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Comment by mathieubordere | Hacker News Reader

There should be legislation around this, same for music and games. If you "buy" it, you should be able to download it in a DRM-free, non-proprietary format.

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I'd settle for "if they take it away from you, they have to refund it". But the problem with either regulation is the response will be just to stop selling things. Instead they will grant you a 99 year lease or some other such fiction.

If they stop calling it "buying", I would consider it an improvement.

Agreed. Part of the problem is digital goods pretty much never have a right of resale. That's bullshit, particularly for e-Books where the electronic copy often costs more than the resellable paper copy.

> digital goods pretty much never have a right of resale

In some cases this has been tried in court and the decision has been that a sale is a sale and that you can do what you will with it.

See, for instance, https://www.lw.com/thoughtLeadership/CJEURulesResaleofUsedSo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

That and consolidate accounts. I "bought" movies with two different google accounts and there is no way to transfer from one to the other. You also cannot be logged in i to two differwnt accih t at the same time with an Android TV.

All this bad faith is doing is pushing people to pirate more, not less.

> That and consolidate accounts.

Happened to me with Bandcamp. Support was kind and helpful. After I gave them proof of my purchases, they just merged the collections to my current one. Excellent experience. I wish it was always like this.

You can try https://families.google.com/families which will share your purchases across accounts, however, it does not work for connecting a regular Gmail and Google Workspace account together.

As far as I know, only the family manager can share purchased content. If you have different content from two different accounts and join them in a group, only one of those accounts can share their content. Also, groups are limited to six members total only (managers + 5).

In the physical world, if I "buy" something, I can lend it, give it, or even sell it to somebody else.

Alos, the fact that the content is linked to an account rather than a biological person raises other issues about digital identity.

90% likely, the small print specifies that what was bought was the right to access that file provided that a couple of conditions remain met, and one of the conditions is "until 1. august 2022" or something like that.

You may assume that other streaming companies will do similar things. They're all squeezed between customers who want to pay low prices for the service and rights holders who want high prices for their concent. The rights holders offer a lower price for time-limited access than for permanent access, and the streaming companies take that offer. Film at 11.

> 90% likely, the small print specifies that what was bought was the right to access that file provided that a couple of conditions remain met, and one of the conditions is "until 1. august 2022" or something like that.

Note that this happened in Germany, where judges generally treat fineprint as "Whatever."* - the way something is communicated and customer's reasonable expectations matter a lot.

* Where fineprint contradicts more prominent text.

Moreover, in a world where advertising "purchase this cheese* (contains no actual milk)" is illegal, why would advertising "purchase* this movie (actually a time-limited rental)" be legal? How could that not be deception of the customer?

Note that this happened in Germany, where judges generally treat copyright owners as gods with greater rights than others, even when the copyright owners hurt themselves.

Pirates ruined this opportunity initially (by providing a reason to lock things down), and greed ruined it thereafter.

After all, why sell what you can rent?

Piracy in the 90s was a reaction to overpriced and over restricted content, same as is happening now.

See, that's not how I remember the 90's. I remember getting offered floppy disks with every bit of software out there. Their overly restrictive copy protection often consisted of "what's the 5th word on the 10th page of the manual" or similar.

The prices were not really outlandish, though they were representative of catering to a new and niche market. It's just that the barrier to copying was so low and distribution was so easy and risk free.

Basically, it was the equivalent of a physical store with no employees, locks, or security systems. Thus everyone went in and got what they wanted without putting money in the "honor box".

I was thinking more about movies and music. I would agree with you on software, more or less, but I think adding DRM was inevitable once the capitalists got control away from the engineers and inventors.

Probably for a minority, the rest just did it because it was free and easy.

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