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Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything!

I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership.

(Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...)

If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY (https://lbry.com or https://lbry.tech), which in addition to letting you stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a blockchain.

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> You don't own anything!

This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you. There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in this era.

I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.

Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.

There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice. The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech) services.

Worse than DVDs are books shelved en masse. I've spent more on storage for various things in my life than I ever have for renting content or products. Ends up dominating your house.

The key is to regularly clean out the shelves. Those books you're never going to re-read, those movies you haven't watched in a decade? Just give them away, to friends/family or thrift stores. Keep your collection at manageable size, only keep the ones that actually mean something to you.

I even do that with my digital music collection, just to make it easier to keep an overview.

This. You can give away or re-sell what you own. You can't do that on digital content.

I struggle with that. Got so many books that were gifts, many of which I might in-theory read. Feels wrong to offload them. And the shelves are bought and installed now.

We also keep original boxes for things like iPads, cameras, etc in case we ever re-sell the product. Then of course, we never do...

> Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.

One word (OK, two):

Microsoft PlaysForSure [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure

"primary business lines"

Everything can be a "primary business line" until it isn't...

An MP3 from one another doesn't make a difference to me. As long as it stays organized.

The risk isn’t that amazon ends the line of business, it’s that someday they decide they’d like you to pay again, and once they set their minds on that it’s gonna happen with no recourse for you.

That’s why I’m super happy with google reader. It means I don’t have to manage my own RSS reader and there’s no chance a multi billion dollar company is going to stop supporting it. /s

Standard oil was always going to be around, and then it wasn’t.

AT&T was always going to be around, and then it was broken apart.

There are literally leading democratic candidates for US president that want to break up big tech companies. In two years you could be looking at Amazon being broken up like AT&T into a bunch of shaky companies that sell to other shady ones or just fold up.

> I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs

Did you actually buy 1000s of digital movies from Amazon or are you talking about a streaming service (not the same thing)

Paying $10 a month for amazon's movie library streaming access is different than paying $10 per movie for virtual ownership. In one the price is $10 a month. If amazon ends their service I start paying $10 to someone else and pick up where I left off. In the other 1000 movies costs $10k and if amazon ends their service my $10k of virtual ownership is worthless.

Perhaps you should. Amazon isn't likely to discontinue the whole service overnight, but individual videos are another story. See also Netflix, on which most of what was interesting has already disappeared.

> And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.

I sometimes wonder if that's really true. It definitely is if you have a stable cash flow, and the services aren't really that important. But in general, there are costs of choosing a service over a product you own that are non-obvious, or delayed over time. You can't change, adapt, or improve a service yourself. You can't use it outside of its ToS. A service can raise its prices, or go out of business, or otherwise become useless to you - and there's nothing you can do about it, except hoping that a competitor exists and that there's a migration path.

It seems to me that the "pets v cattle" argument about servers now also applies to cultural products.

There's so many books and films that you're not supposed to care about them individually. They just make a Content library, and you consume Content. Because more Content is continually produced, you'll never run dry of things to put in front of your eyes.

(I don't like this and think it's bad for culture, as it leads to things like the Disney Vault)

Conversely, that's why I consider exclusive releases prima facie anticompetitive. Cultural products are to a large extent pets, or non-substitutable goods. If you want to watch Game of Thrones, you won't accept the newest Star Wars as a substitute. Exclusive deals essentially destroy competitive pressures that would otherwise apply.

(I'm aware that solving this is not as simple as straight out banning exclusive releases.)

> from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice

I don't think you really understand what Stallman is saying or else you wouldn't be making consumer choices based on pure self-interest.

It's also worth mentioning that even when you own a DVD, it is technically a deteriorating asset that will eventually become unplayable.

Many DVD disks deteriorate within a 30-100 year span to a point where they are essentially unplayable, even when kept in pristine conditions.

And if you are in an environment with extreme temperate swings, they will deteriorate even faster.

It's actually slightly worse than that as licensing deals can collapse on the backend that would remove an item that you had paid for from your library.

While it seems unlikely that Amazon would do this, consider that Microsoft has on several occassions with their various attempted music services.

Amazon has already done this and pulled a book from people's kindles that they had purchased because Amazon didn't have a license to sell it

This is exactly what's happening with Netflix. I've heard stories of this happening on Steam, where games receive essentially post-humous updates to remove licensed content for which the license expired (I believe Rockstar did this to Steam users with its GTA3-era titles). One could also argue that shutting off multiplayer servers is like this, when there is no LAN/TCPIP option available.

If you think paying for Netflix means you’re paying for access to anything Netflix has a license for at a certain point time for all of eternity, you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind.

Netflix is subject to licensing agreements, just like cable and broadcast is.

Licensing agreements are not the consumer's problem. From their point of view, the service just gets worse and worse because it no longer provides the content they actually want to watch.

They will get used to it, just like they got used to tv channels becoming unavailable or commercials on cable. Or they will find a better way to spend their time and money.

Either by researching before, or by finding something missing, the buyer is going to learn what it is they are buying.

>you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind.

If the consumer can have an "erroneous model of the business in mind" then the business is doing it wrongly...

4th item from Netflix FAQ on their website in plain English:

>Netflix content will vary by region, and may change over time.

A, the "plans were on display" defense...

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Not sure what the argument is, but if you’re claiming that taking a minute to educate oneself by reading an FAQ on Netflix’s website is too arduous, then I’d have to say I disagree. Life as a buyer doesn’t get much easier than that.

Y'all are terrible techno-utopians if you stop at the consumer having limited access to stuff for a certain time.... the utopian ideal is everything in one place, forever.

Personally I've dusted off my bittorrent seedbox...

Or; as a consumer, why should I care about these things? Just give me my damn TV shows, screw your licensing BS

Rockstar has removed licensed music and other content from their games post-purchase.

In the case of GTA San Andreas, the version on steam is now closer to the mobile/tablet version, with significant gameplay changes over the original release.

Comparing it to my original copies on PS2 and pre-Steam PC, it's very different.

Patches should be for fixing bugs, not taking away things people purchased.

I didn't knew this. This is a disgusting practice, and another reason why you should keep the installers and versioning. At least GOG let's you keep the installer.

This is precisely why I ditched Spotify and went back to a local music collection.

I got sick and tired of albums disappearing and reappearing at random, ruining my playlists. Some of my favorite albums were gone for months at a time, with no warning. Not to mention the terrible state of Spotify's catalogue and curation. Wrong information, spelling errors, multiple artists with identical names being confused, you name it.

With my local collection, I can fix the tags and keep track of the correct information.

Apple did this in 2018 when two movies bought on iTunes were removed from a user. After contacting support the user was offered two vouchers for rental movies, which is obviously worth less.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/13/apple-is-...

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-res...

If Amazon ever stops serving you the music or movies you’ve purchased, I am quite certain you could get your money back in court. You paid for, and they agreed to serve that content to you in perpetuity.

Monthly subscriptions on the other hand... those could shut down at any time.

So copy the file to a DVD. The idea here is that you are cutting out the physical costs - production, delivery, loss to spoilage, etc.

Fact of the matter is, you probably don't even want the thing when you are done with it - e.g. shitty 20th edition book that your professor wrote and made you use in their class to make a profit.

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