Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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I do believe it would be a great thing for these buttons to read "Rent Indefinitely" rather than "Buy", and also force these companies to outline in clear and short language within a popup near the button the general conditions under which the rental will be revoked. Like, "Company X may revoke your access to this content in situations where your account breaches the terms of service outlined [here], or if the original rights holders of the content force us to." Not even full ToS, just something to inform people that its possible.

And to be clear, there's a massive swath of digital content that needs regulation like this. Amazon movies, Kindle books, Steam/Xbox/PSN digital games, iTunes music purchases (though in situations like this, I think the word "Buy" is valid given that you're allowed a DRM-free download, but I think the popup should still be required with the language changed to read "...may revoke your access to re-download this content...").

I wonder if a better solution would be allowing people to really own digital goods they buy the way you do physical copyrighted goods. Someone tried to let you "sell" your iTunes library by deleting it off your hard drive and then giving it to someone else but they lost in court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....

> I wonder if a better solution would be allowing people to really own digital goods they buy the way you do physical copyrighted goods.

the situation with blurays and dvds is not much better. "own" is not quite the right word for what's going on here; it's more like a permanent transferable license. you can freely buy/sell them second-hand, but AFAIK it is technically still illegal to make backups, even for personal use (since it involves circumventing DRM).

as both a long-time torrenter and someone who works on proprietary software project, I'm somewhat conflicted on this topic. for the consumer, it's best to just get the product unencumbered by DRM and do what you want with it. on the flip side, I really need people to actually pay for the thing that I work on so I can get an income. not all pirated copies are "lost sales", but some are. I've certainly pirated stuff that I would have paid for and paid for stuff only because it wasn't cracked yet. not sure what the middle ground is here.

sadly, I'm not sure the average person even cares that much. I follow a couple specific TV shows where I'm invested in what happens next. with the current balkanization, it would probably cost me $50+ a month to have access to the handful of things I actually want to watch. but most people I know just want something to watch, often just to have it playing in the background. they don't particularly care what it is or if it was well-made.

I never really thought of this before, but now that I have I'm confused about backups. In particular, why do we back up some types things but not others?

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.

CDs are easy to back up, comparatively, and they do degrade faster then the other options over time (5, 10, 15 years and many become unusable).

> 5, 10, 15 years and many become unusable

Wile writable CDs will decay relatively quickly, professionally mastered CD-ROMS will typically last longer.

On the other hand, a scratch in the wrong place can render a CD useless while a book with a torn out page will still be usable.

The reason we do not make backups of our books is because there is no reasonable technological way of doing so.

One can buy a second copy and donate it to the Library or give it to a friend. Now it's offsite, like all backups should be, and one doesn't advance technology much to achieve this. Depending on how you attribute a "cost" to the time it would take to make a duplicate of a physical copy, it may even be less expensive.

Photocopiers and OCR and both things which people have used for this purpose.

The time it takes to use them for that purpose though... ugh.

Interesting. I do have digital backups of all (or, nearly all... some are hard to find) of my physical books. I didn't make them from my own copy of course, but I still consider my digital library to be a backup of my physical bookshelves. Maybe this isn't as common as I had imagined, but I thought it was a fairly reasonable thing to do.

to be honest, I think "backup" is somewhat euphemistic. the real reason we "backup" CDs is because it is much more convenient to play their content from a computer than from a CD player. it's also trivial to make a lossless copy of a CD, unlike vinyl.

I did both.

I ripped them to my computer to play there and to download from there to my Archos Jukebox and later iPod.

But I also burned copies onto archival quality DVD-Rs, which are stored in my fireproof safe, and I think this definitely counts as a backup.

sure, I'm not saying the idea of archiving is illegitimate! just that I don't think this is why most people rip CDs. they do it because they want to make playlists, play songs on their ipod, etc. I don't think it even occurs to most people that a CD degrades over time.

Of course that would be a better solution; but its not a feasible one at this point. Our governments are corrupt and businesses are too large; the best we can hope for is protecting consumers as much as possible in attainable ways.

I would like to see a law which states that businesses cannot revoke your access to any discrete good you've purchased. Arguably, media companies wouldn't be the primary aggrieved party of a law like that; it really hurts Amazon (et al) more than anyone, being legally forced to continue serving video files you've purchased even in the face of Terms of Service breaches and such.

Which is perfect. That's exactly what we want. If Amazon has to guarantee access to content, the easiest way to fulfill that requirement is to offer downloads for customers (which I think should be a fulfillment of that requirement, and its alright if they terminate an account so long as a download was offered for all content). Of course, the Media companies Definitely don't want that, so now we have the media companies and tech companies fighting each other. Laws which disrupt the alignment of incentives between companies are the best kind of laws.

"Revocable Rental" should be the only permitted button text in most digital licensing situations.

> By ordering or viewing, you agree to our Terms.

goes here

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...

"Rent Temporarily" with a comment "Rent can be terminated by renter at any time, without ability to appeal". Because "rent indefinitely" is definitely incorrect since it is impossible.

"Indefinitely" does not mean "forever"; it means "the end is not defined". The end could be tomorrow, or in a thousand years; its just unknown and not communicated at this time.

This is a similar misconception to the word "infinite", which many people believe means "an unending amount" but actually just means "not finite"; an amount large enough that it can't be quantified, but still an amount nonetheless. This comes into play in mathematics when talking about some infinities being larger than others.

If you take a nihilistic view of the universe, then everything is temporary, and thus even the DVDs you've purchased should have been advertised as a temporary rental. That's not very useful, though.

Leasehold?

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