorg@HunterZ
I am not sure that's how DVDs were sold 10 or 20 years ago. People were seeing that as the equivalent of VHS tapes, much like CDs were the equivalent of vinyl. People understood the DRM part, as in "keep paying the piper". They certainly had no expectation that it could just "go blank" on the mere wishes of the seller.
@nyquildotorg@huitema yep, it's always been that way - but nobody paid attention because it wasn't really enforceable without someone breaking your door down and ripping the media out of your hands.
Now it can be enforced simply by setting a flag in a database on a server somewhere, so it's much harder to take for granted.
@nyquildotorg@HunterZ No it did not. I don't believe there is a law that says the publisher of a book can come to my house and remove from my libraries the books that they don't want me to read anymore. If you know of a law that says that, please point me to it.
@huitema@HunterZ publishers decide to stop printing new copies of books all the time, because they no longer think it makes them enough money to make it worth selling them anymore.
Publishers don't care whether you read the books or not, just that you pay them. "Digital distribution" requires a constant expenditure to keep the DRM servers up and running to make it possible for you to access them.
They're never like "we don't want people to read this, delete it!" They just decide that it costs them more money to maintain than they make from new purchases of it.
@nyquildotorg@HunterZ
The initial DVD roll out did not require DRM servers. That came later, after the DRM keys copied in each approved DVD reader leaked. I get that they may decided to not run servers anymore, but there are potential remedies, like publishing the keys for the abandoned products. Just waiting to see if some enterprising lawyers want to mount some kind of class action lawsuit...
@huitema@HunterZ in the analogy I've been using, DVD is analogous to a paperback. They don't remove them from users, they just decide it's not worth it to make more of them to sell. This makes them "out of print" which means nobody can buy it. Existing copies work until the media wears out, at which point the licenses to use them are void.
@huitema@HunterZ I'm not trying to say that I think it should be this way; I'm just trying to explain that it has always been this way.
Regardless of the media format in which the intellectual property is monetized, the only thing that's been purchased is a license to consume the IP under specified scenarios.
"But what about copyright-free works?!"
Same situation, just with fewer specified scenarios.
@nyquildotorg
In Germany (and some other places) you have the right to have private copies.
The main use are CD copies of music on portable players.
You can copy anything as long as you don't break a copy protection.
I guess DVDs are a gray area. Recording from video-out seems ok.
@nyquildotorg I think most people are objecting to the ability to revoke access to something you’ve bought. In the instance of a DVD or a book, the publisher or distributor can lose rights to continue publishing the book or DVD, but for people who already have it, they can continue to use it. That’s not the case with streaming/hosted/saasified stuff
@jerry I understand. But, because I know what's actually being purchased, I know not to make that kind of purchase in the first place.
A record or a cassette or a DVD or a paperback or whatever has a limited and unpredictable lifespan, which is factored into its cost. If it wears out or breaks, you aren't entitled to a new copy of it just because you purchased it previously
But with digital purchases, the lifespan is actually both more unpredictable and less unpredictable simultaneously. (It won't suffer from wear like a physical copy, but it will get disabled by the IP owner eventually, either intentionally or as a ramification of changing DRM schemes.)
I think the important thing is understanding what your purchases actually entail rather than misunderstanding it and using that misunderstanding as a philosophical position excusing theft 🤷
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