Can’t wait for the apologist to appear and explain why this is just totally fine
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...
You don’t actually buy digital books, you rent a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration. I think there should be legislation that sets a minimum standard for the rights people acquire when they “buy” a digital work.
Which is fine, as long as you know that going in and set your price expectations accordingly. If those terms are unacceptable, walk away. If you do decide it's worth it, keep a backup with the rest of your digital data.
So it’s ever so slightly fraudulent.
If only there was a way to preserve digital data even if the company you got it from no longer exists…
I just treat it as a open end rental. The ability to revoke my access to the book lowers the value. The ability to instantly get the book in seconds adds to the value. I keep my expectations clear from the beginning.
Yes, we can argue that regular people are just too stupid to understand that. I don't really agree with that attitude.
We shouldn't let marketers tell outright lies just because regular people are smart enough to recognize them for lies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/bhdkvo/comment/el...
As OP said,
> I'm never buying e-books again.
I do something similar.
If the book is worth it, I buy it in material form.
If it’s not worth the bookshelf clutter it’ll cause, I just skip it.
But then again, most of my books aren’t on digital subjects, for that I usually rely on specs and articles, as tech is moving too quickly to be worth being nailed down on paper.
Yeah, just like someone can "buy" an empty iPhone box on eBay for $800.
I'd argue that the “buy now” when viewing a Kindle edition listing, or Audible edition, is noticeably less honest, especially as you are usually at most on click away from the dead-tree editions where buy actually does mean buy. I'd have that iphone box that I'd legally bought for as long as I choose to own it, the seller can not revoke access to it arbitrarily like Amazon can, will, and sometimes has (1984 being the most famous and somewhat ironic example) with ebooks and audiobooks.
As easy as that may be, the shiver-me-timbers route might be even easier.
(I use audible, if they want me to go pirate instead they know what to do!)
What's the stated time period here? 1 year? 5 years?
It is an indeterminate amount of time. It is not a lease.
I'd say their record overall points to the license offering potentially more value over the short term defined rentals, if you're planning on watching the content again.
Amazon isn't hiding any of this, there's a link to this that's close to the "Buy" button on their site and they mention you're agreeing to it when you check out. It is pretty easy to read and comprehend, it is not exactly fine print.
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...
By that definition of "buy" renters are home owners.
No, they are lease buyers. The lease (like the e-book purchase) is a right to use for a period of time. It's not equivalent to ownership.
(That's not to say I don't think the practice by Amazon is bad)
But seems strange that it is legal.
You are only harmed when amazon loses rights to media you purchased and that harm is easily measured in terms of the monetary value of the thing they took from you (which, they'll likely refund if you start talking to lawyers because it's not worth it to them.)
What we need is to get corporations out of politics.
I don't read anywhere in here where an unaffected individual can raise a case and collect money. Rather, this sets up how the government can enforce the law at various levels. That's pretty standard stuff everywhere (that's why every state has a department of justice). The government can police, but me, and average citizen, can't raise a case against amazon.
Class action lawsuits are civil lawsuits. You can't raise a civil lawsuit if you aren't harmed.
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/bpc/17200-17210...
What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.
What an app store or kindle "purchase" provides you with is exactly a lease. You gain a temporary right to utilize a resource (such as a particular physical or digital copy of a work) subject to various restrictions.
By contrast property rights always imply the ability to transfer (via sale, inheritance or gift or voluntary abandonment) as well as to in fact not transfer. Both of which are fundamentally lost here. You can't sell your kindle ebooks, pass them on to your children or even keep them if Amazon decides otherwise (as in the case of 1984).
And there is absolutely no technical or economic reason you can't inherit or sell a DRM protected work.
Nope, licenses as a form of intangible personal property long predate the “modern technological advances” being discussed (or, say, the existence of the US, for example), and the meaning of the word “buy” already encompasses buying licenses, which may have a variety of terms, including termination conditions.
It’s just that you seem to be trying to falsely generalize the specialized meaning of “buy” that applies when the object of the purchase is an item of tangible personal property to things which are not tangible personal property.
What you write is true and I see where you are coming from. But my contention is that what you refer to as the "specialized meaning of buy" was pretty much the only meaning an average person would have used it in. And that such a person's reasonable and natural assumption when first confronted with a "buy" button for an ebook would be that it pressing it would confer analogous rights of transfer as buying the physical copy. And furthermore that courts and regulators allowing this assumption to be violated was a major oversight. If for no other reason than that it is foolish to the extreme to bring about a system where a single dominant entity having a bad day could in a blink wipe out a large fraction of accessible books.
A 99 year lease still has an end date on it. These licenses do not have an end date. The only time it is generally supposed to become unavailable is "due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons."
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...
Buying a limited license which allows "an indefinite period of time" is still inherently different from renting. It is definitely different from buying a physical good, I do agree. But I still don't seem to be convinced that its "renting" or "leasing".
If Amazon had to put an end date ahead of time on all the movies they listed with "Buy", do you think they'd put that date as 99 years or would they make it more like one year? Personally I'm perfectly fine with the tradeoff that sure, some move I "bought" 15 years ago on Amazon might some day disappear from their service, as I knew it ahead of time that was the trade-off of "buying" a license on their Unbox service versus owning a physical copy of the VHS or DVD at the time. But in the end I felt it was worth the tradeoff for the connivence.
For all we know Amazon may continue on forever, offering some kind of version of its streaming service and continue to offer these movies forever. Its not guaranteed Amazon will lose the rights to some of these movies, its not guaranteed they'll stop offering a streaming service, its not guaranteed they'll eventually be replaced by Walmart which will buy out Weyland-Yutani. There's no real pre-defined end condition to it at all, other than until the rights holders say we can't or until some other situation happens that makes it unavailable.
Its definitely different than owning a physical good, I completely agree. Its still very different from renting or leasing.
It's non-transferable (i.e., can't move it from the account), but it doesn't list death as the end of the license. If a family member of mine dies but has a bunch of "purchased" movies on their account, those licenses don't just disappear. They remain on the account until the account is closed. I don't think the Amazon Terms of Service requires me to have a pulse to continue to have an Amazon account, and the license terms listed in the link I provided above clearly allows family members to access the media licensed to my account as long as it otherwise is allowed under the above terms, which never references death.
I don't see any reason why my spouse wouldn't be able to access Super Troopers on my Amazon account purchased back when the service was Amazon Unbox after my death, assuming Amazon still has a streaming service, and they still have the rights to stream that movie on the platform, etc. If I'm wrong, please feel free to point it out to me on the Amazon ToS.
Non-transferable doesn’t mean “can’t move from the account”, it means “legally belongs to the original person to whom it is issued, and cannot be transferred to another person”. Transfer by inheritance at death is…still transfer. A non-transferrable license expires when the entity to whom it was issued ceases to legally exist.
> It’s non-transferable (i.e., can’t move it from the account), but it doesn’t list death as the end of the license.
They don’t need to, since the underlying general law requires you to be alive to legally exist and have property rights in anything, including an Amazon account (unless you are a special entity created by law, like a corporation, which has its own rules.)
It’s different from a lifetime lease in that there is nothing to revert. The subject of the lease is not an enduring, rivalrous “thing” (tangible or intangible) which is returned to the owner, it is a use permission which is extinguished.
You can buy a license with specific terms, including termination conditions. This…long predates digital anything.
Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.
I set up a forwarding policy from GMail -> Protonmail. Whenever I would receive a forwarded email, Id go to the sender and update my email address. After about 6 months the only email coming from my Gmail account was spam.
Then I turned off my forwarding policy and noticed something: I don't really get spam anymore. I don't know what it is about Gmail but it receives several of orders of magnitude more spam than any of my other email accounts. To drive that point home, to crack down on spam, I setup my own domain on protonmail and configured a catch-all. Now everyone gets their own email address (like homedepot@mydomain.com). It lets me reverse track who is sharing my personal info with who for marketing purposes. Turns out: in the 5 years I've been using Protonmail I've had two cases of someone sharing my email address. I had assumed all my spam was from people sharing my email - turns out it was just a Gmail problem.
If your experience ends up being the same as mine, the time you save not dealing with spam on Gmail will cover your migration costs.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...
“After years of growing, we are at the point that our systems can no longer support free 6 second video storage for all our users”
I proceeded to remove the cameras and replaced them with on site NVR. After I did this I receive another email-
“ WE ARE SORRY.
Due to a system error, we sent you an email by mistake expressing that we will no longer support free 6 second video for the Yi/Kami Home app. Do not worry, you will still have this feature.”
Too late. I also find myself moving away from subscription based types of experience whenever I can, where the company can just remove feature or content at will. I wonder if there is a name in marketing circles for this behavior.
I was wondering if these cameras are locked-in with the Kami cloud vendor solution, or they use a standard protocol thus trivial to move to another provider, or just something in between those two extremes...
I'm sorry, this person stumbled and happened to land with their chest directly on the tip of my knife which I was holding in my hand.
Organic Maps.
Migadu or Fastmail.
You're not "stuck" with anything.
In many cases OSM-based solutions like Organic Maps or Mapy.cz are good enough (though for car navigation Google Maps is still clearly better).
In Czech Republic they use data outside OSM, but last time I checked it was entirely/mostly data released by government of that country.
Roads, buildings, hiking trails, landuse, paths shops outside Czechia are from OpenStreetMap.
Can you give example of anything that is "their own proprietary data"? So far I have not noticed anything like that outside Czechia.
The ambiguity in digital purchases is a real problem, but if physical goods and services haven’t solved the problem with the semantics of “buy”, I’m not sure that’s a productive approach, unless the idea is to just scare people away from digital specifically by implying it’s materially different than other transactions where “buy” does not mean “receive irrevocable and unrestricted exclusive rights forever”.
Rent has a defined time period. Buying a license in this case has an indeterminate time period. Buying a license is still very different from renting or leasing it.
So, a rental agreement for a defined period (very short, instantaneous even), with automatic renewal.
I’m adding this detail because it’s not as sinister as you alluded.
You are correct with regard to renting, not buying. This is why I only buy paper books (with cash), and grab the corresponding digital version from the high seas.
From Amazon and the likes, no, not usually. But there are some sites that offer DRM-free copies to buy, rather than perpetually rent.
Even on Google Play, authors/publishers can choose to go DRM-free. You can download those copies without having to be tied to the Google app. Sadly, however, I don't recall Google making it clear which ones were DRM-free before making a purchase.
Personally I think ebook vendors should be required to use language that makes it transparent that what you are buying is a kind of contract, which is different to a physical book in several important ways.
Corporations (at least in Europe) aren't allowed to make you sign away your rights. I don't see why it should be any different for ebooks.
You would own nothing and be happy...
To try to prevent this, Amazon tries very hard to make sure you download and install the latest version of the Kindle app.
"Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next
week. The DRM'd books will stop working.
I cannot believe that sentence.
"The books will stop working."
I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time."
The difference is that while I can do it by mistake, Amazon can do it intentionally.
By the way, when I first stepped in this landmine and went to complain on Amazon forum, regular people also defended this practice. It was even more mindboggling than Amazon actions itself. Like, why would people voluntarily defend strictly negative to them feature, and for free?..
> Can’t wait for the apologist to appear and explain why this is just totally fine
Obviously this is beneficial for the economic, because you will replace the lost goods and buy the important ones again. This will drive the numbers to signal bestsellers, and let unimportant ones dwindle into oblivion, or so...
YMMV, if it doesn't work for you, don't shop there.
It's funny that techies, of all people, don't realize online digital content doesn't last forever. We helped build the system, and now we have to live with it.
We undoubtedly do realize this, but underestimated the degree to which companies would use this to siphon as much money out of the consumer as they theoretically could. It has made for many aggravating experiences, and ruined a lot of products that used to work perfectly.
Looking at the bigger picture, very few things in life are under my control, and on the long list of things out of my control, this is a relatively minor, hypothetical problem.
If this is a "minor problem" for you, why comment?
If others here clearly feel it's more of a major issue, perhaps you'd benefit from seeking to understand why. Personally, I find it disturbing in several ways. The consolidation of editorial control in the hands of tech-oligarchs; the resultant de facto sterile homogeneity of expression; the ditching of customers en masse without recourse; the erosion of ownership and the expansion of eternal rental of anything and everything; on and on it goes.
Could we avoid bait comments? They create unnecessary polarisation which is bad for everyone. We should strive for productive discussion which allows us to learn, not to shun the “other side” and start a flamewar before the conversation even begins.
In fact, HN in this sense is a bubble where people seem to agree with me on this issue, often misleading me into the belief most people are aware about the war on users' rights...
Just think about it, GP preemptively felt the need to shame virtual users having a different opinion.
They'll probably want some kind of job to afford art supplies, but it's an option rather than a mandate.
This is oversimplified, of course, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible.
Nowadays with crowdfunding a writer could be paid by wannabe readers before the book is published, and only publish when he has obtained a FAIR compensation for his time working writing said book.
It seems like most are not using that model. Maybe it’s not lucrative enough; maybe they’re not aware of the possibility.
Kickstarters only work for known authors, so the newcomers would be excluded automatically from the beginning, but we consumers won't feel this for a few years.
Then it will stop being a novelty and hip thing to do (in about a week, given current attention economy), and the money streams will start to dry out, while the number of kickstarters will only increase while every existing author will switch to it.
Then Kickstarter itself and other portals will start promoting "better" authors, making it a sort of an unofficial ranked contest. Promoting will be based on different metrics, fairly as far as reviewers will think. Mostly it will be based on popularity and track record of previous products of those authors.
So the motivation to be seen on top (which equals - seen at all, due to the number or creators), will be releasing popular and catchy products, and as often as possible to generate a track record of good releases.
Over a few years this will shift people to create a common as possible popular and simple products, mandatory oriented on kids and ya because that's a gigantic market, so the lowest common denominator products will be the most successful and popular.
And so all kickstarter money, slowly drying out because more and more people will be tired of seeing this clown show and paying for inferior products, will be even further concentrated at the top kicktarting creators, while leaving "long tail" with zero money. Also audience will shift, while adults will stop participating in general, their kids will participate and will fund whatever is most flashy and predatory.
Thus this perpetual machine will go on in circles eventually producing only garbage.
We see a renewed interest of that with Patreon and other services.
(To simplify step 1, you could skip the thorny problem of defining who an "author" or an "artist" is by instituting a universal basic income.)
I thought we were talking about viable societies?
How can you expect any form of R&D investment if the investor can't expect to see an ROI? Sounds great if you want to stagnate but personally i dont.
If not, could you explain where you see a connection between copyright and R&D?
Almost all the money is skimmed by the huge range of industries that have arisen to capture the marginal proceeds created by copyright law.
Maybe you could argue that all artists are motivated by the folly of dreaming that they will be the next unicorn who actually gets rich, but I don't think most of them are that naïve. They find creating fulfilling. They would still do so with a UBI.