No. If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it. If it starts falling apart, you can repair it. If a cd gets a scratch you can repair it. You can store it in a climate controlled environment. All of these things are in your hands. Some people will burn their books or toss them. Some will preserve them for centuries.
The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.
Nit: It's not protected by DRM, it's protected by copyrights. It's still against the law in most places to violate copyrights, even if there's no DRM involved.
But it's equally important that where the copying would otherwise be allowed under copyright rules, anti tampering DRM laws (like DMCA 1201) make it criminal to perform or aid that copying.
That's why DRM protection for its own sake needs to get tossed. It's a massive overreach.
Yes - it's non-trivial to figure out for the first time, but if we're allowed to share such information, it only needs to be figured out once. Each subsequent copy after the first is trivial.
Maybe we should be given a lifetime "license" for the digital goods we buy. For example, if I bought a digital copy of a game or a movie and the company went out of business, I would be allowed to obtain and use a bootleg copy. Ideally, we should be allowed to download it from anywhere, including other stores, but that seems unlikely.
Why only my lifetime? If I buy a copyright protected work, the doctrine of first sale asserts that I have the right to transfer it to anyone else, and if I die before doing so, whoever inherits me should have the rights to access to every single copyrighted thing I ever bought.
Perhaps anybody that uses the term “Buy” or “Forever” should risk the content falling into the public domain should they cease to uphold their service requirements of the contract they made.
Just to be clear for anyone who didn’t read TFA, the digital copies were given out as a bonus with purchases of physical media. Sure someone may have made a different purchasing decision if they knew the streaming platform would be going away eventually, but it’s not like they took back their DVDs.
Just to be clear for anyone who thinks that makes Sony's actions acceptable in any way, it does not.
Sony took from the customer what they sold. That they legally "allowed" themselves to do this in fine print while telling their customers otherwise makes it even more scummy, not less.
Sure, but that's a lot of effort. And if you want to copy your streams illegally or pirate duplicates you can do that too, which also involves effort.
I'm just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it's degraded, they're upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with all of it, but probably most of it. So there's already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you're doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.
Having AC and bookshelves is not fancy or hard. Books with decent paper can and do last centuries. Books with really crappy paper last decades and are generally still usable if you’re careful. DVDs last a stinking long time, too.
All you’re saying is that physical things aren’t eternal. Yes everybody knows that. Digital things aren’t generally eternal either. I accept that. But look at the timeframes.
Making copies isn't fancy. It's just illegal because IP brokers have too much power and made it so. It's a commonsense measure that you could do with most forms of purchased media, increasingly trivially until said IP brokers succeeded in roping the government into threatening people who did so, and so now less people do so. To promise that a digital copy would be accessible forever and then rescind that access without offering a download is straightforwardly fraud
That is incorrect. We still have perfectly fine vinyls from the 1970s and that's just us. No climate controlling or anything like that.
If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
>If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
Remember to re-rip as lossless (e.g. flac) while you still have those CDs.
Vinyl doesn't degrade with time, but it does degrade each time you play it. A heavily played album does not sound the same as a new one. The rate of degradation probably depends to some degree on your specific turntable and needle. (Of course, a worn-out record has its own special charm.)
And I've certainly lost all the MP3's I had from 25 years ago to 15 years ago. God only knows what old hard drive they were on that got tossed. I hadn't listened to them in years, of course, once Spotify's library grew large enough.
If you deliberately throw out your record collection, possibly because you no longer like that style of music that's OK and not the thing we are debating here.
I do still listen to those records from 20 years ago.
We are also not talking about you renting music. That's OK if you decide you'd rather rent your music and are OK to loose access to it at any point in time at which Spotify or a rights owner may pull it from rental access.
We are talking about music that someone bought to own, albeit with DRM because copying. That's OK too but then Sony can't pull something like this without valid outrage being directed at them. The expectation was that I can listen to this in 75 years if I so choose.
You are reasoning from what might be better described as an artifact of a limited period in time that will never come again reasoning from happenstance as if it were a fundamental source of meaning.
It's trivial with backups to retain digital data forever. Even going just a bit further back in time books and vinyl can last a lifetime. What you are hanging your argument on is the lack of durability of optical disks a factor for ~40 years vs the inherent infinite durability of files forever after.
We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
The interests of rights holders is rarely aligned with the public. Its a multitude of barren fields that have never yielded anything because they are capable of buying art but not capable of making it. Even creatives have largely been compensated for their work many times over and are largely offering society bondage in return for nothing. More manure than fertile field. I suppose this is an overly long way to say fuck em.
Instead of quite frankly over complicated nonsense just don't legally let people use the term buy if the company can by any means whatsoever reclaim their rights EVER. They should have to use the word rent and give a duration and that duration should be enforced. The simplest way to enforce this is if you use the word buy you cannot encumber the PURCHASE with DRM whatsoever.
Current rights holders should have to provide a means to remove existing DRM. Failure to do so should imply forfeiting the entire purchase price. Rights holders that offer rentals and don't meet the duration should have to offer a prorated refund for the time stolen from users.
The sky wouldn't fall. People would still make movies, music, and write books.
> We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
Not only that, it's copyrights which are supposed to expire. The idea that physical media should be expected to degrade through the passage of time sooner than works will enter into the public domain is absurd.
After the copyright expires it's no longer a copyrighted work and then you're not circumventing DRM that protects a copyrighted work.
The real problem is that circumvention tools are prohibited regardless of what you use them for, so then they use the same DRM system on works that are still under copyright and you nominally can't provide someone with tools to break the DRM on the ones in the public domain. (In practice people just ignore the law or distribute circumvention tools from servers in other countries.)
It's not completely obvious that it actually works this way. For example, if someone's "DRM system" is that the box it comes in is screwed shut and you're intended to use some I/O pins provided on the outside, does that mean a screw driver is a circumvention tool and therefore screw drivers are illegal? Obviously problematic if so, but in the reverse case where anyone else using the same system for something other than protecting a copyrighted work means anyone can distribute tools to circumvent it, third parties would just put public domain works behind the same DRM system as copyrighted ones so that anyone could distribute circumvention tools. The prohibition on circumvention tools is batshit crazy.
So for example, if a diligent company offered a DRM removal tool, perhaps in escrow, for its media for which copyright had expired, it would be breaking the DCMA. Can DRM media be considered to be in the public domain if it is locked up by a company that’s probably out of business by the time copyright has expired, and breaking the encryption is illegal under DCMA? If the company is still in business, I suppose they could publish the keys publicly
I get your point but I think your timeline is off. I don't have concrete data but from personal experience (myself, friends family) is say it's trivial to keep books, records, even newspapers for decades. CDs in my world only go back to the 1990s.
Tapes definitely didn't
> If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it.
Copying it is illegal in some countries, even if it is purely for private use - the UK and some EU countries, probably others around the world. The UK tried to introduce a private use exception but it was only legal under EU law (this was pre-Brexit) if the copyright holders were compensated for it (which was not part of the UK law).
This is why the analogy with "wear and tear" doesn't apply to digital goods, it doesn't even make any sense. Wear and tear is something that applies to physical things in the real world, not information, specifically information in a digital format.
The problem here is not physical things that are the medium for information, it's the information itself that somehow people want to control.
The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.