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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.

Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.

Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.

Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).

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>"They're yours..."

Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.

But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.

>At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

most people are under the impression that they own the things they've paid for, and the inevitable rug pulls always take them by surprise.

rejecting the bullshit rules of rent-seeking parasites would be a more worthy principle to pursuit.

Nobody can compel you to destroy a DRM-free digital copy AND enforce this. It is impossible.

If it's not enforced or not enforceable, there is no "compel".

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