Yet another case that demonstrates that as long as DRM is involved (in this case, being restricted to online reading of titles only), you're never actually buying anything, merely renting them indefinitely. http://xkcd.com/488/ keeps being sadly relevant.
It's also such a damn shame that genuine digital purchasing (as in, something that involves DRM-free downloads) is such a rarity outside the music industry. I just can't understand why every other industry (especially the video industry) thinks that offering DRM-free downloads would somehow kill them or whatever when digital music sales have only got better since the wide-scale ditching of DRM, especially since huge video files are much harder to share casually than small music files. There is value in the catalog subscription model that the likes of Netflix offers, but it should really have actual buying options available next to it (ideally, a service could combine both models - pay a lump sum for catalog streaming rights, then actually buy individual titles, and as a bonus, not only do you get DRM-free downloads, but you could also offer extras, formats that aren't possible with streaming, unlimited streaming rights for actually purchased titles since they have the available infrastructure for it, and so on).
I've been able to buy a lot of e-books without DRM (mostly tech books). But still, it is rather ridiculous, I can't help but think that the people of, say, 2050 will look back at the way we have gone about "managing" content in this era and think we were all mad.
Big corporations don't even have a monopoly on multimillion dollar videogames (thanks to Kickstarter), let alone novels or nonfiction books which are typically produced by a small handful of people in a year or two.
A dystopian DRM future is not impossible, but generally I think people do want to "own" things, and eventually we'll see digital goods treated as such legally.
Based solely on what seems to be a technological advantage to those who desire content to be un-DRMed, I'd say that scenario is very unlikely. At least not without an extensive world-wide police state enforcing it.
For many years when I bought a console game I was able to sell that game when I'd finished with it. Japanese[1] companies were especially unhappy with the second-hand market, and took vigorous efforts to stop it. US companies are also keen to prevent this re-sale of games.
Now many games are unable to be sold on.
When I buy a DVD there is a clear benefit to me in being able to play that DVD in my player, no matter where I buy it. Yet DVDs are region locked. VHS tapes had Macrovision anti-copy signals; DVDs had region protections and CSS; BluRay has region protections and several layers of DRM; restrictions continue to get tighter, not more relaxed.
Laws are also getting stricter. The 1996 WIPO treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty) led to the introduction of the DMCA and similar laws in other regions. (Circumventing technical protections is illegal under the DMCA but it's also illegal throughout Europe, with various difference in each country).
I agree with "unlikely", but I'm not so sure about very unlikely.
[1] Japanese companies have been doing this longest, since SNES times. I think, but I could be wrong, that they managed to make second hand sales of games illegal. Maybe they just wanted to do that?
>I can't help but think that the people of, say, 2050 will look back at the way we have gone about "managing" content in this era and think we were all mad.
Only if those people have progressed beyond capitalism and big corporations having control over laws.
Copy protection has been a recurring problem since the early 80s. That's over thirty years. You'd think by now we would have learned our lesson, but I fear it will take another thirty before the powers-that-be start to question the wisdom of copy protection, and another thirty for them to give up.
Why, you are buying it. You just need to be diligent and back stuff up. And if DRM is not easily breakable - avoid buying it altogether. Publishers who use DRM can't be trusted, so backups should be a norm.
That's a USA problem. In most places, interoperability and backups are legally valid reasons to break both DRM systems and EULA's.
So "ignoring DRM" may bea reasonable strategy, but you need to work on your laws to ensure that things that are both socially accepable and morally good (such as breaking DRM to make backups) are not criminalized.
Even if it's illegal, society at large ignores it, and there is nothing practically wrong with ignoring it. Surely the right thing to do would be to nullify the 1201 section altogether, but currently it already makes unrealistic demands on reality and people simply don't consider this restriction valid.
The only thing that is illegal are immoral laws, besides, the culture that DRM laden companies bring to the world is utter trash anyway, we the world can easily do without that.
Nothing of value is lost.
Edit: it seems that again my post ends up as the wrong reply, it's for the grandparent, not the parent. :-S
But the fact that it's illegal has wider implications than the prosecution of the infringing person. For example, it becomes hard to distribute tools to remove DRM, should someone build them. Thus, it is unfeasible that DRM removal could become commonplace, since everyone has to do it for himself, or make a big effort to get help. There can't be legal commercial incentives to help people solve this problem, and even if someone made a free good tool for that, it would be legally attacked if it became popular; that means it probably won't be solved.
Who said those incentives should be commercial. They probably should make a point not to be. But practically this usually happens with placing the tools outside the jurisdiction of DMCA. For example repositories that host libdvdcss are located outside US, since the whole purpose of libdvdcss is to remove DRM from DVDs to enable playing them in open source players (which is naturally 100% fair use - i.e. to view the legally purchased content). And it is widely used - all Linux users basically use it to watch their DVDs.
The level of "mainstream" penetration of such tools will depend on the level of DRM penetration. The more DRM will be pushed on people, the more commonplace the circumvention tools will become. In practice however the developing trend tends to be to use less DRM in various areas, so circumvention tools are kind of not very widespread either.
Are you really so stuck on not breaking the law, just because it is the law? It is the twenty first century, everybody breaks the law either by downloading stuff or by driving too fast or by ripping a cd and putting it on an mp3 player.
For lawyers to take that on there has to be some blood left in the stone.
In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
At that point, you have to go after their backers. In this case its 10s of Japanese publishers, few of whom have US presences. Don't know the law there, but unless the publishers' lawyers were incompetent their liability is limited. I.e. an obvious way is to arrange a package deal to keep transaction costs low for jmanga to buy limited rights to publish derivative works as they did. On the other hand, if the publishers engaged in serious control over jmanga.com's operations there could be openings.
Given the foreign country aspect, Japan Inc. being very unfriendly towards lawsuits, and I suspect relatively small sales (their MVP wasn't particularly viable, and lots of people recognized the trap) I wouldn't expect anyone to try in this case. But I do wonder why no one has in previous cases like this, aside from avoiding going after behemoths like Microsoft when the potential payoff was probably very small (and e.g. Microsoft did offer a path to keep your songs, albeit at some quality loss ... and I can imagine a Microsoft lawyer asking a plaintiff "And you kept the volume turned up to 11? Let's get your hearing tested" :-).
After all, it's efforts that fail in the marketplace that are most likely to shut down; we probably need to wait until a big and for a while successful one goes down in flames....
> In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
But perhaps the court could at least issue an injuction requiring them to unlock the DRM, or find some alternative way of ensuring continued access to the goods they paid for irrespective of whether or not the company stays in business.
It's not classical DRM, it's content can only be read on the site. So someone would have to pay money---for how long?---to maintain access. A bit like Carpathia's problems with the Feds and Megaupload.
Going beyond that would be difficult and expensive. Certainly jmanga.com's licenses don't allow them to publish the content in other ways that would be accessible and yet limited and then there's practical matters, e.g. Amazon wouldn't likely play ball.
And then we come to the original problem I cited: there's no money to speak of to fund such difficult litigation. We're probably talking 8 figures minimum with all the expert witnesses needed, new case law to be forged, the foreign company angle, etc.
Why do you think that would happen? Given the complexes of incentives attached to the judiciary and the legislature, respectively, it seems more likely that new statutes rather than case law would attempt to legitimize this practice, which probably already runs afoul of existing case law.
And if it was likely to happen, wouldn't it happen anyway, even if there were new legislation involved?
The one that clearly says they won't support unlocking cellphones under contract, and doesn't even address the outrage over criminal penalties?
"...neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
This is an awesome petition. Thanks for bringing it to our attention; I've signed it.
That being said, I don't view the cellphone response as particularly progressive. The way it parses for me is "we think your phone should be unlocked if you don't have a contract." It didn't address the criminalization of unlocking cellphones while under a contract. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'd love to hear if I am, but I've read it a few times and I can't find another way to read the response.
I'm inclined to agree ... but on the other hand, from reading the Anime News Network forum topic it seems very likely the people running the company were operating in good faith and that the rug got pulled out from underneath them.
You could effectively ban DRM that depends on active servers or schemes like this where the content is always kept on theirs' by requiring them to post a bond sufficient to refund the customers who've been screwed. Not the full amount, but enough to compensate for value promised but not delivered. It would be essentially declaring it is not in the public interest to allow companies to play these games, but here's a mechanism if you're really determined.
Liability of some sort really needs to be established, and it would be wise for the companies playing these games to do something intelligent before extreme DRM becomes too toxic.
Good faith means less when you're selling an ongoing service and accept money. When they promised an ongoing service to host purchases, they laid the rug out and stood on it.
If a product is bought and sold, it should mean that ownership has been transferred.
If ownership has changed hands, then the previous owner should not be allowed to retain control over the product. DRM, withholding of root passwords, forced updates, it really shouldn't matter. The owner should be the person of total control, and anyone interfering with that should be sent to court as a thief or intruder. This was after all the economic model in USA before DRM was invented.
I asked a lawyer about this. Well, specifically, about the difference between a physical book and an ebook (Kindle). He basically stated that when you buy a physical book, you are, in fact, obtaining a license to read the contents of said book. While you own the physical object, you do not own the contents. You can transfer this "license" to another party (gift it or sell it) but you, in fact, licensing the contents.
It makes a weird kind of sense. I can sell the license to my physical copy of _Neuromancer_, but I cannot sell the contents (or claim to be the author) of _Neuromancer_.
That is actually incorrect. Once you bought the physical book, it is yours. There is no license involved¹, and you may do what ever you want with your property. However, copyright law adds an incursion on top of property rights, which by government law adds a limitation to what the owner of the private property might do.
1) Some books include a legal trick by adding a shrink wrap around the book. The claim is that by breaking such "seal", the owner of the book agrees to a legal binding contract (confusingly called a "License Agreement") with the book publisher. Such practice has a long history of being non-enforceable outside the United States, and a sketchy history within.
The physical book is yours, and in the US through the first sale doctrine you can transfer it to someone else.
But you only have a limited licence to the contents. You can read them, under the Fair Use doctrine you could photocopy or otherwise use a few small excerpts to teach a class or use in your own writing, etc. etc., but you most certainly do not gain a licence to copy the whole book and give or sell copies of it, or to use this example, do the same with a derivative work like a translation.
Surely they were depending on representations by the Japanese companies they were fronting for. Although as we've seen in the anime market, those, at least implicit ones, can be very iffy (Pioneer/Geneon, Bandai).
>> Is there a way to download the manga I have purchased?
It is not possible to download manga from My Page. All digital manga content will no longer be viewable after May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time)
If you care about issues relating to DRM, please spare a few minutes and take action by tweeting at your Congressional representatives. Not only should owner's rights be protected, but people should have the right to circumvent DRM systems when there's no copyright infringement.
For what it's worth, it looks like the preview books simply have every byte XOR'd with 0x42, and you can see the image requests coming in on the Network tab of the Chrome developer tools while you're in the Flash-based reader. (I can't say for sure if the previously-for-sale books have the same scheme though.)
I doubt that this will reach the eyes of most of the users being screwed by the DRM though...
No, if you want to keep it formal - it's not a purchase. It's rental. But since it's presented to people as purchase, people should treat it as purchase. And don't claim that people who buy it are buying any "rights" (i.e. keeping in mind to buy some abstract "rights"). They are buying content.
There isn't a dichotomy between rent and purchase. In both cases, you're buying a bundle of rights with respect to somemthing. You may buy use of something yet be restricted in that use. Consider buying a condo. You "own" the condo, but there are all sorts of restrictions on what you can do.
The real question is: are people aware of the terms of the deal? Are the aware of the specific rights they are purchasing when they buy DRM content? I think they are.
Dichotomy is in perception. Rental can be formally called "buying rights to use it for limited time". Still there are two distinctly perceived use cases (even if not fully formal) - "buying" and "renting". Buying implies owning it, renting implies limited usage (not owning it). Distributed content is presented to people as "purchase", while DRM attempts to limit the use case to "renting". It's misleading and unfair. As long as it's presented as "buying", people should treat it as buying.
Explicitly presenting it as "renting" decreases the attractiveness, that's why DRM inclined distributors mislead their users with avoiding the usage of the "rent" term. But it only strengthens my point - since they rely on implicit perception of buying to attract people, people should treat this interaction as buying and these distributors should not complain when their DRM is scraped.
A lease and a purchase are legally distinct concepts. Generally, a lease is a time-limited acquisition of rights. A purchase is an unlimited (with respect to time) acquisition of rights.
A license can be purchased, even if it does not carry all of the rights associated with the underlying product. A license can also be leased, in which case the license is of a limited duration.
A purchase of a DRM-protected good is a purchase of a license to use an IP on the condition that the usage is subject to a rights management policy. This is not a rental, because the license is not time-limited in the acquisition agreement itself. (Thus, even if the DRM servers were disabled the next day, it would not have been a lease--the terms of the acquisition agreement itself are what matter.)
Renting does not have to involve a lease, as in being time-limited. Renting can be open-ended.
The key differentiating characteristic of renting vs buying is that in renting ownership of the expected good has not changed or has not fully transferred.
When you buy a good, legal ownership (whatever that means in any given jurisdiction) of that specific good has been transferred in full.
Entities using DRM are exploiting not the ownership transfer but the expectations for that good. The corporate, as it almost always is, transfers ownership of a substitute good which requires a license/renting to access the expected good.
The end users therefore have not bought the expected good, but a substitute good plus an access license "option". With DRM, this "option" can be (technically or legally) revoked or is callable at any time thereby disabling access or removing the expected good.
So, the obvious solution is not to buy a substitute good + callable option when you actually want the underlying (expected) good. Otherwise, you are just creating demand for substitute goods and all the fancy methods to create the callable options.
Ownership does not have to be "transferred in full" for something to be a purchase. They key difference with rentals is the lack of time limit or reserved right to revoke the license. The fact that the purchased rights may be fragile does not make it a rental.
I can sell you an easement on my land. It's a purchase, not a rental. But it can be a very limited right nonetheless (e.g. Just the right to cut across the grass to the road). I can sell you a car on the condition you don't repaint it. I can sell you a piece of land on condition that you only use it for a certain purpose. These are all purchases within the common use of the term, even though they effect a partial transfer of rights.
The discussion above is not about formal definition, but about common perception. Common perception of buying is getting full ownership. All other cases are far less common.
In general, the whole notion of attempting renting the content obscuring it as a sale is not a honest way of doing things. And using DRM to enforce those rental limitations makes it even worse, since it uses unethical preemptive policing methods to do it.
If this is not a time limited acquisition of rights, then what about all the "time windows" and potential revocations? If they exist - it means it's not unlimited in time and therefore it's similar to the lease (of the content), rather than to a purchase.
That was my point above - when people buy, they don't care to buy any "licenses". They buy content. Those who sell it, fool them with selling a license, while making them think they actually buy what they want to buy (i.e. the content). I.e. in essence they lease them the content, while making people think they buy the content.
Abstaining is the correct choice though. Piracy only breeds stronger and more invasive DRM and I'm personally of the mindset that no one should work for free or produce goods without compensation unless they choose to.
While I agree with you - I really do - it's also an incredibly difficult choice. You'd have to give up owning nearly all movies and TV shows legally, the lion's share of ebooks, and nearly all commercial audiobooks. You basically have to live a life where the only media you can consume is in formats created before the 90s, or those rare one-offs where new content is issued in DRM-free formats.
I don't really have an answer for this. I feel guilty every time I buy a Blu-Ray, but I haven't stopped buying them either.
edit: and, oh, yeah, video games. Not all of them, but most of them.
No, I'm not missing the point. This thread is about a DRM laden comic that is no longer available to those who _paid_ for it because the company went out of business.
I paid nothing for Hulu. They are more than welcome to delete anything and everything.
Or do you somehow imagine that those who give you something for FREE are required to do so indefinitely in the future?
Well, personally they give me nothing, since I'm not part of the 6.39% of the world population they serve.
But in any case, it's not just about deleting or not. Being only able to watch on other than "blessed" devices is important too, unless we want to further cement software monoculture.
This is silly. This article is about a comic that people paid money, and because it contained DRM and the company went out of business, those customers are no longer able to view it.
You say: the problem is the DRM. Get rid of the DRM and we won't have the problem.
And that is a perfectly valid point.
But there is another solution you are completely missing: Why are you paying for DRM'd media?
No one is forcing you to purchase it. Someone created something, and they decided they wanted DRM in it. You (or more accurately, those customers) looked at it, saw the DRM, and said: here's my credit card number.
If you don't like the terms they are providing the service on, DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY!
So then you bring up Hulu. Hulu uses DRM. What are the solution here. 1) Go argue with Hulu about their DRM; or 2) Stop using it.
If you don't like the terms of a free service, stop using it. It really is that simple.
I don't give Hulu money. It's free. I think in exchange for free videos, they can put DRM in it. I didn't buy the videos, I know they aren't mine. I don't expect access to them in the future. If they go overboard with the DRM, then I'll stop visiting their site.
Games situation is improving, along the lines of music. More and more DRM free games appear, since more publishers learn some common sense and realize that DRM serves no useful purpose whatsoever.
"Piracy only breeds stronger and more invasive DRM"
I don't think the history of music publishing supports that claim.
On the other hand it may be unique, e.g. the normal smallest granularity is a 3-5 or so minute song, AND the 33 RPM vinyl LP allowed publishers to move away from that (the 78 and 45 RPM formats weren't very long at all). Some of what we're seeing is a rejection of what turned out to be a fairly short lived business model.
In that case, Wireshark and protocol analysis comes to the rescue. The trick is to find the images in the mess that is the downstream packets, but I've had success in the past with recording VoIP calls this way (the client didn't support recording).
So let's change the title: instead of "Digital Comic Publisher", put "Steam", "Sony" or EA.
DRM is the 21th century worst trap of all and we must stop it from spreading.
Ah... JManga... I didn't think this place was the best example of electronic publishing to begin with.
Their page structure was very misleading, too. They had some "informative" page, that is unavailable to "buy" and such.
The idea of the service it was actually interesting, and they perhaps had a better chance if it was all-you-can-eat subscription model as opposed to retailing.
A bit of shame especially after coming into the market with big fanfare of how all Japanese publishers joined the force making this possible... (and, it is plausible whole business model was dictated by influences of those publishers.)
You don't differentiate anything for consumer rights.
If you advertise and charge a monthly fee for a service, you don't need to support it forever.
If you advertise and charge a one-time fee for "premium gold star membership" on your site, then you need to support it for the lifetime of your site, not forever.
But if you advertise and charge for a product or content, saying "Buy it now!!! Own this beautiful widget for only $9.99!" then you have the following options:
a) Hand over the product, take the cash and be happy;
b) Instead of handing over the product, promise to show the product on demand, and keep your promise eternally;
c) Sell a promise to show the product on demand, but don't actually do it - that's called fraud and should be prosecuted.
But noone is asking jmanga.com for eternal support - they can quit, but they have to deliver the paid-for goods if they want to stop providing on-demand access.
b) regular open source apps that they don't have a community to continue them after the original coders lose interest, and you don't know enough programming to support them nor have the money to pay someone to work on them?
b) is like saying 'how is this any different from a car if you drive it until it runs out of gas, and then push it into the ocean, and then wait until it rusts from being under the water, and then you forget where it is?'
Yes, of course it is possible to deny yourself the ability to view content, use software, or access goods that you have purchased. That is beside the point, which is that webapps are inherently transient - unless you have access to the ability to configure and run your own server to host the application, the ability to use it can be revoked at any time, either through malice, negligence, or the regular operation of business. There are numerous examples of all three categories. This is, in fact, worse than proprietary software. At least with proprietary software (DRM/authentication notwithstanding), you have an executable, and it works on the machine you have right now. VM software like VMWare allows you to preserve a particular software configuration indefinitely if you wish, and access that software as long as you like.
What has me puzzled is why they didn't try and sell their usebase, I'd be willing to make a modest offer. But now that they've gone off really pissed off their customers the value of that asset just dropped like a rock.
It is circumvention and it is illegal. There are only 6 allowed exemptions to the rule as of the last rulemaking, and making backup copies is not one of them, no matter the situation. The only exemption that exists for DRM-protected ebooks is to make stripping that DRM legal when no version of the ebook compatible with screen readers or read-aloud functions exists, so that the visually impaired can access the text.
So, why buy any media then? I'd rather just pirate it and be on my way. Xkcd/488 makes a great point: buying and then freeing from a dying system is just as illegal as copyright violation.
So, media types that use any DRM: why should I buy your product?
I doubt any media companies are much interested in swaying self-professed pirates that demand rights not offered to their side. You're coming from this imagined position that you deserve license to others' work on your terms at your price. The companies offering media with DRM for sale on the market have no such delusion that they have an innate right your money; they're OK with you not taking their offer. That's fine, since the value proposition is suitable to millions of others who will make the purchase on the terms offered -- watching a movie today is still worth some number of dollars even if you might not be able to dust it off 20 years from now to watch again. They're not OK with you infringing their rights to their property instead of declining the offer. But really, your moral and ethical compass won't be turned by logic or debate.
In terms of a capitalist debate, one side charges money for substandard product. The other side charges less, while providing a much better product. It just turns out, with copyright applied, the better side is illegal.
But being illegal hasn't stopped pirates yet, has it?
One major side effect isn't them trying to sway us; instead they are forced to release movies in the range of weeks, and not the traditional years. So yes, pirates are a competitive pressure downward.
Don't get me wrong: I think people should be paid for creative works. I like creative stuffs. I just disagree with putting locks on our culture, that are physically or legally hard to remove.
>DMCA circumvention clause makes many types of fair use illegal.
> If you make a personal backup by circumventing digital access controls, you are not violating copyright but you are violating the DMCA; you are committing a crime.
It looks to me like self contradicting laws then. How are such cases legally resolved i.e. when law A directly contradicts law B? Fair use says it's legal. DMCA says it's illegal. What is correct then?
And fair use is not a "defense". It's a description of lawful legal actions which aren't affected by restrictions granted in limited monopoly of copyright to begin with.
While it is possible to argue about analogies til the end of days, I don't think your analogy quite captures the essence of what is going on with the DMCA.
Allow me to present a refinement:
There exists one law that says it is only legal to make a right turn on red if you stop and look to the right first. There exists another law that says if you stop on red, you can't look to the right. The net result is that in order to avoid breaking any laws, you can't make a right turn on red.
These laws are technically not contradictory, but the end result is to nullify the ability to turn left on red just as the DMCA nullifies the ability to make a copy for any reason, fair use or otherwise.
Why isn't then fair use applicable to DMCA? It's against the point of fair use - i.e. not to prevent sensible usage of the content like backups. If DMCA forbids it, fair use becomes totally useless idea. So I'd say from people's perspective - in cases of fair use DCMA should be ignored as an insane law.
OK, probably it's better to rephrase the question, since copyright law and fair use concept predate DMCA. Why DMCA didn't include provisions of being not applicable in cases of fair use from the copyright law perspective?
The point of fair use is obvious - to limit copyright restrictions for sensible use cases (like personal use, accessibility and so on). Comes along DMCA and claims that cases covered by fair use are illegal. Was it the intention all along, or it was a sneaky way to do it? Can't DMCA be challenged on this grounds as being invalid as is?
Isn't DMCA unconstitutional as is? It restricts free speech rights.
But my question was not about it being directly unconstitutional (which I think it is). It was about it being nonsensical in the light of fair use (as the other commenter brought above about forbidding to look to the right before making a turn).
You just said that DMCA is separate from copyright and thus fair use doesn't apply to it conceptually. So DMCA is not related to right to establish exclusive rights to works and etc. And it restricts the free speech. So why is it not unconstitutional? (See https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100402/1856128861.shtml
If your friend uses strong DRM and/or uses cloud based "purchasing" to keep users from possessing the bought files, I hope he fails.
The last thing I want is more DRM peddlers catering to people who aren't in the know about every tech nuance out there. So yes, it can he unduly harsh. But in our legal environment (with little recourse), drm providers almost always deserve it.
An exception to that is companies that sell "drm" servers to authenticate that only X licenses of software are used at one time. License compliance is another drain on innovation, but can be effective in keeping legit in compliance.
The purchasers are issued a refund in the form of a gift card. So, if you purchased it and DRM stripped it then you get to keep the comic and get the refund!
Edit: Looks like you don't
The point I am more worried about here is that we are actually reliant to an extent on piracy and DRM stripping in order to preserve abandoned works.
The refund appears to only apply to "Unused JManga Paid Points". If you used your points to <strike>buy</strike> license manga, you will not be getting a refund for them. (edited to replace "buy" with "license")
The refund is only for the points you haven't spent yet. If you 'bought' something you will not get the money back and you will never get to see it again.
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. But they've been in business since sometime in 2011, and chargebacks only seem like forever, aren't they limited to 6 months or so?
That's true, but physical archiving has it's challenges too.
I think there's an important difference between something being hard because it is and something being deliberately made more difficult that it needs to be.
It's also such a damn shame that genuine digital purchasing (as in, something that involves DRM-free downloads) is such a rarity outside the music industry. I just can't understand why every other industry (especially the video industry) thinks that offering DRM-free downloads would somehow kill them or whatever when digital music sales have only got better since the wide-scale ditching of DRM, especially since huge video files are much harder to share casually than small music files. There is value in the catalog subscription model that the likes of Netflix offers, but it should really have actual buying options available next to it (ideally, a service could combine both models - pay a lump sum for catalog streaming rights, then actually buy individual titles, and as a bonus, not only do you get DRM-free downloads, but you could also offer extras, formats that aren't possible with streaming, unlimited streaming rights for actually purchased titles since they have the available infrastructure for it, and so on).