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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media, what media you consume, how many times you consume it, or how long you consume it. You can enjoy it offline, and in 20 years long after the studio that licensed it is gone. You can give it to a friend or loan it out. Or sell it. It is yours.

Meanwhile DRM media we pay full price for, or if the content is only available via streaming we pay for it indefinitely. In neither case are we assured access a decade from now on different devices and we certainly don't get any privacy as studios track every second we consume. Worse, when big companies decide it is not profitable enough to keep "purchased" data around anymore, they just cut it loose.

Try opening a book from the Microsoft eBook store. It will fail because they closed down the DRM servers. The books stopped working. PlayStation 3 store? Wii store? Same story. You can no longer access your purchases.

Literally the only way to get the same freedoms with modern digital media we had with physical media, is piracy.

We got scammed.

View on HN

> We got scammed.

Well, depends on how you look at it and how comfortable you are forgetting about how it looked before you could buy online.

I pay for convenience which is a service rather than tangible good.

If I need a book for my research, I would prefer to have access to it immediately rather than wait two weeks to get it from overseas. My time is valuable and the pause on the project or inconvenience of not having the book for a week or two cost me much more than price of the book.

If I want to watch a movie with my kids I am fine renting the movie for the price of the DVD even if I know I could be watching the DVD multiple times. Most times we do not re-watch movies anyway and it is worth to me to be able to do something with my kids on a whim rather than have to plan it.

If I pay for Spotify I understand I don't own all those titles. But, for a price of half a CD per month I get access to as many titles as I can listen to. This lets me discover new music on a whim. Something, that was not possible when I was buying physical CDs in a music store. Also I paid A LOT more for CDs than I pay currently for access to much more music.

But I agree things should be called properly without creating false impression that you own something rather than pay for a time-limited service.

I used to be somewhat skeptical of the convenience claim. A former colleague argued that the attraction of Napster was more about convenience than price which I didn't really buy.

But if we look at the popularity of streaming services today versus owning even DRM-free music, that would seem to support the convenience theory. (It hasn't taken off for books to the same degree but I'd guess that's in part because the vast majority of people just don't consume enough to make an all you can eat offering work.)

As perhaps both cause and effect, there's probably also something of a generational shift in which ownership of stuff you can put your hands on may just not be as appealing to many younger people, especially if they're urban dwellers without a lot of space.

Owning music is made much more difficult now that the ability to use it has been greatly diminished. Many new cars don't even come with CD players. Sure, there are work arounds, but I think that moves us beyond a measure of "convenience".

>>the ability to use it has been greatly diminished

Really? I have tons of music ripped from CDs on my iPhone and I can trivially play that in my car. I have CD players in my car (which I never use) and attached to my stereo (which I rarely use). It's not that the ability to play CDs (or rip them and play them) has been diminished but a lot of people prefer to just use a streaming service.

I'll grant that many people don't have a CD player even on their computer any longer but you can buy one for not much money online and have it in a couple days if you want one.

> I have tons of music ripped from CDs

Are you suggesting that it's a simple and convenient thing to do for the public?

That supports ghaff’s original point. It’s far more convenient to stream music than deal with CDs period.

Automakers didn’t remove CD players despite people wanting them. They did it because enough customers were not willing to pay a premium to have the CD player. I would rather have a larger screen for CarPlay, and I’m betting most people who use streaming apps/MP3s would too.

> I would rather have a larger screen for CarPlay, and I’m betting most people who use streaming apps/MP3s would too.

CarPlay and touch screens generally are one of the worst 'innovations' that have happened in cars in recent decades, as far as road safety goes.

In the past, I would have a CD that had 5-10 albums on it, and could easily flip between them without taking my eyes off the road. I could glance up at the sleeve on my sun shade to find a different CD to switch to, and easily switch the CDs around and navigate the rest of the process by feel alone.

Now I have to pull over to change albums in a reliable (siri is unreliable and doesn't work with all apps) and safe manner.

It's an improvement as far as how much total music I have access to on any given journey. Does that convenience justify even one additional life lost as a result of a distracted driver? As a society, we have very loudly screamed ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY, which, like GP notes, is a real fucking shame.

Yeah? Didn't we all burn mixed CDs to trade as kids? Most cars have an aux plug, and there are still standalone mp3 players with a drag and drop interface

Shoot, almost ten years ago I ripped my dad's CDs and put them all on a SanDisk mp3 player. He's almost certainly just using it as is.. I'd have to ask, but his music taste has been set for thirty years; he doesn't need to put anything new on it, ever.

All he needs to know how to do is unplug it from the stereo and plug it into the jack in the car.

What's hard here?

Streaming is more convenient for most people. Ripping is as simple as it was 20 years ago when much of the general public had no trouble doing so. It’s just that there are simpler alternatives that weren’t available then.

Yes...all you had to do with iTunes was insert a disc and click a button. After a couple of minutes, the tracks would all be in your library with metadata pulled from the internet. Everyone I knew who had a computer used to duplicate CDs for their car and make mixes.

looks at laptop

Hmmm...

looks at old laptop

Hmmm...

looks at ipad, iphone

Hmm...Oh, I know!

looks at gaming PC

Nope. I don't have a disk drive on a computer and haven't for several years now. Sure, I could get one, but optical drives have been optional equipment for a while now.

It's optional because you, like many, don't rip/play CDs/DVDs any longer. You'd have one if you had a use for it. I'm guessing you have peripherals attached to one or more of your computers that I consider optional.

But ripping CDs is not the only way of "owning" the media.

As another commenter said [0], you can buy and own media without ever touching a physical medium or waiting for the post service to deliver it.

I seem to remember at one point Apple was offering DRM-free music. This is pretty convenient for everybody. Yes, you have to buy it ahead of time and store it, as opposed to just streaming right away.

But it does seem quite easy to me. Go to the iTunes store, click buy, done. It may even sync automatically to your iPhone, so you can play it in your car, just as you would Spotify.

---

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914754

They still do, Apple's MP3s are DRM-free, and you can download them with the iTunes desktop client. Another super handy way: Amazon.

Amazon's MP3 download store is DRM-free, but also, Amazon has an "Auto-Rip" feature that means often when you buy the physical music CD, they immediately give you the ability to download the MP3s for free. You get the real purchase of physical media, and the convenience of instant access.

If you bought Apple's MP3's when they had DRM, you can't get them without it. (Maybe if you re-purchase it?). At least I can't access DRM free music that I purchased initially with DRM.

Yeah, that sounds like some contractual nonsense. Similar to how Play Family Sharing only applies to apps bought after they rolled it out.

Are you suggesting that it's not? Maybe I'm out of touch with both the state of technology and the general public (guilty on both counts), but last I checked major operating systems all came with CD ripping software included. Do people really not have CD drives any more or something?

A fair number of people probably don't have CD drives any longer given you generally don't need them to install software. But you can buy one on Amazon for < $20 so that's certainly not a huge barrier for people who want to.

It seems like a lot more people have laptops only these days and most new laptops don’t have a CD drive. Neither my 2013 MBP or the desktop I built in 2018 have a CD drive and I’ve never needed one with the desktop and haven’t used one with the laptop since a year or two after I bought it. They are basically phased out for computing purposes it seems.

Shoot, in the late 90’s I feel like everyone was ripping and burning CDs not just the savvy ones.

What device are you using that allows you to stream music but can't play from audio files you bought? I don't find the difference between spotify and MP3s that large.

Alternatively you could just download everything you wanted to listen to for the last 30 years.

I have Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Spotify, sometimes Youtube TV, OTA via TIVO. Trust me, TPB is much more convenient.

I can be streaming just about anything purchased/rented a la carte from Amazon in a couple of minutes. It costs more but I don't see how that's less convenient than TPB.

The primary challenge with today's streaming services is determining which platform the content is on, and what tier you need to have to consume the content.

In that way, Amazon Video is one of the most convenient platforms as it has more content than many other platforms, though you may need to pay a rental fee.

When it comes to convenience, for me unified access to the most content trumps most other issues.

I have to add that I do have one other streaming service I did not list and that is Formula 1 TV.

And I think this is an incredible example of value that can be added to television. During an event you can watch live video footage from the main feed, any of the 20 cars on the track, or the pit straights. You can listen to team radios, commentary, or just engine audio.

Assuming it's on Amazon...

What do you do when the show you want to watch is not on there? What do you do when it's a Hulu Exclusive? Or a Netflix show?

You know what I do? Search for 'movie/show name' + 'torrent' and I pull down the rip at 10MB/sec, and have it in a few minutes. Faster than signing up for another service, installing the app on all of my devices, connecting that app up to my account, adding my credit card, then paying for it. Then having to discontinue that subscription later when I decide there's nothing else on that service I want to watch. Then you realize, you paid for 1 month of service, just to watch one show... ridiculous.

Streaming is only convenient when you are already subscribed to the service. Otherwise piracy is much easier. Plus I don't get my fucking videos downsampled to 720p because I choose to watch in a web browser on a Linux box.

I'm not really concerned about cost.

I like to be able to use my laptop to locate content and then watch it on a television. So my habits mostly include YouTube or TPB. With youtube I can queue a number of items into a playlist. For TPB, I just press the magnet and it appears on my television a short while later.

I mean I intend to continue paying for these services since I like the offerings. I just don't like using them. They're all ugly and annoying, and they each have their quirks I need to learn. Discovery sucks and searching is always slow and painful. I just don't care to deal with it.

Plus, every time someone mentions a show you have to have this extra little conversation about what streaming service it's available on. It's annoying and I really don't want to care.

I think it depends on your viewing habits. If you decide what content you want to watch and then seek it out, you might have a tougher time finding what you want with all the streaming services segregating content.

But if you start by opening a streaming service and browse from there I don’t really think there’s any contest between the high-quality exploration and experience of eg Netflix vs the glorified spreadsheet browsing that is TPB and all the gotchas that go along with downloading random torrents...

If you think TPB is the holy grail of convenience, then you haven't tried a service like real-debr1d with kodi. I've been a pirate for many years, nothing beats this combination if the objective is to stream whatever movie/show your heart desires on demand.

Your opinion on convenience is not relevant to this case.

Yes but that's not the same thing. You're arguing in the "physical/digital" debate and I believe evryone will agree that digital is better in most cases. Physically owning something is nice for the memorabilia and for those who still have DVD/CD players but that's not the biggest use case.

The topic here is DRM vs non-DRM'd media. It's orthogonal to the topic of physicality: you can have DRM'd physical media (think Google Nest) and you can have non-DRM'd digital media.

Switching back to the convenience of using digital instead of physical is a disservice to the discussion because it switches the focus on something that is totally unrelated and makes people believe that those who prefer non-DRM'd media are somehow reluctant to adopting streaming platform. I definitely see the convenience of it: I barely have any music files on my computer, I stream it all from Youtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp. And like you I have spent MUCH more money on artists now that I can stream them than when I bought CDs. But when I want to get the files for offline use I know I'm in good hands because those platforms allow me to do it and have files I can use forever without ever reconnecting to the mothership.

So, to come back the initial point: yes we got scammed, because we didn't read the fine print. We didn't understand that DRM'd media is never bought, it's always rented. We switched from buy-it-for-life to subscribe-until-the-platform-dies

I think the point is it’s not a scam because these businesses are of value to you overall. That they decided they needed DRM to make sustainable business is unfortunate but doesn’t make it a scam. The words may be scammy in this case, but digital media is better than physical media and you get the good with the bad.

You have an interesting definition of scam. For me "selling" you something by misrepresenting what it is, is pretty much the definition of a scam to me. It does not matter if it had some convenience to me. E.g. If I was sold a new iPhone online (maybe when it was currently not available on the apple store) and I later found out it was used (and I e.g. can't get warranty) I would say I have been scammed, even though it was convenient for me to buy it from some vendor online and I didn't have to wait for it to be back in stock at apple.

> I believe evryone will agree that digital is better in most cases

If you include modern piracy in with "digital", sure. If you only include legal offerings, absolutely not.

Even DRM'd physical media that doesn't use the network in any way to authenticate is way better than DRM'd digital media, which you can never truly own, and which exists at the folly of the service operator.

GP was talking about the format of digital media, not the usual protections put in place on what is currently offered legally.

You're back to conflating the two.

> If you only include legal offerings, absolutely not.

I have plenty of ebooks from Baen and Tor, and plenty of music I've bought from a variety of places, all in digital format, all without any DRM. It's not the "digital" part that's bad, it's the DRM part.

And there are some unsung heros out there breaking those DRM schemes. I feel way more comfortable creating a DRM-free copy of Blu-rays I own, and I don't feel I stole anything from anyone or did anything morally wrong

The OP he's replying to was arguing that "physical media" doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of "DRM media" implying that physical media has no DRM (obviously false).

Fine, but selling convenience is DIFFERENT from selling possession.

Alan may want convenience of streaming a large library for a low price.

Barbara may want the conveniece of having physical media she can bring on her travels and play without an internet connection, or the ability to play it 20 years from now and give to her kids.

That is all fine, they are two different things

The scam is selling the rental of transient streaming service rental as if it had the attributes of buying physical media.

Apple and others are exploiting the familiarity and positive connotations of "buying a movie/album" to sell something that clearly lacks the same attributes. It is a linguistic sleight-of-hand, and it is a scam.

They are leveraging the connotation of "buy" to get you to give them money. If they used the words lease, rent, or borrow or explicitly stated the purchase may be for a limited time then consumers' brow would furl as they pulled away from the action button. That is bad for conversion. This is classic anti-market behavior.

I get where you are coming from but I don’t really care what you buy movies for and I don’t really understand what that has to do with this topic. This isn’t a wishy washy political or abstract technical topic. Its a legal interpretation.

Did you really need to reiterate yourself three times? Are you even really trying to participate in the conversation here are you trying to derail?

The convenience argument is such bullshit.

We have been seduced into selling our rights down the river because we will sacrifice anything to this most pathetic of gods, Convenience.

I have been fighting in this war (anti-DRM/copyleft/etc) for decades, and peoples' susceptibility to convenience has always effectively thwarted any kind of counter argument.

We are fucking lazy and we should be ashamed of it.

Yes I am bitter, we could have had a world of power, control, and ownership at our fingers... a cornucopia of content on our terms... computers that well and truly serve us and not some wanterpreneurial, rent-seeking master... but it wouldn't have been as convenient.

And now zoomers, seduced by corporate sponsorships and the cozy fiefdoms of communities like YouTube or TikTok, have almost no concept of files or their utility, of the value of owning something detached from a profiteering cloud. They have no problem enriching those who seek to exploit them.

It is all complete, utter horseshit. We fought for a better world that nobody wanted because it wasn't as convenient

> And now zoomers, seduced by corporate sponsorships and the cozy fiefdoms of communities like YouTube or TikTok, have almost no concept of files or their utility, of the value of owning something detached from a profiteering cloud. They have no problem enriching those who seek to exploit them.

You’re blaming gen z for the world they were raised in? The oldest “zoomers” are about 25. You think they ran these companies for the last 20 years and made the decisions that got us here?

They have no problem enriching those who seek to exploit them because there is no other choice. Nobody actually wants this.

I'm not blaming them, they are a victim of circumstance. But they are now the demographic that marketeers fawn over, and the demographic that shapes the immediate future. And they just don't care.

>You’re blaming gen z for the world they were raised in?

I read it as complaining that the work done defending the concept of digital ownership and absolute control of one's own digital space was for nought. The people coming of age in today's digital landscape were basically raised as prisoners inside of the rent/data-extracting walled gardens we have today.

It's because it's 99% just entertainment, and not that important to most people. Sorry to burst your bubble. Even your use of the word "content" gives the game away.

Arguably when you had to search for content (either by ripping CDs or DVDs or browsing limewire, etc) you put effort into obtaining it, and so it felt worthwhile to put effort into maintaining it.

Now it's easy gained, easy lost and so people don't care.

I feel your pain, exactly as you describe it. It's all horrible and wrong. And I'm 22.

Well that is service vs non service model. For example lets say you buy a ebook from Amazon. You expect the book to stay with you forever. It costs Amazon next to nothing to transfer the 5mb of book data I need to read the book. Compare that with subscription to Kindle unlimited. You get some books you can read but lose access to them once you unsubscribe.

You are not being lied to in the subscription model but it seems the digital buying isn't quite honest.

Yeah, I think that's why I object much less to Netflix's DRM than to iTunes DRM on movies that I've "bought". Netflix, HBO+, Disney+ never give you the illusion that anything involving them is permanent.

I've been buying some DVDs off Amazon lately because the movies I want to watch, some of which aren't even that old, haven't been on any streaming service at any price.

Pretty inconvenient.

If we live in a world without physical media, some things will simply disappear forever.

Remember when we could buy mp3s on the iTunes store? Why can't we buy our movies as mp4s on the Apple Movies store?

I would have convenience (more convenience than I have now, I argue). They could still have a cloud offering that only lasts as long as they feel like it.

That would be enough to make this lawsuit go away. So, no, it isn't that we are now buying convenience so we must bend our backs to their spying and control. We had both freedom and control in the digital music ecosystem for more than ten years.

> I pay for convenience which is a service rather than tangible good.

Piracy is often more convenient than going through the hurdles of a legal purchase.

Bollocks more like.

A fraudulent contract is not a contract.

"The books stopped working" is a fantastic writing prompt for a dystopian novel.

I have been looking for a book title to express my discontent at the state of freedom and privacy in our rapidly all digital society today and what we can do about it.

There are several more cases of books being remotely disabled and I see this being used for censorship before long.

...Noted

You should check out the book "Radicalized" by Cory Doctorow! It's four short stories. The first one - "Unauthorized Bread" was published online: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

On the way! Thanks.

Take a look at this great story from Richard Stallman:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

It's chilling how much this doesn't sound rediculous.

I was reminded of a 2-minute video from the FSF, Shoe tool.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/presenting-shoetool-happ...

It really pains me that I feel rms has to go. He's just too much of whatever he is in real life.

It pains me because he's just so utterly correct on the things he writes and wrote about.

He’s back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224

Wow, this is mind-blowingly prescient.

> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Shoutouts to the UEFI secure boot fiasco.

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I’ll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

- Ubik, Philip K Dick, 1969

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...

What?! I got that book somewhere. That's hilarious, I didn't expect that. Now I have to read it.

It is, not so much so that the concept is not without precedent ("book burnings" are quite famous throughout history), but that the book burnings will be conducted by corporations that also have all the data on those who ever read them, and not to mention they are the ones who initially made money selling them in the first place.

In fact [blank] is a fantastic writing prompt for a dystopian novel, seems like a fun little game to play with friends.

And will we even notice when the books are “burned”? I have so many digital titles I think it would take quite a while for me to catch on if they were removed slowly enough.

Weird to think a book burning could happen right under our noses (literally!) without us even realizing.

In the before times, people were allowed to show their faces.

Let us search about the Gutenbergian cartel for time limited ink prints.

You know it is not book burnings that concern me (they do a bit). It is more re-editing that will start to happen once they get the tech just right. They will edit problematic people in and out of old movies. At first it will be used for advertising. Such as switching one cola for another in scenes or a billboard in the background. It will be something like 'restaurant X has given us money to change billboards for a year'. Next year 'car company Y has given us money to change billboards for a year'. Then they will go bonkers with it. Do not like the dialog, because they said something you no longer agree with? Well run it through a couple of programs and they are now saying something else, or new and upcoming actor someone wants to promote. So you will see something then a few months later it will be edited and you will never see what you saw before.

Oh and it is already happening with adverts in some streaming movies.

> I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

From [Libertarian Police Department](https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...)

>Please drink verification can to continue

https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png

> Halo 2k19

Little did we know that they'd just use the same game over and over for years. Look at GTA 5.

Which could happen system-wide because they turned off the DRM servers (a la Microsoft books) or maybe you've been deemed "unacceptable" on the platform.

This is why supporting DRM-free stores is important (e.g. Bandcamp for music and GOG for games).

Are there similar platforms for buying ebooks?

I like ebooks but I'm not comfortable with all the layers of DRM involved in it.

I looked and looked and looked for an option here, and almost pulled the trigger on book scanning gear.

Eventually I gave up realizing it is an extraordinary effort to personally rip books just to have drm-free digital copies.

Instead I built a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and filled it.

I read ink on slices of dead trees now, like a barbarian.

That's one of my dreams, floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with books. Can't you try 'Calibre' [1] instead of paid book scanning gear? It's GPL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

That means buying the DRM copies in the first place, further contributing to that system. Also it is a PITA.

Pretty much all e-paper readers are proprietary and track all reading too which is a second order problem.

IMO the long-term solution is attaching an author-payment system widget to pirate sites. It's not illegal to pay authors, so a payment system can't be DMCA'd, and pirate websites pop back up like weeds and can't realistically be stamped out. Magnet links are way too portable for that and anyone can spin up a new VPS with 100MB or so of data (the size of TPB's db IIRC) to keep on going.

Honestly, this is an amazing idea be if for individual creators or studios. It should also have a way to tag specific media that caused them to want to contribute so it is a wallet vote for more like this.

Really all creators should just have anonymous donation options for people that want to support -them- without supporting the toxic labels and DRM situation.

There are ebook scanning services that do a great job. I have used bookscan.us for hundreds of books for years and it works well.

The only issue I have is most of them require the destruction of the book by removing the pages. Many of mine are very rare and collectible now costing hundreds of dollars so it would be a crime to damage them.

Do you know of services that can do this without damage?

I unfortunately don't know of any services that do this non destructively. However, there are scanner designs that Archive.org use to scan rare books. I'll try to find references but I think they'll require construction - afaik, no one sells such a scanner ready to purchase.

Edit: Ask and ye shall receive: https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-SV600-Overhead-Scann... - had no idea this existed. Very tempting - Fujitsu makes solid scanners .

You can actually find quite a few on Amazon. Example:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QGM36KB/

"At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."

Smashwords comes to mind: https://www.smashwords.com/ . Once you buy a book, you get a DRM-free epub that you can open in whichever e-book reader you fancy.

There are in fact more of such stores, but this is the one that I use and remember.

Yeeeesssss.....buuuuut....

Only for certain books.

Book DRM has been a nightmare. Tying a book to certain readers is an automatic showstopper for a lot of folks (like me). I recently bounced a tech book I purchased, because I had to download their crappy hybrid app to read the book. The same people that sold it to me, used to sell unlocked reflowable EPUBs (my preferred format), or watermarked PDFs (I have no problem with simple margin watermarks). I'll lay odds that the app they make you use phones home. I didn't bother downloading it, or reviewing their privacy policy.

I'm not so concerned with privacy, as I am, with perpetual access to the books I want to read, on whatever reader I want to use.

I often go back and re-read books, years after the the last time I read them. I want to have that book available, then.

Also, this goes for all types of media, region locks are garbage.

Adding for people who want sources:

There are quite a few places especially technical ones. However, many major pulishers don't offer them, so you then have the choice of DRM stripping, searching for illegitimate copies or giving up/in and using a DRM copy somehow.

https://www.ebooks.com/en-nl/drm-free/

https://leanpub.com/

https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/

Note places like ebooks.com don't sell exclusively DRM free, so you will need to check per book. I returned one to them and got a refund because of my mistake in buying a DRMd copy.

I'd add Lulu to that list.

https://www.lulu.com/search/?contributor=Nils+M+Holm

For free books in the public domain, https://standardebooks.org

> Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

(Not affiliated, just think they do great work!

Discussed before:

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802

2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138534 )

Add Manning, No Starch Press, InformIT (Pearson) to that list.

They somehow watermark your books though, but they don't contain any DRM.

O'Reilly was very good. Now they only rent their books via Safari. I feel betrayed.

One approach I've used in lieu of buying ebooks is to buy a used/new print copy, get it destructively scanned, and thus acquire a drm-free copy of the book. Often this can work out cheaper than buying the ebook.

Sadly many of the books I buy are quite rare, and getting a destructive scan would be a crime against humanity.

One could argue it is ethical, if not legal, to obtain a drm-free digital backup from a pirate site if one has a physical copy on their shelf.

This HN thread has some DRM-free

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892249

Ironically, DRM drives me towards Z-Lib and Libgen, when I happily payed No Starch for their stuff. Especially their bundles are a smart move in the digital age.

Also, see e.g. Steam, you cannot charge for these digital goods the way you used to. It's shifting towards (searchable) collections, not just individual books. It's ridiculous, when digital edition cost almost as much as print. They are emotionally and functionally different things.

I used to work in the industry: Print really isn't much more expensive to produce than ebooks, so there's not a huge different in cost.

A hardcover will cost around $3-$4 in printing costs. Even still, ebooks can be a good deal. To use a recent example that wouldn't yet have any digital discounts, there's the John Boehner book [0]. As of this comment, it has an MSRP of $29.99. The Kindle version is $14.99. At actual retail, Barnes & Noble charges $23.99. At Amazon it's $17.99, which makes the savings on print costs a wash.

Mid-size paper backs are usually a fair bit cheaper too. Mass-market editions are the bad deals: In print they retail around $8 to $10, which is usually the ebook cost too. However, many books never make it to mass market editions theses days.

The bulk of the costs involved in bringing a book to market are the people: Time to review the "slush pile", pay the author, editor, copy editor, typesetting, marketing. And many books either lose money for the publisher or barely earn out the author's advance. Mid-list authors who can consistently earn out their advance with a healthy margin are the ones that keep the lights on long enough for the publisher to (hopefully) catch lightning in a bottle with a block buster, or at least an outsized success.

Of course all of the costs above assume you're buying a new copy. Used books are often a very good deal.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/House-John-Boehner/dp/1250238447/ref=...

Thanks for the insights!

Still I think ebooks are a different product. At least in my head. I have a different emotional relationship with a physical book. The information within isn't in competition with the endless a "wealth" of information available legally or not.

For text books piracy is a victimless "crime" in my case, as having a digital copy or not, is independent from financial loss above a certain price tag. That is, I can't afford most text books, so I won't buy them; piracy does not influence the income of the publisher. On the other hand, if I really need/want to buy a book, I am likely gonna get much more intimate with it. Let's face it, digital copies are much more likely not to be read. Maybe only indexed and searched as part of a collection. Digital has a different value. (Although, I ofc understand the superficial dilemma here.)

This is the situation we got IMO.

Side note: You, as someone from the industry, I assume we can both agree that at the very least, a free digital copy should be included with every physical one, right? That just silly and artificial to separate, if you make an argument for the value of content and presentation.

In the case of text books, if you can't afford it then pirating it can actually be a net-benefit to society. You weren't going to contribute to the economy through purchasing it, but by learning from a pirated copy you increase your knowledge & potential value to society.

I was actually about to write the net benefit bit, but decided against for avoiding some knee jerk reaction of the HN crowd, drowning the argument XD

Yeah, ebooks are particularly egregious because the readers actually have features that are good or bad and being locked into one or two options at the most severely limits how you consume your books.

What I've doing is buying physical books and then downloading DRM free ebook versions from pirate bay. I know not everyone will agree with those ethics, but I'm ok with it.

DRM-free media stores: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/ (scroll down).

DRM isn't the only problem. Watermarks are as well, they ruin the sound quality. Its a bit disappointing FSF doesn't mention Fairphone, as they offer a smartphone made from slave-free labour (Librem 5 isn't).

Bandcamp is watermark-free. I’ve verified it myself by comparing FLACs bought from two different accounts. They were identical.

Fairphone relies on Qualcomm, which forces planned obsolescence through proprietary software [0]. This is why FSF do not recommend it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593274

Consider Librem 5 USA instead: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa. It is produced in USA.

For me it is pointless to buy made in USA given NSA. I would be better off blending in crowd, or buying from within EU.

As for planned obsolescence, FP2 has 5+ years of support as we speak. Without help from Qualcomm, as they EOLed SD800/801 long ago. That's the same SOC as in the Mars helicopter, btw.

The point I made still stands: Librem 5 is made from slave labour (gold, cobalt). Especially sour with the 2000 USD price tag.

Feel I should add https://libro.fm/ for audiobooks, since missing from that list.

Shame GOG don't care about your privacy. When they published a profile page for you without asking first, leaking your personal data and what games you owned to anyone you had friended before, I contacted them and they just straight up said they didn't think it was a problem.

No DRM is a marketing gimmick for them, they don't actually care about the privacy of their customers.

CD Projekt Red also sell Windows exclusive software (Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, etc.), which, one can argue, is also a form of DRM.

That is a very tenuous argument. With DRM, one has to work against the grain of a software to implement it, whereas focusing on one native platform is almost the opposite - one has to go against the grain to make it cross platform. In that sense, DRM is an artificial limitation, whereas supporting just one platfrom isn't one.

Wasn't Cyberpunk compiled for Linux to run on Stadia though? Not shipping the Linux binary looks like an artifical limitation at that point.

Judging by the QC nightmare that game appears to have been, supporting just one installation configuration on an OS with the direct support of the company running that configuration (I wouldn't be surprised if Google had chipped in resources to get the Stadia port through) is a much different level of resource commitment than supporting it for a user base.

"Shipping a binary" is not the same as actually porting the game - porting requires a ton of expensive QA, and no port is better than a bad port because the latter 1) gets bad press for the main version of the game and 2) misleads customers who expect quality from your brand.

You certainly could argue, but that doesn't mean it would be a good argument. How far can you take this? Are cars that only take premium fuel also DRM? What about a conduction stove that doesn't work with all pans?

https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-made-cyberpunk-2077-playable-...

By adding yet another indirection. Compiling the binaries for Linux and just shipping it with a fat "no warranty" label on top would have been 100x better. Even Linux distros do that (GPL: `THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.`)

You want them to sell their product with a "if it doesn't work it's not our problem" label? I'm sure there are consumer protection laws against that.

The no particular fitness of purpose clause in nearly every EULA you’ve ever clicked through is literally that.

EULAs that are shown post-purchase are invalid in all of EU, there have been numerous court cases about it. If software makers want a legally binding contract it has to be shown before purchase - if you already have bought something and are just installing it, the EULA presented during the installation is meaningless.

EULAs are mostly invalid garbage - they include "TO THE FULLEST EXTENT APPLICABLE UNDER THE LAW" is clever lawyer-speak saying "this only applies if we can legally get away with it". They include that because if they didn't, then any explicitly illegal demand they made would void the entire contract.

Just because the EULA requires your firstborn son, doesn't mean they have any claim whatsoever.

Probably not in the beginning, but once you have a successful model going it's inevitable that the sociopaths/careerists invade and take over. It's unnatural and unstable for a company to believe in anything but accumulation.

No DRM is not just about privacy, far from it.

The most important aspect is that as long as you have a compatible system and a good backup policy, you will never lose access to what you bought.

No DRM can help with privacy but they are mostly independent. There is DRM that doesn't violate your privacy, like hardware keys typical of arcade machines, oldschool copy protection and game cartridges. And I think Nintendo has privacy-preserving DRM for digital games too, the problem is that if you lose the console, you lose the game.

And as you have shown, you don't need DRM for privacy violations.

Oh, for sure. I'm just saying that "they don't use DRM, therefore they care about privacy and we should support them" isn't going to hold. I agree no DRM is better, but as you say, there is more to privacy than that.

I have put quite some trust in Steam and hope I won't get disappointed

You will be. Give it a decade.

I've given it two; so far, so good.

Though, I have made the transition to GOG where possible. but with so many games requiring online activation, I've accepted modern games might not have a long shelf life.

iTunes is also a DRM-free music store. (Assuming you buy and aren’t using Apple Music.)

I wonder if we'd have gotten there without Jobs. It seems it happened in a moment of time when there was still a lot of piracy going on so there was a big push to make purchased digital music as good as/better than pirated music. Maybe today there would be a general feeling that DRM-free would be the only incentive for people to buy music given that streaming predominates, so why not, but I'm not sure.

Here's an archive link for those who didn't see it back in 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

Almost all of my optical media from around the year 2000 oxidized and stopped working. I've lost more CDs, DVDs, and blue rays to scratches than I care to admit. Many of my old photos and books were destroyed with some water damage.

Much of it was due to improper storage, but that's where the very real value of not having something physical or on site comes from.

When I get a choice between cloud and physical, I now always buy cloud from the largest, stable, cloud distributors (Amazon or Apple, never Google or Microsoft). I will pay more if needed. It's a valuable service to me to not have to babysit a movie/book/photo. I've personally never lost anything to DRM, but I've lost dozens of physical media, over the years, for one reason or another.

Freedom is great, but the freedom of not having to lug things around with me is the freedom I would rather pay for. But I'm the type of person that gets terrified when I see someone's DVD /Blueray collection that covers a wall, "I hope you have homeowners insurance".

This is a real shame.

I encourage anyone with physical media to make digital backups right away in case the media becomes unreadable down the road.

Then the original media, readable or not, is just a physical license certificate that sits on a shelf.

In the case of blu-rays or DVDs be sure you rip them by simply doing analog MITM recording in a custom LCD controller just after the DRM decryption is done so you don't break DRM circumvention laws.

For sure avoid using any of the really good open source tools that can get you identical copies in a shorter period of time. That would be illegal.

I’ve known a few people that had all of their photos backed up on USB flash drives. Once their main drives eventually died they quickly leaned that flash drives have a limited unpowered shelf life. I’ve seen family members cry. I tell everyone to use a real cloud backup services, rather than a home grown backups that everyone forgets to refresh.

You can still download purchases from the PS3 store; in fact you can still buy things from it (but only because of an outcry when Sony announced they were closing it). I'm pretty sure you can still download past purchases from the Wii store too.

Of course, those kinds of "we're keeping the servers up after the store is closed" situations are necessarily limited so it's just a matter of time. As you say, once the calculus of remaining users and the reputational damage of shutting down gets small enough then it'll happen.

On the other hand, Playstation has a worse set of problems going on: systems apparently need to phone home if their CMOS battery dies or is replaced, and if those servers aren't around anymore or you have no internet, even physical copies don't play. (As far as I know this is just about resetting the clock but it's still a network dependency.)

> I'm pretty sure you can still download past purchases from the Wii store too.

Correct, at least for now. You haven't actually been able to buy anything since 2019.

In my opinion, this was reason enough to find a complete archive of all the Wii Shop files and just go through the library to find the gems. It might be technically illegal, but the only legal process of obtaining any of these games is finding a Wii that happened to have a particular game already installed on it.

Instead of wasting money and acquiring dozens of otherwise-identical consoles, I opt for the preservation (formerly piracy) route.

You're right. I've returned to buying only physical media -- haven't purchased an online format for 6 months+. I agree, we got played.

About a year ago, Amazon changed the verbiage on the ui from "you own this movie" to "you purchased this movie". That was my clue and trigger to change.

This reminds me of the widespread move to change from “private message” to “direct message” on platforms like facebook and twitter. A subtle hint in the UI as to how things really work.

Twitter has always, to my knowledge, called them DMs. I’ve always hated FB messaging, despite using it out of necessity occasionally, so I can’t speak to if/when the naming scheme changed there. That said, a bunch of smaller messaging sites made that shift, so your core point is valid, I just think you overshot with your examples potentially.

An interesting exception - it is still Audible's policy to say you keep everything you've bought if you decide to cancel a subscription. This still ties those books to their app but it seems like the best we can hope for given the alternative choice.

There have been at various times scripts found on GitHub, BitBucket and the rest that will convert the files to MP3, effectively breaking out of the DRM, but this has been hit or miss in my experience.

My pipe dream for all of these services is still a buyout clause which would provide you with the unprotected files for a fee, but with the rise in popularity of streaming services, legally and financially, there doesn't seem to be much will to help a shrinking segment of the customer base with a niche concern.

How much to charge for this would be a terrible debate, as trying to do it "at cost" per purchase - presumably the company's preference - would be heinously expensive.

I highly recommend https://libro.fm/ as an alternative.

Do you think it'd be a good idea to force companies to open source abandonware? We could claw back space from copyright laws, and force companies to remove DRM schemes, open source DRM-ed copyright, servers and any/all assets required to run "the store" locally.

This is analogous to right to repair, DRM "breaking" your property should be banned.

How would you define abandonware?

I don't think I have the full definition.

But if you think about online games, it becomes abandonware if you can no longer log into the game servers?

Or if your product is dependent on DRM, then is becomes abandonware when the DRM servers shut down.

I think different classes of media will require different definitions of when they become abandonware, but I think we'll mostly know it when we see it.

Your definitions are better than what I was imagining, but I think they might still have rather significant edge cases & loopholes in reality. To give some examples off the top of my head: What if (say) access ends up varying across jurisdictions? What if they keep the servers running, but start charging for them? What if the company wants to sell to someone in another jurisdiction? etc.

I would require copyright holders to renew their copyright. 5 years for free, then $1 for the 6th year, $2 for the 7th, $4 for the 8th, $8 for the 9th, $1m for the 25th, etc.

Not every copyright holder is a massive corporation. Artists produce many pieces per year. That would cost them a lot to keep copyrights.

It's mostly representatives of individual creators who oppose orphan works legislation. Disney probably isn't going to forget (or worry about the expense) to renew the copyright on Frozen. But an individual author/photographer/etc. may well forget. And in the photographer case, does that mean they're going to have to spend money every year to renew the copyright on each individual photograph that want to continue to protect?

It doesn't necessarily benefit massive corporations more than individual artists, because those massive corporations probably also hold copyright over a lot of works; it'd cost them huge amounts of money to renew them all.

I think GP's scheme isn't awful honestly; it would have the effect of drastically lowering the practical length of copyright for most works while providing artists with a way to maintain copyright over works that are actually highly successful. (A per-year doubling might be a bit much but I think it's on the right track.)

If the practical effect was that we mostly got back to the original copyright term we had in the US (14 years with the possibility to extend that once), I'd be pretty happy. Maybe start the fees after the 14th year.

Not for the duration that matters. 5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society.

Sure, boost that to 10 or even 20 years if needed[0]. But from then on extension costs should grow exponential - otherwise we risk locking down work for duration longer than a human lifetime. Like it already happens with Disney.

[0] - 20 years may have been appropriate in mid-20th century, but I'd argue it isn't now. Cultural creation accelerates exponentially, but long copyrights prevent the ability to improve on prior art to accelerate in lock step.

5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society.

I strongly dispute this statement, unless your definition of reasonable income does not include at least making back the money you spent on producing the content in the first place. You're ignoring all the small creators who produce new material for niche markets, possibly as a side income rather than their main jobs, and rely on the long tail of sales of that original work to make it financially worthwhile. Not every copyright holder is a Hollywood movie studio, big name record label or international book publisher you've heard of.

Your longer periods might be more realistic in those cases, and even 10 years might not be enough to break even.

Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line? I can't really see the need for 25+ without a fee.

Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line?

I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it?

As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens.

I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well.

In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.

We could allow natural persons to hold copyright for their natural life. Their heirs, if natural persons could get a 18 year free extension (allowing any minor child of a creator to benefit from their parents IP to pay for their upbringing)

Corporations can start paying that escalating price right away.

(Edit: misread GP and removed a paragraph)

I think that's the point, to send works nobody is making money with to the public domain faster. Rather than the politically untenable idea of shortening the ever-expanding length of copyright.

Right, this is the problem: how to protect normal people without giving large companies more power? And how to do it when the companies are the ones in the room with lawmakers?

Non-transferable copyright/patents?

I don't think that's the right set of incentives:

1. Different industries have different paces; it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place, whereas if you haven't made back your money on your singleplayer videogame after 10 years, you probably won't ever make it back. Point is, there is no flat duration that is fair to every work out there. 2. almost by definition, the stuff we care about is more profitable and will therefore be kept under copyright longer. 3. I wonder whether copyright expiration is actually helpful for software, when it doesn't provide you with source code. I'd like to see some mechanism that incentivizes the IP owner to publish source code after their copyright expires - perhaps by offering a conditional extension to the copyright duration in exchange for putting the source code in escrow?

Really, I don't think software's IP type should be "copyright" in the first place. It doesn't make sense to cut and paste a binary like you would with a book's text.

> it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place

NASA is a government agency, the work should be in the public domain

s/NASA/aerospace/

Does the clock reset if you update the original work? With rolling releases, who determines when the clock officially starts? Also you'd have to account for industries where copyright/trademark/patents could overlap on products. While a nice idea, I imagine it would become a bureaucratic nightmare to implement as a law. But nevertheless, we need to think about new ways to fix the current broken system.

Sure, the new version (where Greedo shoots at Han) would reset the clock, but the original work (Where only Han shoots) still remains the same, and to be renewed would cost Disney $500b to renew it this year.

It looks like abandonware has an evolving legal status and relates to "orphaned" works in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...

DMCA is no longer enforced on media where the device needed to play it is no longer sold.

You can go get almost any Super Nintendo ROM on archive.org right now, legally.

I hope to see this foothold extended.

Do you have chapter and verse for this? It doesn't sound right to me but I don't know for sure.

https://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/librarian_statement_01.h...

There is an explicit exemption for:

"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."

AKA old console roms. https://archive.org has piles now unchallenged for years as a result.

I haven't looked into the source of this specific exemption yet, but if it is the mechanism I think it is -- a ruling on an exemption petition -- it is important to understand that this exempts a user from circumventing the protection mechanism but it does not provide any kind of exemption for "trafficking" in tools that help people actually perform the circumvention... which frankly makes a lot of these exemptions feel a bit academic :(.

Maybe, but archive.org has listed this exemption on their website for years as their rationale for being able to distribute ROMs for dead consoles and it has totally remained unchallenged AFAICT.

SPAM didn't act fast enough to protect their brand, and once it became commonplace as a term for internet garbage it was considered too late to enforce.

Unless someone like Nintendo makes a new Super Nintendo that can play original cartridges, I don't expect they would do well in court trying to enforce given the exemption and after doing nothing for so long at this point.

I study IP law academically but IANAL. With that said, I think we are honestly at a free for all at this point, and the more people that host ROMs openly, the worse the case against them gets.

It doesn't say anywhere that you can also distribute copies of the copyrighted work, though.

But it does imply DMCA can't be used to go after people that do.

DMCA is the only tool people that wish to stop distribution of media have, so it might as well be a blanket statement of legal distribution IMO, and archive.org certainly interprets it this way.

The trouble is that the company may not own the rights to everything involved. This has been an issue for some companies that have tried to open up old games. Sometimes you have libraries, like Bink video (infamously) that are licensed and are not compatible with open licenses. There might be issues with the game engines or with assets. e.g. it's not uncommon to have music licensed for use in the game, but the rights don't include redistributing in other forms or producing something like a soundtrack. Stock music often has licenses that allow use in something like a game or movie, but disallow redistributing the file. (That was a sticking point for Bioshock Infinite: they produced their own new arrangements of some popular songs, but didn't have more costly licensing necessary to release a soundtrack.)

Opensourcing the code is different from including music or graphical assets that are licensed. The Bink issue is legitimate, yes, but there's nothing stopping them from stripping copyrighted assets from the game prior to opensourcing. Harmonix's source for Guitar Hero II on PS2 would be nice to see in such a form, for example (and their engine is pretty much entirely bespoke, so no real worries about license incompatibility). Along with the necessary tools to build our own assets (that we can't already do with homebrew tools).

FWIW, there is some subtlety here with respect to "physical media", as something that otherwise looks like physical media can still have DRM annoying enough that you might not be able to have a functional player when you go to use your media 20 years later (particularly if your console has Internet access).

Case in point: Terminator 2 Extreme, purchased in 2003. I figured that having the physical media meant I could play this forever long as I owned the discs.

I haven't been able to play those discs since 2008, when the license servers went offline.

See if your local library has a copy. My library doesn't have many Blu-Rays, but the ones they do have seem to be DRM-free.

> We got scammed.

Personally, I had movies I had purchased years ago automatically upgraded to 4K HDR versions.

That's certainly one advantage over physical disks.

For me, the advantage is that I don't have to go find the disc and physically insert it, and deal with whatever disc was in there before. I get to just watch my movie when I want.

I also don't have to physically store the discs, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like. I really don't want shelves and shelves of books and movies in my house. I have a few bookcases of our favorites, and that's it.

Even better is monthly streaming services, though. Then I don't pay nearly as much and get almost all the convenience, but with the risk that any particular movie might no longer be streaming.

Former me would agree with you, but I hit my breaking point when I saw Microsoft eBooks stop working, or shows I liked pulled from streaming services. There is no permanence no matter how much I pay when media has DRM.

I for one only pull dvds out of the box once ever.

It is easy enough to rip DVDs or Blu-rays to a NAS and use Kodi.

Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives.

Accept the monthly fees, tracking, and proprietary devices/apps or no entertainment for you.

The only reason I built a home media server was because I was sick of the splintering of streaming services. Now we buy, rip, and store physical media. Honestly, I think that it's something that, if people understood how easy it was today, more people would do.

I got it all figured out but I don't think it's easy. I have a stack of discs awaiting the ambition to start swapping and ripping and converting again.

Shows removed from a streaming service is not really the same, because you don't pay specifically for that particular show. You pay for access to the library which is updated every now and then. Just like your taxes might pay for a public library in which certain books are sold off every now and then.

The problem here is when you buy a movie, show, book, album ect. that you suddenly do not have access to. That is problematic.

This is why I built a home media server with Jellyfin and Navidrome. Nothing will "go away", short of a fire or multiple drives failing at once. I keep a physical copy in a separate house, and back up the essentials with duplicacy to backblaze b2.

In the last few years I've spent more than ever on cds through discogs.com.

"Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives."

Certain websites say otherwise. Luckily my main focus is music, where nearly everything I want is already in the used market, so the original artist won't see any money.

Not to mention instant loading and the sheer bliss of being offline if you want.

Yeah, I go back and forth.

I had a decent blu ray collection, DVD collection before that, I'm not that old and now they are all essentially outdated tech when I could upgrade to 4k.

I love the idea of saving the space that any decent film/tv collection would take up, especially living in a 1BR place. Then again usually when you watch "4k" on Netflix or whatever it's still not up to the same quality of an ACTUAL 4k disk would be played through a PS5 or whatever. That is unless you have crazy fast broadband. And even then I'd bet it's a degraded quality compared to a lossless 4k source.

> Even better is monthly streaming services, though. Then I don't pay nearly as much and get almost all the convenience, but with the risk that any particular movie might no longer be streaming.

That's it for me. If I buy something now I'm looking for a DRM free version (even though are Blu Rays even DRM fee? I'm sure there's a day when the certs or licenses will expire), otherwise it's streaming services. If I never buy something from a digital store I'm not sad when it disappears.

They certainly don’t do that on Amazon but I expect Amazon stick around a lot longer than any company that you were talking about

Maybe, but Han Shot First.

I had movies I had purchased years ago automatically upgraded to 4K HDR

Wait until they get downgraded to error screens because the company you bought them from went out of business, got bought by another company, pivoted to something else, forgot to renew a domain, or a thousand other things.

>PlayStation 3 store?

For what little it is worth, Sony has postponed shutting down the PS3 and PS Vita stores after backlash. The PSP store will still be shutting down this summer. Your point still stands regardless

FWIW, Sony just backtracked on the PS3 and Vita store shutdowns, for now (but still moving forward with PSP store shutdown, last I heard):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2021/04/20/sony-isnt-c...

I agree that there's been some highly questionable shutdowns of DRM and content servers by a few major companies, later disabling things that they claimed customers were buying.

It seems we're lacking sufficient regulatory/judicial disincentives for companies to hoover up much of the market for selling content products, then fly-by-night shutdown of the DRM and content servers that they'd intentionally made part of the products.

IMO if someone wants to shut down distribution of DRM media, then they should grant users blanket license to own a single copy in whatever format they wish.

If that means they are protected from legal recourse for obtaining a single pirated copy, that works.

Else, they have to do the work to distribute DRM free copies until every user has one, since they changed the terms of ownership.

> We got scammed

Not everyone got scammed. I've exclusively purchased physical media or 'acquired' it in DRM-free ways. Piracy is one option yes, but things like GOG are a legal and DRM-free way to get media, which is why I actually buy from them. I only buy digital if I don't care about losing the media, like a movie I just want to watch at a friends place that's not available on a streaming service.

Never understood why people didn't see this earlier. Thankfully many things are available digitally thanks to the work of digital archivists (aka data hoarders) who make an effort to keep media alive

I typed a big long response and deleted it because I think that people just do not care.

I relate to this energy.

Most users just do not care about "owning" DRM-free files. Most users don't have any clue about how to store, manage, or safeguard their DRM-free digital purchases.

To be quite honest I'm basically in this boat. With the rationalization in the back of my mind that if Amazon were to ban my account and block access to my ebook library, or were Steam to do the same thing to my games; fuck em. I already paid for the items, I'll dust off my torrent client if I need to get them some way or another.

Until such time, I have enough other stuff going on in my life that I don't particularly have the time to search for DRM-free media in my purchasing, organize and curate the collection, and so on.

It’s not their fault. We do not have even primitive means to access (except the html part) or participate in the internet, despite FOSS everything. Backups/storage? Dropbox/Google. Send a file to your buddy? Telegram/GDrive. Remote help? TeamViewer. Hosting a site? Facebook/Wix. We failed everything, and only very tech-savvy users can (and have time to) do one of the above without depending on something corporate.

Imagine if every browser had UI->API connection to popular hostings (or a local pc) and could allow users (and businesses) to exchange files, documents, messages, media, etc, and also had established UIs for all of that. All these instagrams, facebooks, google services, dropboxes simply exploited OS shortcomings and stupid complexity of its operation. If a user could just tap to publish a photo, they wouldn’t need a platform/service and a separate app for that. If a user could bypass NAT, they wouldn’t need remote help services. IIRC, the top comment on Dropbox was along the lines of “will not fly, everyone can rsync/email their files for free”. Turned out nobody can. We still use corporate services to send files across the same room, because even simple file sharing still doesn’t fucking work, not to mention media-exchange/play and UIs for that. It’s not “Most users don’t have any clue ...”, it’s “All users don’t ...”.

Most users don't have any clue about how to store, manage, or safeguard their DRM-free digital purchases

They figured out how to care for records, cassettes, and videotapes. They just need an incentive to learn.

Define "care" for. Stuff them into a box in the basement? Caring for physical media is quite obvious and easy to research in 5 minutes. To care for digital goods you need a computer to store them on and make backups. Backups mean choosing a backup service. These all require accounts, passwords, and security. Backups require the Internet. How good is your Internet service. Where do I get DRM-free digital goods?

Microsoft "Plays For Sure" is all you need to say ...

We need consumer digital rights. Any device, service, or license that depends on an external server should be required to carry an expiration date that defines the minimum length of time for which the maker is willing to support it. Failure to render that support should result in liability for a full refund of the purchase price.

The other day I saw a dusty copy of Tabula Rasa on the shelf at Walmart. That game shut down twelve years ago.

>We got scammed.

Yes, but it matters less than we think, since it mostly affects entertainment consumption. In fact, I'd argue that the amount people get burned for using DRM content is precisely enough to keep physical media alive and well for along time; and insofar as DRM enables the production of more stuff, and the inevitability that the popular stuff will "escape" thanks to piracy, that's its not that big of a deal.

That said, the issues of DRM are far more vital for creator applications! When you've coupled your ability to write, communicate and earn a living to any privately controlled service that is hard to replace (and that is the very definition of the Google vs. Apple software ecosystem, to take the most important example) then you've lost something far more profound, and when things go sideways (losing your Google account, say) you won't be prepared. It is scary that so many public services require access to a smartphone, when "having a smartphone" is itself not a public service. (And no, library computers don't count. You can't install and use an app in the library computer browser.)

> Wii store? Same story. You can no longer access your purchases.

Not really.

You can still play games purchased at the Wii Shop, you just can't re-download them.

[Edited to note: Apparently you can re-download or transfer to a Wii U]

That's not meaningfully different from having one physical copy: you can use the physical copy until the point that it's worn out.

The difference between the time it takes physical copies to wear out is much much longer than the time it takes $company to decide that it's time to force everyone to buy the next latest-and-greatest.

I've got NES cartridges from the 80s or 90s still working.

> I've got NES cartridges from the 80s or 90s still working.

And I've got Switch cartridges that are dependent on Nintendo's continued online support.

My point was that a physical Wii still works and is still a physical object, so it serves the same functional purpose here as individual NES cartridges.

"...for the time being you may continue to re-download content you have purchased or transfer that content from a Wii system to a Wii U system. Be aware that these features will eventually end at a future date."

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

It happened recently so there is a grace period to download final copies of a game, but if your console dies and you want to transfer games to another unit you get off eBay in a few years, you are SOL.

> if your console dies and you want to transfer games to another unit you get off eBay in a few years, you are SOL.

Again, this is not functionally different than your cartridge dying. If your NES cartridge dies, you can replace it with a second-hand copy, or you're SOL. The same.

You're saying that there's a consumer benefit to a console-cartridge system being modular (such that either module can be replaced when desired, rather than needing to replace them as a package), but I don't think this has any bearing on ownership rights, nor any of the other points that you claimed. At least, not in the case of the Wii Shop.

Large game collections are of much more value than a console, and consoles are more complex and have a much higher failure rate. Particularly if it is a console vs a simple media like a Wii game optical disc that is well taken care of.

Maybe I had 100 $40 games on my $100 console. Console breaks, I lose all games.

With physical media: One game breaks, I lose one game. One console breaks, I lose one console. Way less risk.

Also I can't sell or transfer the digital copies to friends or family.

Lock-in digitals are not at all equivalent rights of physical copies.

For cartridge roms and pressed CDs the failure rate is much, much lower than the console and the expected life span much longer. Not to mention it's often possible to back those mediums up and play the backups or original media on another console.

For carts this is (mostly[1]) true but honestly I'd be pretty surprised if the average CD outlasts a console that used mostly flash to store the games on. Sure if the flash has had consistent write cycles for years it might fail eventually but probably people will be finding games intact on wiis for a long time yet.

A lot of video game CDs barely lasted the life of their console without becoming basically useless.

[1] There are mask roms that are prone to failure, and some NES for eg. games are vulnerable to progressive failure of their battery backed RAM chips, which were not just for save backup but were also often used as extra RAM with a lot of write cycles (and to be clear, I don't mean the battery dying - I mean stuck or flipped bits on the ram itself).

It's heartbreaking to see Nintendo Switch consoles on ebay with hundreds of dollars worth of eshops games. At that point you're selling an email address.

AACS (the BluRay copy protection system) is making a lot of effort to change what physical ownership means, and I'm pretty sure many TVs and players are working on "improving" on the privacy aspects too. One of the nastier aspects is that inserting a new disk can permanently modify your drive to no longer work with your player software, because the content industry no longer trusts that software.

https://hackaday.com/2014/09/08/unbricking-a-bluray-drive/

> Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media

Don't some blu ray players try to connect to the internet whenever you watch a disc? I think my PS3 used to do that.

You have identified the reason my physical media players and TVs don't get connected to the internet.

PS4 and Xbox One both need to be connected the first time you watch a blu ray, I think so that Microsoft/Sony only have to pay blu ray licensing fees if you actually use the feature.

Not sure about other blu ray players but I imagine those are the most common ones.

> We got scammed.

This is what happens when a technology enters the mainstream.

Average people don't care about the same things that tech-people care about.

See eternal September as another example.

Eventually the market always serves the "average" client best, and the more demanding people (which are usually the early adopters of a technology) aren't served so well.

> Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media, what media you consume, how many times you consume it, or how long you consume it.

Quick note, smart TVs when using the smart features capture this information and send it to the manufacturer or their partner. The manufacturers often sell it. It subsidizes the cost of the TV.

Using physical media does not mean your viewing isn't being monitored.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I was wondering if you have a source on the claim that studios know every second you watch one of their films. Specifically, I was under the impression that Apple wasn't phoning home with users' watching habits. Do you have a source on that? (I'd like to update my mental model if so)

In cases where you actually downloaded the content, check the end-user license agreement of iOS and macOS. I think if you read this, as you’re required to do, you will find that they explicitly state thais when they say they declaring their rights to track this kind of consumption for market purposes and to enforce law.

Relevant XKCD (from 2008): https://xkcd.com/488/

Cannot stop thinking the web was sold as a better and cheaper business model due to false understanding of digitalization as the amount of caveats is getting ridiculous. We keep having to walk on eggs for everything and get regular bad surprises.

Physical media fails too, it's become a real problem in the retro gaming world. Optical discs start to break down and even worse optical drives wear out with no viable replacements. So piracy helps preserve physical media too.

I'm committed to reviving Murfie.com a digital access and remote ownership service that respects ownership of media.

I really hope that is true. This was such a step in the right direction.

I would like to have a complete set of the FLAC files for the hundreds of CDs I have in your warehouse, and my original disks back.

At that point I would gladly start shipping new batches of disks to be ripped to continue building my legal FLAC collection.

> Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media, what media you consume, how many times you consume it, or how long you consume it. You can enjoy it offline, and in 20 years long after the studio that licensed it is gone.

If you mean books, then yes.

If you mean DVDs, then no - many TVs will report what you are watching back to the manufacturer.

this is why, whenever I can, i buy games from GoG instead of Steam. and purchase paper books rather than digital if at all possible.

Is there a digital book seller that doesn't use DRM?

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/488/

> Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media, what media you consume, how many times you consume it, or how long you consume it.

I am so excited for my great-great-great-great ... grandchildren to find a layer of plastic DVDs in the earth’s crust 25 generations from now /s.

Seriously, Blu ray discs and DVDs are such a waste of resources.

As long as the disk still exists /somewhere/, a digital copy you ripped from it is legal to keep and backup for personal use indefinitely, and transfer to a new owner of the physical copy.

One of your many rights if you -actually- own a copy of media.

Many sites offer DRM-Free music and books without needing to have a redundant physical copy laying around, but in video media this is extremely rare, and that is a problem.

> As long as the disk still exists /somewhere/, a digital copy you ripped from it is legal to keep and backup for personal use indefinitely, and transfer to a new owner of the physical copy.

Depends on your jurisdiction. Ripping a dvd or bluray in the first place would be illegal in the states. Any type of format shifting (including say CD to mp3) is illegal in the UK - even if you did buy a drm free WAV, unless the copyright holder explicitly gives you permission to copy it to your phone, or another computer, you're stuck.

This is hotly debated in the US, I will grant, but it seems -most- US lawyers agree personal ripping of "encrypted" DVDs is Fair Use.

https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-...

Some like to claim DMCA could be used to prosecute someone for bypassing the encryption on a DVD for personal backups but this has, to my knowledge, never been tested in court when an individual defendant was purely using it for personal backups.

There has been a case in favor of DMCA seeking to restrict the release of selling products that allow users to to this: https://www.eff.org/cases/realnetworks-v-dvd-cca-realdvd-cas...

That was an insane call, and it is a pity they didn't appeal as AFAICT.

A similar issue to this was challenged recently with DMCA being used to stop the distribution of the open source youtube-dl tool making the same anti-circumvention claims but in the end this fizzled out as having no merit.

If anyone from Hollywood really wants to test this in court I will happily publish a video of myself ripping one of their DVDs that I purchased for personal use. It would not be a good look for them to to anything about it, and would bet a -lot- that they lose. Still, I would like to see this chilling effect gray zone be put to rest so people are not scared to use their rights.

There is no requirement to forefit your rights once you transition away from physical media. E.g. you could trade DVD equivalent rights on a blockchain. The blockchain including the proof that you legitimately own this copy would stick around for as long as people want it to, it wouldn't depend on big tech companies like MS, Sony, etc. I'm not even a blockchain fanatic but this is one of the few good uses of the technology I think.

What happens then if the blockchain you rely on as proof of ownership goes away?

Blockchains, at least traditionally, work in a way that each full node has a full copy of the entire chain. Anyone can operate a full node. So it goes away when the last person who has kept a copy around somewhere deletes it. That happens way later than relying on a central party and its digital content store that it might close in 5 years (or they might just cancel your account for whatever reason they thought of).

How does the energy use compare of stamping out a DVD and of streaming a movie to your TV? Especially if it's a film you (or your children) watch repeatedly.

The answer is not obvious. According to [1], mailing a DVD and streaming a film use about the same amount of energy. This doesn't include the energy cost of manufacturing the DVD, but stamping out plastic disks is cheap, so it can't be too high. On the other hand, other studies show that DVD players, being older, tend to use more energy than streaming boxes. For repeated watching, ripping a DVD and streaming it locally seems likely to be better.

Or best of all, stream the movie and store it locally for future viewings. But that's not allowed. DRM is killing the planet.

[1]: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/energy-cost-stre...

How much landfill use does my stream use when it's been watched 100 times and becomes garbage?

How much of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch will my Netflix stream take up?

Plastic is killing the planet.

So is CO2 though.

Yes, and oil converted to plastic sequesters CO2.

Every plastic bag, every CD, is sequestered CO2.

Of course, plastic is a problem on its own. I don't like it, its usage.

Yet I am a realist, and in as such, believe that (sadly), every drop of oil will eventually be pumped. Thus, by this logic, any use which locks that carbon up may be a net benefit.

I mean, I can play a movie on a DVD player on solar energy for a very long time if I take care of it.

How much electricity and infrastructure does it take to deliver the same movie over and over again via the internet I wonder?

Both are silly solutions that could be avoided if we were allowed to buy and download a DRM-free copy of a movie once.

> Plastic is killing the planet.

No, it isn't. Plastic is only showing up in large quantities in areas where it shouldn't, and occasionally hurting some animals. Microplastics in particular may become a problem at some point, but then again, maybe they won't. We aren't sure. And either way, it's not causing problems just yet.

Greenhouse emissions are what's killing the planet. Manufacturing plastics is a part of that, but so is power generation, and thus all "purely digital" activity.

It's a point that people often confuse. Microplastics are bad, and emissions are bad, but they're bad for completely different reasons. Climate is what's an existential threat to civilization, and what we need to focus on right now. We can deal with microplastics later, if we survive that long.

Just to nuance the nuance...

We do not have an alternative to petrol based plastic for our current economy. Yes, we can make plastic from non-fossil biomass, but it's energetically feasible to replace petrol based plastics. We don't have the landmass, fertilizer, ... to switch completely. (Especially, if you consider the big picture: Biofuel, carbon sinks, food security, ...)

In a way petrol chemistry bought the planet some time before being destroyed by us. It saved the whales and prevented ecological exploitation in the colonies.

Since plastics are used amass not just for stupid junk, but also critical for e.g. medical single use items, sanitation and so on, we shouldn't just think about pollution. Although the thought of eating up to 7g of plastics a day doesn't sit right with me. (Little known side fact: It's not just obvious "plastics", silicone and paint does contribute to microplastic accumulation too.)

Our survival very much also depends on preserving oil reserves for essential use cases of petrol chemistry. Carbon neutral alternatives for many things usually come with an increase in another factor (energy, land use, non renewable resources) which makes them in concert unable to replace fossil energy/chemistry.

Resist.

REDUCE.

Reuse.

Recycle.

Rebury.

Infeasible I think you meant

Yes! Thanks for pointing it out!

> ... but it's energetically infeasible to replace petrol based plastics

(2nd paragraph)

I am using this throw-awayish account with a lacking mobile app and cannot edit. So by all means, everyone, consider selimthegrim's comment a shame-edit to mine.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-hidde...

These are all really good points, but what about the cost at the data center?

> DRM is killing the planet.

Agreed. Thanks for the link. I think I could've stated my point clearer. I am against DRMed streaming/video, and I'm against DVDs. I still want people to be able to make movies and get paid, yet the above two options are unsustainable e.g. when considering the use of plastic for DVD's, and the high energy costs of streaming movies from a data center.

Physical media doesn't automatically provide privacy. There are players which do track what blu-rays you put in them. Blu-ray players are internet enabled and include advertisements, which obviously can have tracking as well. Also you are tracked by the banks and stores you make the purchase from. You bought a Blu-Ray at Target on a Discover card. Target tracked it and sold it. Discover tracked it and sold it. Companies batched that together and added it to the same profile that Netflix updated. You still got tracked.

Physical media also includes A LOT of DRM as well. You called digital streams "DRM media", which is a weird phrase considering all physical media uses DRM as well.

I think you're remembering some rose-tinted view of physical medias past, not discussing the reality of physical media in 2021.

It's weird that you're so inaccurate with these terms and concepts, it's almost like you have an agenda

>Literally the only way to get the same freedoms with modern digital media we had with physical media, is piracy.

And there it is: The Pirates Rationale™

You see it a lot. An excuse in need of rationalizations, so the details get mixed up because it's not about the details, it's about the end point.

Stealing media you didn't buy is literally stealing from artist and developers and no amount of crying about how the DRM on Blu-Ray is more OK than the DRM on Netflix will change that. This community should not be as immoral as Reddit and proudly and openly support stealing software and content that you did not, in some form, pay the artist/creator to access. If you're "pirating" things you own, consider ripping and cracking them instead, less chance of malicious code that way. But if you're using your loose understanding of these concepts to justify stealing from developers and artists, then shame on you.

I literally bought many hundreds of used CDs and had them shipped to https://murfie.com/ to rip for me and give me FLACs automatically, because that was the only way to get lossless drm-free music I wanted legally.

I even wrote a python library to automate the process since I had so much music I wanted to obtain legally that I needed bulk access.

I spent thousands of dollars and many hours trying to play by the rules on this project.

A: The artist got nothing. CDs were mostly used, and the artists are often no longer alive.

B: Murfie went out of business and can't even afford to sort and return my discs to me. I can't prove I own my own music if challenged. It is all unsorted in a warehouse in the midwest somewhere.

Am I a criminal now anyway after all that work?

How many others would go that far to get a legal DRM-free music collection?

In the end I still got screwed.

If I could just download DRM-free music/movies/games directly, take my money.

Since that is usually not a thing, what other options do people that want freedom and privacy have?

> Am I a criminal now anyway after all that work?

You legally purchased the music and legally made backup copies of it. You are not a criminal.

> I can't prove I own my own music if challenged

I don't think that matters. Someone would need to prove you stole it, which they can't do since you didn't.

> I don't think that matters. Someone would need to prove you stole it, which they can't do since you didn't.

Welcome to the civil law world, where they don't need to prove that at all, they just need to ask "on the balance of probabilities, is it more likely than not that a violation happened here?". Unfortunately, for many, juries, and even judges, the mere assertion thereof by a corporation, even if backed by scant or contradictory evidence, is enough for them to say, "that's reasonable".

While the standard is lower in civil law than criminal law, this isn't how it works at all.

The rightsholder does not want to fight you in court because the amount of money you can pay (most likely) is less than what they have to pay in legal fees to hire these guys to come after you.

The era of mass lawsuits ended like 10+ years ago. It was a hallmark of the 2000's. These days, rightsholders do the settlement fishing where they get enough data to subpoena your identity from your ISP, then send you settlement offers. They don't want you to show up in court, they want to spook you and get you to give them $1000 or something to make it go away.

I doubt the piracy moralist you replied to will respond with an apology for calling you a thief and a criminal; but I really appreciate that you explained your situation.

It's unreasonable to lump all people who pirate media into some cesspool of common criminality -- each use-case is different. Sure, there are people who aggressively collect more pirated content than they could ever hope to personally consume and refuse to pay for any media; but there are also people who want a secondary copy of something they've already purchased, or who can't even legally buy the media that they'd want access to in the first place.

Easier to just vilify a strawman (for what reason, even?), I guess.

That goes to a deeper philosophical question on social contract theory. There are laws that I may not agree with. I may chose to break them out of protest or civil-disobedience - but then I can't also claim immunity from the state's action when they uphold the laws.

You took a risk on a business (murfie) when you sent them your property. Sometimes, the risk materializes, and that was unfortunately the case for you. You will have to utilize the legal system to retrieve your property, just like every other person.

>If I could just download DRM-free music/movies/games directly, take my money. Since that is usually not a thing, what other options do people that want freedom and privacy have?

When you pirate copyrighted content, you're sending a strong signal - that there is demand for that content. Rather, you may want to consider rewarding creators who release their works under a license you agree with. An aggregate effect could potentially trigger an industry shift away from DRM. As it stands, it may be that your favorite creators are not in that list, but that is just the reality of the current situation.

>In the end I still got screwed.

When people point out that the creator got screwed when people download Avengers or Game of Thrones, others are quick to point out that they would never have paid for the content. Its all about context and perspective! :)

>Since that is usually not a thing, what other options do people that want freedom and privacy have?

A realization that your desire to access music and content with freedom and privacy DOES NOT SUPERSEDE the creators right to profit from their work. Look at where you are -- do the people in this community deserve to be paid for their code? Or can you take it from them if their feelings about privacy and freedom do not match yours perfectly?

I could say, I want bread but I don't want to contribute to capitalism, what option do I have? I'll just take. This isn't how we run our society. It's not how good people behave.

If you cannot abide by the authors/owners wishes, then you must set aside the entitlement you feel towards their work and simply move on without it.

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