
“If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.” - rahuldottech
https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/f9d5rf/are_you_sure_you_really_wanna_leave_if_you_do_we/
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WorldMaker
I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of
decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their
investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you
pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there
[which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of
people over the next few years.)

~~~
stubish
Uptake of subscription services might make this a non-issue, if it is sizable
enough to make a minority of people who want to own media. If the providers of
subscription services can solve the disappearing and exclusive content
problems. Maybe fights over rights will be there instead, with 'exclusive'
distribution rights to media being limited and a right to buy. I tend to think
that a change such as requiring copyright holders to sell to everyone or no-
one under the same terms would mean us consumers would no longer be stuck
needing to hoard, and most of us would be happy to pay our monthly fees to
have access to everything delivered to our TVs.

~~~
slayback
I think it reduces the risk to consumers, but it won’t eliminate the need.
It’ll be a long while before my entire Steam library will be available via
subscription.

~~~
stubish
If you can rent out a purchased copy (one for the courts, jurisdiction
specific), then Steam/Microsoft/GOG/Humble could offer things as a
subscription quite easily. If publishers are required to sell to them and not
allowed to create roadblocks. Given the concurrent player counts for most
games the subscription service wouldn't need to purchase many copies to allow
almost-always access. The interesting games to consider are the 'always
online' ones, where the software could be given away for free, because it is
useless without access to the game servers. Which pretty much operates like a
subscription ('lifetime' or monthly), and is expected to stop working one day.

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wtmt
I'm not going to debate ethics or local legalities here, but I believe that
pirating (where feasible) is perfectly fine as an alternative to preserving
what these sellers impose restrictions on. Where it does get tricky is, in
addition to pirating, whether to pay for the DRMd walled garden items and
voting with one's wallet that what they're doing is fine, so that the
artists/developers behind the content get something. I don't have a black and
white answer to this. Sometimes it seems like supporting these evil
corporations is evil.

This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more
difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a
lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).

The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the
world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and
doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.

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znpy
i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was.

companies came and went, my torrents are still with me.

sharing is caring.

~~~
sneak
I use put.io to avoid endangering my residential connections.

~~~
wtmt
That looks quite expensive and doesn't disclose details about the kinds of
disks used (upfront) and the connection speeds allotted. The seed times are
also too short with the ratio "or" time clause. Anyone wanting to seed to
maintain an archive of content for the future may find this tedious. There
seem to be many others that provide more (cheaper, faster and more
features/flexibility).

~~~
bubblethink
put.io isn't a traditional seedbox. They do caching + dedup + transcode +
chromecast etc. It's sort of like seedbox + plex and the UI is quite clean.
It's not geared towards the private tracker crowd. It's for casual users who
use public trackers, and it's a pretty good service for that. Casual users
don't care about ratios. They just don't want to get notices from their ISPs.

~~~
wtmt
Now I get what put.io is for.

I was commenting earlier from the perspective of preserving content for longer
and also making sure that it can be available for people in the future. From
that angle, this service doesn’t help. For example, there are many people
building and maintaining content archives for the long term.

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ALittleLight
I don't get it. You delete or close the account you use to access the digital
content, what is the expectation here? That you can keep accessing it without
an account? How would they know what you own?

~~~
jjgreen
If I buy a cheese sandwich and there's no cheese in it, then I'm entitled to
my money back. Same here, give the "purchaser" their money back.

~~~
ALittleLight
Some things work like that. If I buy tickets to a concert, then decide not to
go to that concert, I'm not entitled to my money back.

~~~
serf
>If I buy tickets to a concert, then decide not to go to that concert, I'm not
entitled to my money back.

that's not some universal truth, that's a loss-reduction scheme that certain
live event ticket sales groups adhere to.

In some cases it isn't even loss-reduction, it's just a means to increase
profit; there may not be a loss associated with refunding a ticket to a venue
that isn't sold out and has unassigned seating other than some virtual
infrastructure loss like "they used the bandwidth of our service without
creating a profit _this session_ ", which is basically the equivalent of a
restocking fee at a small pawnshop where an already hourly (otherwise idle)
paid employee just throws the product back on a shelf (aka : bullshit).

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robomartin
I have this problem right now, sort of. I purchased dozens of Kindle books
through my personal Amazon account over the years. Now I prefer to do so
through my business account. Yet, I want all of them available through the
same device. Well, that’s a pain in the behind. I have to call Amazon support
for help and have been procrastinating because I know it will be a one hour
ordeal.

This is why I prefer to purchase digital books as PDF files. I keep them on
Dropbox and my local drive and they are great to handle and read.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Calibre. Convert those books to DRM-free formats asap and you're good to go.
They become completely yours. I do it by default for all my Amazon kindle
format purchases. It's "forbidden" but if I paid near physical book retail
pricing for it, as far as i'm concerned, that copy of digital content deserves
to be mine.

~~~
anticodon
I was unable to do this for any recent purchase. Calibre could strip DRM only
from very old books, like 7-10 years old.

~~~
shadowprofile77
I had this same problem and what worked for me was to download an old version
of Kindle for PC, regardless of the age of the books. I think version 1.17
works. Have copies download to it and then try the Calibre conversion again.

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harry8
Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft,
apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it
is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand.
Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?

~~~
wtmt
If there's one thing I've learned with all these app stores and digital
stores, a better way to handle this when you move countries is to create a new
account for that country and also retain the older account (if possible,
without a payment method, just to have access to older purchases and to free
items).

Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across
countries as long as you can attach the appropriate payment methods. They
don't do this even for content that's not controlled by giant corporations
that are stuck in the past.

~~~
heavenlyblue
What if you owe the apps on your phone?

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drummer
Anyone remember Microsoft's Zune?

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downerending
Yeah, super-irritating. I bought about a dozen movies through Google Play
before I realized that their platform was going to fail.

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T3OU-736
(IANAL) This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels
inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We
don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This
gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations
like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are
licensed being deleted.

~~~
redis_mlc
> This is fairly pedantic

Congrats on reaching self-awareness, HN!

~~~
downerending
I was going to pedantically point out his spelling error, but it seemed a bit
over the top.

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dredmorbius
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