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It’s easy to scoff at this whole “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” phrase, but it’s really gone too far already.
I’m really tired of hearing “you don’t own it you own a license to it” like it’s some revelation for people complaining. We’re aware that the system has been constructed to benefit media companies at the expense of consumers.
To be honest; I never really bought the argument anyway. From a legal standpoint I don’t give half a shit. From a layman’s standpoint it’s bullshit. Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
They know they’re pissing on you and telling you it’s raining and the goobers doing their legwork by repeating the sentence like they just came up with it annoy me to no end.
This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing “buy” unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To “sell” cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.
Same energy as, “I didn’t shoot that man, the gun I was holding did!”
Guns don’t kill people… I do.
Yeah, I understand that hearing the same simple explanation of “you don’t own it…” gets to be annoying. Especially in places like this where most people are pretty well aware of the situation.
The primary issue seems to be that enough people support this type of service willingly for the sake of convenience and are generally ignorant to the potential long-term issues. It feels pretty exploitative as a consumer.
But I don’t see how making the distinction between ownership of the content vs the license is providing legwork for those services. In my mind, that distinction is key for understanding that the service is not for me. And I may just be looking at this too optimistically, but I would hope the same would be true for users who don’t read the fine print, or happen to have not understood the issue until something like this post is presented.
If people are aware, why do they keep buying movies they won’t own?
It’s an oligopoly. Free choice in a market owned by a few rich assholes is an illusion.
This sounds worse than communism. At least communism said “everyone will own everything”.
Not the collective ownership of everything, just the collective ownership (and eventual abolition) of private property, which differs from personal property in that they are assets which are used for the purpose of capital accumulation (e.g factories, real estate, farms, supermarkets, etc.)
We’ve been screaming about it for 20+ years now and no one seems to be listening.
I’m hoping that someone will tie digital ownership rights to a block chain sooner or later and offer me movies, music, games and books that I can actually own resale rights to - but as publishers are already drinking from the rent-seeking model teat where every single license is a new sale I’m not terribly optimistic about that particular future.
No. Never. Stop asking. Crypto is not a currency and blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
Well put
Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they’re the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
The only way to actually digitally own something is to have a full DRM-free copy of it (ianal though this still might not be enough to allow resale).
Right, either you have the file on your computer, or you don’t. You still can’t legally resell the file because that’s piracy. Computer files can be copied pretty much endlessly.
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain. It’s a transparent and consumer friendly model compared to what we accept now. I know people are over block chain hype but this type of publishing model is where it’s actually useful.
Transferable digital rights tokens and chain of custody are places where block chain tech actually works.
Edit: People seem really hung up on crypto as currency which I’m not asking for at all. I’m asking for control, ownership and resale rights to digital goods I’ve paid for which isn’t possible at all on current digital publishing platforms. I appreciate that people hate crypto shit, that’s fine, but at least read the content you’re replying to.
Fuck no. I ain’t paying a transaction fee each time I want to take a breath. If you don’t want to be robbed by streaming companies, blockchain is the last (or maybe not even a) thing you should consider as a solution.
Hyperbole much?
It’s only hyperbole until it isn’t.
What you describe is fundamentally impossible. In order to decrypt something you need a decryption key. Put that on the blockchain and anyone can decrypt it.
Even if you can, pirates would only need to buy a single decryption key and suddenly your movie might as well be freely available to download. Pirates never pay hosting fees because it’s using the same infrastructure as customers and they can’t be taken down because they’re indistinguishable from customers.
This doesn’t make any sense, who distributes/gives out rights tokens? And if they lose publishing rights, why would the new owner of the publishing rights care about the rights tokens they didn’t sell?
Blockchain doesn’t fix anything new here, there’s no point in decentralizing the rights ownership, verifying ourselves as owners of the right to watch the media was never the issue here.
Getting companies to be willing to give out non revokable rights tokens is the issue, and no company wants to do that because it’s not profitable for them. It’s not a technological issue that blockchain is going to solve
it’s quite fun to see the whole thing you want to engineer just to have an excuse to use a blockchain.
Have you ever heard of Torrents? USENET? eDonkey? Those things are more resilient than your blockchain, they’ve proved themselves by being around more than 20 years and still in use.
Keep it in your hard drive and carry it with you, this was not a hard problem 20 years ago, but we’re being conditioned to regression in expectations and functionality. Better than yet another blockchain overkill and works offline.
PS: just like the creeptobros say: “not in your disk, not your file.” or something like that.
I think it makes sense in some areas. For example private ownership of cars is completely unsustainable in the literal sense of the word.
But when it comes to digital goods, clearly it’s all for the profit of the media cartels. There’s no justification.
Publicly or corporately owned cars are not the solution. A more robust public transportation system is the solution. Busses and trains are so much more efficient than cars.
Agreed that majority transport should be shared&public but smaller personalized transport will still be needed (eg a doctor being called to an emergency)
I could also see a system of self driving cars (not trucks but very small city cars) as a kind of public uber. Kind of like how gondolas work in some mountain cities. And of course just one per let’s say 10 or more people as opposed to 1 or more cars per family like we have now.
Yup, sounds reasonable to me. All we need for that is to make sure that greedy capitalists don’t end up using people’s lack of cars to exploit them with absurd prices and privacy violations.
That’s the real danger. Shared ownership is great but not if you privatise the whole thing.