Ownership rights are buried in the fine print and downloading or buying physical copies may be the only ways to keep your favourites
*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.
If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.
I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
What? Where are you seeing this issue?
I grabbed a Panasonic UHD player and it’s been a dream. Zero ads, HDMI control so I can use the same remote that works with my TV and receiver, it has full Atmos and Dolby Vision support so the quality is amazing… truly the whole package. And it’s available everywhere you’d expect.
I don’t like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you’re into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.
MakeMKV hasn’t failed to rip a DVD to MKV for me yet. I have hundreds of videos from DVDs.
Most I convert to MP4 using Handbrake to save space and for compatibility.
As for playing, look into running something like a NUC (small PC about 2x the size of Apple TV), with Kodi on it. It can play your entire library either stored on it or on a NAS or practically from any storage on your network, and connect to your TV via HDMI. It’s effectively a local streaming box.
Also depends on the country. It isn’t everywhere. Non-commercial file-sharing is legal in a number of European countries and I’m sure elsewhere.
It could be taken as a sign of the health of the democracy’s function and technically literacy of the population. In a society of tech heads with a highly functional democracy, it would be DRM measures that would be illegal…
Piracy doesn’t take money from artists, just ask Cory Doctorow, a person making their living as a writer while uploading the torrents of his novels himself.
Corporate consolidation is what kills the artists. The studios make less movies per year, so the a list actors go to television and take the roles Rob Morrow used to get.
That’s the neat part: you don’t have to, because copyright was never a property right to begin with.
First, not only are ideas not property, they’re pretty much exactly the opposite of it. I’ll let Thomas Jefferson himself explain this one:
It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
Second, a copyright isn’t a right, either; it’s a privilege. Consider the Copyright Clause: it is one of the enumerated powers of Congress, giving Congress the authority to issue temporary monopolies to creators, for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Note that that’s a power, not an obligation, and the purpose is not “because the creator is entitled to it” or anything similar to that.
Besides, think of it this way: if copyright were actually a property right, the fact that it expires would be unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But it does expire, so it clearly isn’t a property right.
Thanks for sharing! I wish they had the date of publishing listed for this article. I get the feeling it was written 15 years ago, well before streaming music services existed. Would love to see them update this based on the latest technologies and services.
I want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work. Why do they get to still make money off their work 70 years after they died?
Yes, it would probably mean that billion-dollar-movies aren’t viable anymore, and most YouTubers couldn’t live off their videos, but I see that as a good thing.
want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work.
Do you? Because that’s how game developers get their ideas crushed in favor of yet another game as a service that nobody asked for but makes stock holders happy.
And for alternative creators, who would pay? Do they need to be churning content as a job and not because they are inspired?
I get the idea, it’s just that seems hard to pull off
I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making “piracy” legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn’t be. Making “piracy” legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.
Most people would be fine with this in the case of a home user duplicating one or two copies for his kids to watch and as backups. But we have seen whenever a rule permits something, someone will work out the MAXIMUM way in which they can abuse it for profit. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.
Ideally, we could have laws that are really finely built to be specific to that first scenario. But I honestly don’t know how you write those.
Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
I dont think streams have a future either. Look at the amount of abuse potential by companies and how far enshittification already progressed. If you have prime, you now get ads in prime video. Its disgusting.
“Has a future” in this context means “Streaming media without explicit ownership rights will continue to be here/relevant in to the future, unlike the idea of ‘owning’ digital media”
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
Its happening for quite some time now. Recently sony did that on the playstation. Thats why we need to go back to self hosting the files (without drm).
That’s why I’m always interested in self-hosting. I have my own Plex and Jellyfin seedbox server for the private trackers I’m in, with a VPS hosting an OpenVPN to make it look like I’m in a different country, just to make it that much safer. It works damn well.
I never DREAMED Amazon would take away my content I bought! Just because they erased the novel 1984 off of everyone’s Kindles a few years back doesn’t mean leopards would eat MY face.
What would it take to get a “Steam but TV/movies instead of games”? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn’t be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
That, right there, is how you can tell the entire premise itself is ridiculous nonsense: if you buy something, there’s nothing to maintain because every right associated with the purchase is transferred in perpetuity. There is no licensor left to need to maintain an ongoing relationship with.
If Steam “needs” a “license” to continue to host the files its customers have purchased on their behalf, it means somebody fucked up.
Why is licensing so easy with games though? It really seems like there’s this arbitrary difference in how the video games and streaming industries work.
I’m not who you asked, but my opinion is that it comes down to the types of people you’re dealing with and age of the industries. The video game industry isn’t that old, especially in its modern, mega blockbuster age. By its very nature, it’s something that is on or near the leading edge of technology. This means the people involved are usually (though not always) forward thinking and live in the modern world.
By contrast, the motion picture industry is over a century old. It’s deeply established in how it does business and you can see the effects of that entrenchment every time a new technology emerges that affects how people watch film and TV. They went to court to make VCRs illegal. DVDs were too high quality, so they made a self destructing kind of DVD (remember divx before it bizarrely became the name of a codec?). The industry went to war with itself more than once with format wars (VHS vs Beta, HD-DVD vs Blu-ray). This isn’t an industry that handles change well, and they’ve always believed everyone is a lying thief.
All this to say, the video game industry is trying to make money in the modern world, while the TV/film industry is trying to cling to a business model one or two generations out of date because they fear change. There’s no technical reason that a game or a movie couldn’t be licensed for exactly the same amount of time. It’s just how the people with power in both industries operate.
If the movie industry was smart, they’d have looked at what the music industry did and just copy/pasted that. The music industry has 2 kinds of stores, neither of which they involve themselves in running:
Streaming services like Spotify or Tidal. For the most part, all the streamers have the same content and they compete with each other on price and features. AFAIK, none of these services are run by a record label.
Download to own stores, like Amazon or iTunes. You pay a reasonable price and you get a DRM free file you get to keep forever. Again, the stores have largely the same catalogs and compete on price and features. And again, none of the labels own these stores.
Compare that to the TV/film industry who looked at all that and decided to do the opposite. They run their own streaming only stores that are all bleeding money instead of fostering competition by encouraging more places like Netflix to start up. They don’t, to the best of my knowledge, run any stores where you can download a DRM free video file after paying a reasonable price. This whole industry is fucked, but it’s so massive it can absorb decades of bad decisions because there’s enough good actual product that people will pay for. And that insulation from their shit decision making and their fear of change is why TV/film licenses are so much more restrictive than game licenses, at least IMO.
It’s hard to say. Look how long it took for the music industry to stop suing their customers en masse and just adapt to a changing market. The film/TV industry hasn’t even begun walking that path. It may never change, but if it does, I suspect it’ll take a very long time.
I think it’s like this: if your game is not on Steam, you won’t sell many copies. Publishers fight to make sure the game is on Steam.
If your movie isn’t on Steam, the company doesn’t care. No one goes to Steam for movies. So Valve has to fight to get the rights to distribute (and compete with streaming services).
But… do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn’t anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
They’ve said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven’t said what it is, but my guess is some kind of “you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM”.
@SorteKanin@thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
Exactly. The licensing and sublicensing structures in TV and film are way more complicated than in video games. They also intentionally license for relatively short durations for tax reasons and other corporate considerations that have nothing to do with the end viewer or consumer.
More and more it is becoming a good idea to store things on your own private equipment. If we don’t demand ownership of our own possessions we will soon own nothing
There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.
All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.
Some reasonable things that could be done:
Money back requirements
Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.
These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.
As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.
All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).
I always thought it should be “unlock”, because that’s more what is happening. you’re not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action… they’ve had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you’re not allowed to see it until you pony up. it’s locked away.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to “follow the rules” unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn’t make anything that isn’t designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they’re also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don’t.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face
We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.
It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.
You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.
Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.
Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?
Unlikely.
I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.
The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.
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I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.
If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.
What? Where are you seeing this issue?
I grabbed a Panasonic UHD player and it’s been a dream. Zero ads, HDMI control so I can use the same remote that works with my TV and receiver, it has full Atmos and Dolby Vision support so the quality is amazing… truly the whole package. And it’s available everywhere you’d expect.
I don’t like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you’re into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.
MakeMKV and Handbrake are godsends.
MakeMKV hasn’t failed to rip a DVD to MKV for me yet. I have hundreds of videos from DVDs.
Most I convert to MP4 using Handbrake to save space and for compatibility.
As for playing, look into running something like a NUC (small PC about 2x the size of Apple TV), with Kodi on it. It can play your entire library either stored on it or on a NAS or practically from any storage on your network, and connect to your TV via HDMI. It’s effectively a local streaming box.
For DVDs, I’ve never had an issue. They just amplified the BS on BluRays tenfold.
deleted by creator
My library almost got wiped out when my backup HDD started to fail. Managed to duplicate it onto a new SSD, now I’m fine.
Don’t trust services, trust yourself.
If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.
Yeah archive then
Piracy is only illegal because we made it so. We can change that.
Also depends on the country. It isn’t everywhere. Non-commercial file-sharing is legal in a number of European countries and I’m sure elsewhere.
It could be taken as a sign of the health of the democracy’s function and technically literacy of the population. In a society of tech heads with a highly functional democracy, it would be DRM measures that would be illegal…
How do you change that without completely stripping property rights away from artists though? Not just corporate IP, but all artists?
Piracy doesn’t take money from artists, just ask Cory Doctorow, a person making their living as a writer while uploading the torrents of his novels himself.
Corporate consolidation is what kills the artists. The studios make less movies per year, so the a list actors go to television and take the roles Rob Morrow used to get.
Is it fine for a billion dollar company to ripoff smaller artists? It’s a form of piracy, so this would be allowed, too.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
ripoff smaller artists
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s the neat part: you don’t have to, because copyright was never a property right to begin with.
First, not only are ideas not property, they’re pretty much exactly the opposite of it. I’ll let Thomas Jefferson himself explain this one:
Second, a copyright isn’t a right, either; it’s a privilege. Consider the Copyright Clause: it is one of the enumerated powers of Congress, giving Congress the authority to issue temporary monopolies to creators, for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Note that that’s a power, not an obligation, and the purpose is not “because the creator is entitled to it” or anything similar to that.
Besides, think of it this way: if copyright were actually a property right, the fact that it expires would be unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But it does expire, so it clearly isn’t a property right.
I think what we should do is to have better non-piracy ways of owning things instead of “making piracy legal” (what does that even mean?)
Something like this: https://www.eff.org/pages/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
Thanks for sharing! I wish they had the date of publishing listed for this article. I get the feeling it was written 15 years ago, well before streaming music services existed. Would love to see them update this based on the latest technologies and services.
The EFF’s concept was from the Napster days, but I think this was written later on.
Looking into the metadata of the included PDF version reveals that it’s from 2004, so even a bit older than that.
Wow good find using the pdf metadata!
I want to see a world where content creators are simply paid by the hour, while they work. Why do they get to still make money off their work 70 years after they died?
Yes, it would probably mean that billion-dollar-movies aren’t viable anymore, and most YouTubers couldn’t live off their videos, but I see that as a good thing.
Do you? Because that’s how game developers get their ideas crushed in favor of yet another game as a service that nobody asked for but makes stock holders happy.
And for alternative creators, who would pay? Do they need to be churning content as a job and not because they are inspired?
I get the idea, it’s just that seems hard to pull off
I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making “piracy” legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn’t be. Making “piracy” legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.
Most people would be fine with this in the case of a home user duplicating one or two copies for his kids to watch and as backups. But we have seen whenever a rule permits something, someone will work out the MAXIMUM way in which they can abuse it for profit. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.
Ideally, we could have laws that are really finely built to be specific to that first scenario. But I honestly don’t know how you write those.
Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
I dont think streams have a future either. Look at the amount of abuse potential by companies and how far enshittification already progressed. If you have prime, you now get ads in prime video. Its disgusting.
Probably has a future? It’s already here.
“Has a future” in this context means “Streaming media without explicit ownership rights will continue to be here/relevant in to the future, unlike the idea of ‘owning’ digital media”
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
I remember that time. I rented a couple of apple movies when netflix wasnt a thing.
This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.
Its happening for quite some time now. Recently sony did that on the playstation. Thats why we need to go back to self hosting the files (without drm).
deleted by creator
If purchasing isn’t ownership, piracy isn’t stealing.
That’s why I’m always interested in self-hosting. I have my own Plex and Jellyfin seedbox server for the private trackers I’m in, with a VPS hosting an OpenVPN to make it look like I’m in a different country, just to make it that much safer. It works damn well.
Leopards ate my face.
I never DREAMED Amazon would take away my content I bought! Just because they erased the novel 1984 off of everyone’s Kindles a few years back doesn’t mean leopards would eat MY face.
🏅
Just another victim of WEF.
What would it take to get a “Steam but TV/movies instead of games”? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn’t be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn’t last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
That, right there, is how you can tell the entire premise itself is ridiculous nonsense: if you buy something, there’s nothing to maintain because every right associated with the purchase is transferred in perpetuity. There is no licensor left to need to maintain an ongoing relationship with.
If Steam “needs” a “license” to continue to host the files its customers have purchased on their behalf, it means somebody fucked up.
Why is licensing so easy with games though? It really seems like there’s this arbitrary difference in how the video games and streaming industries work.
I’m not who you asked, but my opinion is that it comes down to the types of people you’re dealing with and age of the industries. The video game industry isn’t that old, especially in its modern, mega blockbuster age. By its very nature, it’s something that is on or near the leading edge of technology. This means the people involved are usually (though not always) forward thinking and live in the modern world.
By contrast, the motion picture industry is over a century old. It’s deeply established in how it does business and you can see the effects of that entrenchment every time a new technology emerges that affects how people watch film and TV. They went to court to make VCRs illegal. DVDs were too high quality, so they made a self destructing kind of DVD (remember divx before it bizarrely became the name of a codec?). The industry went to war with itself more than once with format wars (VHS vs Beta, HD-DVD vs Blu-ray). This isn’t an industry that handles change well, and they’ve always believed everyone is a lying thief.
All this to say, the video game industry is trying to make money in the modern world, while the TV/film industry is trying to cling to a business model one or two generations out of date because they fear change. There’s no technical reason that a game or a movie couldn’t be licensed for exactly the same amount of time. It’s just how the people with power in both industries operate.
If the movie industry was smart, they’d have looked at what the music industry did and just copy/pasted that. The music industry has 2 kinds of stores, neither of which they involve themselves in running:
Compare that to the TV/film industry who looked at all that and decided to do the opposite. They run their own streaming only stores that are all bleeding money instead of fostering competition by encouraging more places like Netflix to start up. They don’t, to the best of my knowledge, run any stores where you can download a DRM free video file after paying a reasonable price. This whole industry is fucked, but it’s so massive it can absorb decades of bad decisions because there’s enough good actual product that people will pay for. And that insulation from their shit decision making and their fear of change is why TV/film licenses are so much more restrictive than game licenses, at least IMO.
Convincing analysis. I guess the question is, if we assume this is the case, will the industry ever heal?
It’s hard to say. Look how long it took for the music industry to stop suing their customers en masse and just adapt to a changing market. The film/TV industry hasn’t even begun walking that path. It may never change, but if it does, I suspect it’ll take a very long time.
I think it’s like this: if your game is not on Steam, you won’t sell many copies. Publishers fight to make sure the game is on Steam.
If your movie isn’t on Steam, the company doesn’t care. No one goes to Steam for movies. So Valve has to fight to get the rights to distribute (and compete with streaming services).
But… do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn’t anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
No. That’s why.
The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can’t take that away.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership
They’ve said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven’t said what it is, but my guess is some kind of “you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM”.
Yeah I don’t trust the good will of corporations, even the ones I personally like
@SorteKanin @thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
Any idea why there is this discrepancy between TV and games?
Money. It’s much better if you can sell the same thing over and over again.
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
Other comments are wrong, its complicated residual structures on tv/movies.
Exactly. The licensing and sublicensing structures in TV and film are way more complicated than in video games. They also intentionally license for relatively short durations for tax reasons and other corporate considerations that have nothing to do with the end viewer or consumer.
More and more it is becoming a good idea to store things on your own private equipment. If we don’t demand ownership of our own possessions we will soon own nothing
Don’t disagree but surely it’s not impossible to add some regulations to protect the consumers here.
Legislation is always years behind tech.
Which means it’s just about due.
While possible, by the time it comes around it’ll be too late.
There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.
All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.
Some reasonable things that could be done:
These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.
As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.
All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).
Another thing to add - these services can’t use the word ‘buy’ because that implies ownership. They should be forced to use a word like ‘rent’.
Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.
I always thought it should be “unlock”, because that’s more what is happening. you’re not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action… they’ve had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you’re not allowed to see it until you pony up. it’s locked away.
You will own nothing and
like ithave no recourse.The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to “follow the rules” unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn’t make anything that isn’t designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they’re also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don’t.
The whole thing needs to go, all of it.
We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.
It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.
You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.
Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.
Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?
Unlikely.
I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.
The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.