Amazon Argues Users Don't Own Purchased Prime Video Content

I've never made backups of my books.

I've never made backups of my vinyl records or my cassette tapes.

I have made backups of all my CDs.

If the backup is to protect against loss of or damage to the media, I should be backing up books and records and tapes, and not backing up CDs. CDs live in a protective case, only coming out for short trips to a CD player, where they are played entirely enclosed, and playback does not cause any wear on the play surface.

Records and tapes are degrade slightly each time you play them. Books also suffer wear each time they are read, and are usually read in environments where they can suffer accidents.

However, I wouldn't compare this to a movie store, or a music store. At least while I used it, GPM wasn't positioned as a store where you buy music and take it home, it's an app/ecosystem where you listen to music.

So I'd argue a more apt comparison is it's like buying a movie at a store with sofas and televisions for watching the movies, where you can purchase content and ask for it to be displayed, and can optionally take the disk home.

Stretching the analogy too far probably, but GPM didn't exactly encourage downloading FWIW -- can only download a song twice ever through the web interface, or all at once through takeout, or through a chrome extension/app, otherwise it's all on the GPM app, where you're "supposed" to listen to it.

You do have the right to download DRM-free music though, so at least GPM had that.

... youtube music on the other hand ...

What is worrying is that these aren't clearly explained when you make the purchase. And it's really down to the company's policy, which if all companies do the same, the consumer ends up having no choice.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-disables-autopilot-on-...

To your point, however, I do agree. I think one of the major benefits of physical media (or even digital media as long as it's entirely self-hosted) is that you can enjoy it entirely without surveillance, and that it's much more resistant to censorship. Being able to read about and understand how people lived, thought, and created in the past is incredibly important, and it's something we should preserve for the benefit of future generations, even if they might sometimes contain things that one might not necessarily agree with today.

Where did I say that? Obviously it is nice to be able to hand things down to one's children. But what I am questioning is whether the envisioned scenario (children of the future being enamored by dad or granddad's old books) is really likely to happen.

I don't have a specific example in mind, but I'm sure the same applies to books people have inherited from friends and family. People write all sorts of interesting notes in books, tuck photos in between the pages, etc. These items offer a connection that a library book or its digital equivalent (often) cannot.

If we would apply the First Sale doctrine in the fullest to digital content, secondary marketplaces would pop-up where people just rented games by the hour instead of purchasing them. With the transaction costs being really low, and the utilisation rate for many games being fairly low, this seems like a no brainer.

There are important differences between physical content and digital content that need to be considered.

That part specifically isn't true in all of EU. There is no such thing as implicit licences at purchase time - that's why EULA and the likes of it are worth as much as toilet paper here. And in a lot of countries you can absolutely make copies of the discs you own, no legal issue at all. You usually can't show it to large audiences, but that's not because of the licence terms, but because the laws of the country prohibit it without paying a fee to the national association of artists. If I want to show a Blu-Ray I bought to a large group of people I need to pay a nominal fee to my country's national artist's association and then it's completely legal - but I don't even need to tell the distributor of the movie, or the owner of the copyright at all, that's not my problem. Same with playing music at events and such - a fee is paid to a national organisation governing this, the distributor can say whatever they want on the box but it's just irrelevant.

>>, you can't modify it and redistribute it etc

Of course you can in certain ways and formats, "fair use" is even allowed in such restrictive countries as US.

You do have rights to copy the disc, depending on the content and the country. This is described as a backup. Things get very murky here though because in some countries backing up software discs is seen as different to backing up CD content. And then DVD has a whole other set of problems because circumventing DRM is another legal issue aside from copying the video content (and different countries have different laws for DRM and some even have exemptions specifically for DRM in DVDs).

With regards to redistribution, you're allowed to sell second hand optical media -- irrespective of the content on them. In fact there are entire businesses based around reselling second hand DVDs and CDs (eg Music Magpie in the UK).

As for performance, this is where things get a bit murky again. Audio performances are allowed if you are registered with the PRS (or similar organisation) as they redistribute members license fees with the content owners. The PRS are woefully bad at what they do and in effect they're just a legal payment protection racket, but that's a whole other topic. Performing data content would be subject to copyright too but it would depend on what was played as to which clause of copyright was in effect -- and in fact it could span multiple different clauses (much like music would have a copyright for songs writer as well as the recording artist, games would have copyrights on the music, artwork, etc and that IP might not be owned by the same publisher). I don't know the law (any international laws) regarding performing DVDs aside that some countries have exemptions for schools perform.

Then you have something called "fair use" which grants permissions to use, redistribute and even modify copyrighted content -- albeit with a strict set of caveats.

Needless to say, things were complicated enough even before internet distribution changed the way content was "licensed".

The DRM coupled with the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions combine to make it illegal to do things that would otherwise be fair use, but this isn't because of a license.

One very important right you get by owning a copy is "first sale," that the copyright owner can't restrict you from transferring or selling the copy, and this is unaffected by the DRM. The store down the street that buys and sells CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays is evidence of that.

Even with the limitations of DRM, there's a very real difference between the kind of ownership you have with a disc and the lack of it that you have with pure-digital "buying" from most sources. (Though I believe there's some movement toward increasing consumers' rights to these kinds of digital "copies," in Europe at least.)

By "fraud" I meant: buying a game with a stolen payment method, that's it. If someone does that, the specific game gets removed from their account and this message[1] is shown. The rest of their account remains untouched.

About the rest of your scenarios: They don't look at how many times you launch a game (I launched 2+ copies of a game many, many times). If a game bans you for whatever reason -- like anti-cheat misdetections -- the multiplayer-only ban is only for that game and done by the publisher (not Steam). You're confusing Valve/Steam with EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, etc.

Steam doesn't even phone home if DRM fails, the game just doesn't launch; DRM meddling doesn't get you banned or anything.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Ye6Ee2Y.png

This has been one of those instances where if enough organisations tell enough consumers something is true and for long enough then people start to believe it, even when it technically isn't true.

Sure you own the CD and can actually lend it but the person you lent it to has no right to effectively use that CD since only you were granted the right (license) to copy it on a limited number (which can be 1) of your own computers.

Same if you buy a copy of MS Word. You do own the CD but you only get the license to install it on a couple of computers.

Any term that purports to prevent you from lending your property has no value. The key point is that the license prevents others from installing the software/video game.