The History and Future of Digital Ownership

I’d like to get the community’s feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we’re really doing is purchasing a “license” to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.

Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?

P.S. I know there’s pirating and all, but that’s not the focus of my question.

jordanlund,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

“Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media?”

Because Sony doesn’t have the right to permanently sell you the content, that can only be done by the original rights holder.

So when Sony “sold” people every season of Mythbusters, they were limited by their contract witb Discovery. Once Discovery altered that contract, it becomes illegal for Sony to keep distributing it.

For physical sales, there’s the “First Sale Doctrine”:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Rights holder produces physical product. Books, movies, games, whatever. Bulk sells them to distributors, who then have the right to sell it to retailers, who then have the right to sell to you, the general public.

And then you have the right to do with it whatever you want.

There is no digital first sale doctrine.

MacAttak8,

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned this but a lot of physical discs nowadays are nothing more than glorified license checks, especially with games. Even buying the physical version does not guarantee you safety from these problems.

FlavoredButtHair,
@FlavoredButtHair@lemmy.world avatar

Piracy will always win whether corporations like it or not. I’ll always try and buy physical copies of games. But movies and TV shows need to be on my hard drive if the price isn’t right for a physical copy.

I have my fair share of streaming services. Peacock for WWE, prime video well cause of Amazon prime. But if I do wanna watch a movie or show, then I will have to sail the high seas.

Alexstarfire,

Digital ownership is an oxymoron.

BaardFigur, (edited )

It’s fine as long as you get the actual files, and not some DRM bullshit

Alexstarfire,

Sure, but the former basically doesn’t exist which is why it’s an oxymoron.

BaardFigur,

It does exist. I have several cds and dvds myself. It’s being phased out though, for internet based drm. Which I admit is not that great. But I wouldn’t say it’s quite gone yet

Alexstarfire,

That’s not the digital being talked about. Though, you’re technically correct. That’s why I’ve got bookshelves of DVDs and Blu-Rays. But, they also have DRM in various forms. Only difference is you “own” it. Pretty sure decrypting the contents to copy it is technically illegal. Sure, they can’t take that copy away, but it doesn’t last forever either. I’ve already had a few DVDs crap out on me.

Oaksey,

Also related is the fact that DVDs and Blu-rays can be region locked. Years ago I bought media from another region as it wasn’t available in my region yet, happily played it on my PC but later when I went to play it in my PlayStation, nope! Even when there was media, they tried to artificially restrict usage.

Mandy,

Expect, there is no future in digital ownership.

You will own nothing and you WILL be happy.

Corkyskog,

That’s cool, I just won’t buy anything then.

ryannathans,

Digital ownership can be done properly but you need NFT game licences

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I already get a receipt when I buy digital products without needing to involve block-chain bs though.

ryannathans,

You can’t trade that…

Kolanaki, (edited )
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Sure I can. You’ll just be getting a receipt, though. Just like if you traded an NFT.

mammut, (edited )

Everybody is shitting on this idea, but there was actually a GitHub repo a long time ago that proposed something like this.

IIRC, the idea was that your licenses would be associated with your private key. There would be independent resellers who could sell keys (in conjunction with publishers), and there would be distributors who actually distribute the data that your license then allows you to use.

It seemed like a cool idea, because it basically would make it so that there is a standard for licenses, making launcher exclusivity impossible.

helenslunch,

Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media?

Because the company you purchase it from has to host and serve the data to you. For how long? Eternity?

They should probably stop calling it “buying” and call it a long-term rental but that won’t be good for their bottom line.

If you want to keep your data forever, buy a Blu-Ray.

sederx,

If you want to keep your data forever, buy a Blu-Ray.

which will degrade and become unusable in what? 20 years?

Corkyskog,

Probably closer to 100 years if stored and handled properly.

godzillabacter,

I think the point is more so why are digital purchased DRM’ed and prohibited from local storage in so many ways. The historical argument is “well you’re not buying it, you’re buying a license to use it for as long as we wish to provide it”, but why does it necessarily need to be that way. And more generally, from the standpoint of artistic/media preservation, as BluRay releases continue to decrease and console video game releases become continually more digital-only, these non-archivable or locked-without-server-license-validation media results in IP that at some point in time, this media could be permanently lost.

Personally, I feel this is unacceptable. The media we consume forms a huge portion of our culture, and is just as much an example of artistic expression as painting. While I thoroughly believe artists/companies should be able to charge for these properties, I do not believe that when it is no longer profitable for them to support the system, that these pieces of media should simply be discarded with no method for future recovery and preservation.

Chadus_Maximus,

Simple. When you license your show to a streaming platform, it is more lucrative to put in an arbitrary end date on the off-chance the platform decides to renew the license. Consumers have no say in this so they just have to take what is given.

Want to stream it forever? Be prepared to pay an exorbitant amount of money because the showrunnere REALLY don’t want that.

helenslunch, (edited )

why are digital purchased DRM’ed

Because piracy

E: if one of the downvoters would like to provide a better answer, I’m ready to learn from you.

godzillabacter,

Yes, but most DRM has been circumvented in one way or another. DRM primarily continues to keep law-abiding citizens from easily acquiring a copy of media they rightfully own as opposed to preventing piracy.

Though if institutions insist on utilizing DRM for prevention of privacy, I do think that DRM should be built to fail after a meaningful timeframe, at worst the expiry of the copyright for the material. Unfortunately many pieces of media, particularly video games, are abandoned and unsupported long before their copywriter expires. Abandonware in general is not well handled by modern copywrite law.

helenslunch,

Yes, but most DRM has been circumvented in one way or another.

Yes I mentioned earlier that it didn’t make sense.

gjoel,

Why I don’t get is why they fight so hard to promote piracy though. It’s not enough that it’s free, it also has to be easier?

helenslunch,

Well. They don’t. Quite the opposite. I can’t tell you what they’re thinking but my best guess is so they can point to measures taken at their board meetings and say “this is what we’re doing to fight piracy”.

shortwavesurfer,

I just bought a taylor swift album and it gave me a zip file full of mp3s (wow).

hispeedzintarwebz,
@hispeedzintarwebz@infosec.pub avatar

Damn least they could do is give you FLAC…even Bandcamp does that

harry_balzac,

Let’s not forget that this is just as much Discoverys fault as Sony

BolexForSoup, (edited )
BolexForSoup avatar

asfasdfasdf

heygooberman,
@heygooberman@lemmy.today avatar

Hmmm…never thought of it like that. That certainly does put things into perspective. Even so, it does feel like we’re being cheated out of our money when we pay for something and are not able to access it later. I’m currently on an audiobook platform called Libro.fm, and when I purchase an audiobook there, I am given the option to download a separate audio file that allows me to listen to the audiobook in another media player (e.g. VLC). Can’t these movie and tv show platforms do the same thing?

BolexForSoup, (edited )
BolexForSoup avatar

asfasdf

gloog,

It depends on what their license with the copyright holder says. If the platform is the copyright owner, then they absolutely could do that if they wanted to (unless the media includes other sublicensed media, in which case they'd possibly need that owner to also allow it - that's related to why sometimes certain media just can't legally be purchased anywhere). Most of the time those owners don't want to allow that.

It's a legal problem, not a technical one.

Veraxus,
Veraxus avatar

DRM is unethical.

If you can't download something and back it up and use it how you like, then it's not a purchase - no matter how much you paid - it's just a rental.

Ban DRM.

Mahlzeit,

Digital media means that there is an ongoing service behind it. The servers use energy. The parts age and break. It requires a continuing feed of labor and resources to keep going.

Imagine a streaming service that is all based on buying media, instead of subscription or renting. Then suppose all the customers somehow decide that the media they own are enough for now (maybe because money is tight, because inflation). With no more cash coming in, the service goes bankrupt.

In principle, you could have a type of license that allows you to get a new copy in any way you can (torrent, etc.). That would be hard to police, though.

FWIW, owning a physical copy isn’t all that, either. There are various ways built-in to make life harder for customers, like geo-blocking. Bypassing these tends to be a criminal offense.

dandi8,

And yet, somehow, GOG and Itch still exist, allowing you to download games completely DRM-free, as often as you like. If they ever go out of business, you can still use your local copies forever.

How do they do it? A mystery...

Mahlzeit,

That takes a lot less bandwidth than streaming. All business have fixed costs. Blockbuster Video had to pay rent for physical stores, for example. Delivering via the net is relatively cheap compared to stores or physical postage. I’d be surprised if GOG’s cost aren’t much lower than anything physical.

dandi8,

Well then let me actually download the movie like it was a game, then! And how exactly does it take less bandwidth? It's still tens or hundreds of gigabytes to download every time someone wants to install a game, most people only use the offline installers as backups.

Mahlzeit,

But how often do you install the same game? A streaming movie needs to be (partially) downloaded every time someone watches it. But yes, I shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this ends up being a higher bandwidth cost per dollar purchasing price.

When you keep a backup, then the download was basically just a way of delivering a physical copy. I answered why we can’t have online property.

As to why many don’t allow you to keep a private copy. For the obvious reason: To maintain control over their property and monetize it to the highest degree possible.

shalafi,

Thank you! Lemmy seems to believe everything digital is free forever. There are real costs associated with maintaining infrastructure.

Having said that, I pay Google $100/yr. for 2TB of storage. I steal all my media and place it there. Local backups as well, of course.

Y’all do whatever works for you, but don’t whine when these companies drop “your” media.

EliasChao,

There’s a case to be made about “buying” digital media and being able to keep the file in your local storage, that way it wouldn’t cost anything to the publisher when you play the content.

I understand the piracy implications, but most of the content is pirated anyway regardless of DRM, so the only ones affected are those who actually pay for content.

sederx,

Thank you! Lemmy seems to believe everything digital is free forever. There are real costs associated with maintaining infrastructure.

then dont fucking call it “buying”

sederx,

Bypassing these tends to be a criminal offense.

lol no, nobody is in jail for ripping their stuff or even straight up torrenting it.

Mahlzeit,

If it doesn’t bother you that you are threatened with jail over something you might do with your own property, in your own home, without affecting others, then… Well, I can see that you would be living a very jolly life indeed. Good on ya.

Corkyskog,

If you live in America you’re threatened with jail every time you go into public. The average person unknowingly breaks 3 federal laws a day, and an avalanche of state and local violations. And these are almost all selectively enforced.

Outright innocence is not enough to escape the brutality of detention.

Mahlzeit,

Hah! Yeah, that’s so weird when seen from my culture (Germany). Here, prosecutors must enforce all laws on the books. Anything less would be a criminal offense. The actual day-to-day problems are very similar, though. It is kinda infuriating that the English system works as well as it does.

gjoel,

Digital media means that there is an ongoing service behind it.

I could download my file and be done with it. If I throw away or damage my super fragile bluray I’m not entitled to a new copy. I don’t even need to be able to redownload (although it’s a nice service). It means there is an ongoing service behind it because they decide it and because they are afraid I will share with my friends - which is about as difficult as finding the media elsewhere online.

With no more cash coming in, the service goes bankrupt.

Same issue with physical media. Suddenly your expensive factory is idle, your employees don’t produce anything. We still get to buy movies and not rent them perpetually.

Mahlzeit,

I could download my file and be done with it.

That’s true, but that’s kinda delivering a physical copy via the net, and you pay the storage medium. I understood OP as talking specifically about online “property”.

Dasnap,
@Dasnap@lemmy.world avatar

I have my home server backing up my whole GOG library.

dandi8,

What do you use for automating the backups?

Dasnap,
@Dasnap@lemmy.world avatar

github.com/RikudouSage/GogDownloader/

CaptainSpaceman,

Im gonna use a bad word, but NFTs would help with this issue

True digital ownership thats censor proof is pretty legit imo

GrayBoltWolf,

Or just let us download the actual game/movie/song like the good old days.

cmnybo,

That’s what GOG lets you do for games.

CaptainSpaceman,

I didnt know you could download from GoG, thought it was all in browser. Thats pretty sick tbh

helenslunch,

GOG is a last bastion of freedom LOL.

If people want to screw devs by pirating games, they’re just going to do that and it’s pretty clear there’s nothing you can do about it

CaptainSpaceman,

Yeah, thats what I did when I bought my NFT game and some NFT mp3s. They ares in my wallet and I can play/ listen forever, steam or Microsoft or epic or google or whatever can never take it away from me.

atocci,
atocci avatar

Where are the streams being hosted though, or where do you download them from? From my understanding, the biggest problem with NFTs is that the NFT itself is nothing more than a token on the blockchain that states you own something, but the files themselves are hosted elsewhere, so if the service hosting the file stops existing, you are left with a token that points to nothing.

CaptainSpaceman,

Depends on the item, the platform its being sold on, etc, but I believe most NFTs are hosted on the IPFS platform which is censor resistant

Some NFTs actually point to physical objects and have the digital token as a “certificate of authenticity”. Ive got a holographic skate deck from a EDM artist shipped to me, has an NFC badge on it for more goodies in the future

The tech is pretty cool, imo, and has a lot of modern use cases.

echo64,

Nfts don’t give you ownership over anything but the nft itself. Everything else is a license system that says, “You can have this because you have an nft,” you know, the exact same system we have now but will more bullshit .

CaptainSpaceman,

The NFT is the item though, and it can be easily resold

echo64,

So? If the licence holder wanted, they could just put an option in for you to sell what you have. The nft does not matter. It is not needed and is just added bullshit

CaptainSpaceman,

How do you think they can force me to sell?

echo64,

Force? No one said force. I am talking about something like steam letting you sell your game. They could if they wanted and it doesn’t need nfts. Nfts are just bullshit coins that serve no real purpose.

Everything you might claim you can do with nfts, you can do today without nfts, or it’s a ponzi scheme.

ryannathans,

NFTs are a necessary prerequisite for trading games with peers without being locked into some bullshit monopoly like steam community trading

mammut, (edited )

This to me would be the potential big benefit. One of the problems right now is that there really isn’t an organization that everyone would trust to just hold onto their licenses without demanding some kind of exclusivity, etc. If Valve is the one holding your license to Borderlands 3, they’re not gonna let you play on Epic using that license. They want you to use their services.

If there’s a third party that is just in charge of licenses, and those licenses work everywhere, that basically makes launcher exclusivity impossible and also makes it so that licenses continue to live even if the launcher dies.

For the record, I think NFTs / Blockchain solutions are typically the stupidest shit in the world, but there was a Blockchain game licensing proposal some years back, and it actually would have avoided some of the vendor lock-in / licenses evaporating when the vendor dies type issues we’re dealing with now.

The problem is just that none of the publishers or launchers would ever play ball with the idea. They stand to make more money by not playing nicely with everyone else.

CaptainSpaceman,

Tbh, the best use case for NFTs in games is IN games. Items, weapons, skins etc would be amazing if they were x-platform and interoperable with many diff games. Imagine using Stormbreaker in Elden Ring without mods, just by importing a weapon OBJ file.

echo64,

you’re still locked in because the licence provider has to recognise the NFT, the lock-in is with the licence provider. all the NFT is, is a ticket that says “I’m allowed”.

it’s the exact same thing but will added bullshit.

if you want a tradable token that doesn’t require lock-in, that token has to have intrinsic value. Like with a physical disk with a movie on it. there is no lock-in to a vendor system, it’s got everything it needs right there. it has intrinsic value.

NFT’s are a bullshit ticket that says “please give me access, you pwomised”, that you can sell if you want. but you could just do the same thing inside the vendors own system and it’s all exactly the same because the vendor has to say yes/no in the end, as the nft has no value.

ish6,

I may be misunderstanding what OP was getting at, but I think the point wasn't that NFTs would enable this option specifically, only that they would prevent the OG license holder from changing the terms of the arrangement after the fact.

helenslunch,

A movie is not an NFT…

nekusoul,
@nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de avatar

It’s quite amazing that these people don’t realize that they’re just reinventing DRM, but worse.

ryannathans,

Less shit. You could actually trade your fucking games and would not be limited to one platform

Chadus_Maximus,

Then those games would be subject to Gresham’s law LMAO. I would never trust a company that allows transfers between platforms.

mammut,

Why would allowing transfer between platforms be a bad thing? You wouldn’t necessarily have to be able to buy on any given platform, but it could be the case that the license allows use on multiple different platforms.

Chadus_Maximus,

You would have a platform to trade games, and another to keep them. The trading platform will be able to undercut the holding platform due to practices such as exclusivity deals. This, in turn, will make the holding platform require a commission fee whenever a game is transferred to it.

If you could get a game for free in the Epic store and transfer it to Steam, where does Steam get the money from?

mammut, (edited )

If you can transfer / buy everywhere, how would there be any exclusivity, though?

Platforms are all already dealing with the possibility that they don’t make money but still have to distribute the games. If you bought a game for $0.99 on Steam 15 years ago, and you download it today, they’re not making money off you. If you download a F2P game via Steam and never buy anything, they lose money. Hell, I’ve never bought anything on Steam, but I’ve probably downloaded terabytes of data from them. They’re not making money on me, except maybe with ads (which would apply to this other scenario too).

The platforms also already have to deal with the issue of not getting paid because you bought / got the game somewhere else. You can buy from GMG, etc. and then download from Steam. And publishers give away games frequently during anniversaries, etc. that you then download from Steam or Epic.

My thinking is that the platforms would obviously want to make money, so they’re going to price compete to make sure you buy it there instead of buying it somewhere else and downloading it from there.

I also think an inevitable outcome of digital distribution in general is that companies are going to start charging for downloads. Digital games are one time purchases requiring lifetime support. They’re not going to let it work that way forever.

Chadus_Maximus, (edited )

Will I suppose that’s where we gotta disagree then. I cannot ever imagine exclusivity deals going away. Unless we somehow manage to get a government-subsidized middleman to track and enforce parity, you’ll always have platforms attracting prospective developers with exclusivity deals. Then you don’t have to compete with pricing at all!

As for your last point, I believe most gamers would tell any company charging for downloads to fuck off. But I can see this actually happening in the future.

mammut,

You know, I’ve routinely been surprised what gamers do and don’t put up with, so I really don’t know what to expect anymore.

I dunno if you remember how gamers responded when Steam came out, but they really, really hated it. And it wasn’t just the issues with slow internet, bugs in Steam, and stuff like that. They seemed to kinda philosophically hate it. Even the gaming magazines ran articles about how it ruined software ownership, it was awful how it made it so that you couldn’t even do things like give your old games to your kids or your friends, etc. And gamer forums had the same kinda complaints. And it was even worse since Valve forced people to start using Steam to keep playing CS, even though CS had previously not required Steam.

But fast forward to some years later, and nobody cares about any of that stuff. Well, I guess they do sometimes. People complained about Epic moving Rocket League to EGS, which was kinda funny since it was moving from a service that had, years prior angered people when it started being required for a different hit multiplayer game.

Anyway, I could see gamers complaining and then just getting onboard 5-10 years later. That’s what they usually do if the developers they like push for it.

echo64,

you’re still limited to one platform, the vendor has to recognise the NFT, and vendors are only going to recognise their own NFT’s that they saw value from selling.

there is no benefit to bullshit NFT tokens, unless you are running a ponzi scheme.

SnuggleSnail,

So… you have the full game encoded in an NFT? That sounds like a shit ton of overhead.

ryannathans,

No… just the licence

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

So what’s the difference? You just reinvented DRM

ryannathans,

You can trade digital games with anyone with no third party involvement

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