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Comment by koluna | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason why I prefer buying physical/DRM-free copies of things I want to use in the long run. There is not a single cloud software vendor I can trust to not screw me over in 5 years when they either force me to have an account (and this is a big push everywhere) or shut down their activation servers.

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Yes, eventually every cloud vendor will shutdown. The question people should ask themselves is wether the convenience of having an app store where you have a X% chance of losing your purchases every year outweighs having to manage the physical/virtual copies yourself.

I personally have more money than time, so for me the answer is a clear "yes, app stores all the way".

I think this is where a change in copyright law would be helpful. There are likely very few games that are more than ~20 years old that earn significant revenue based on the sales of the game. Those same games 10 years later will probably earn even less. If their copyright expired at that time (or earlier) then it wouldn't matter much whether these cloud providers will go down or not.

With the rise in popularity of doing HD remakes, mini-consoles, and just plain re-releases on new platforms, I can't imagine that would go over well with publishers/developers.

> I think this is where a change in copyright law would be helpful.

The changes have always gone in the other direction.

What I always thought was odd - why has copyright duration gotten longer and longer, but patent duration stayed the same?

GOG is nice for games. Downpour for audiobooks. Any other stores you would recommend? Also curious what sort of physical backup/storage solution people use for their drm free digital items

GOG is my go-to for games I plan to replay game after 10+ years (just replaying the 5th RPG) DRM is only meaningless on the long run

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