Most HNers are employed building things that their customers will never have tangible representations of. It’s how life is today.
[1] technological or business limitations make promises of true perpetuity impossible as a practical matter today.
For literally all of the time that the written word has existed, if you bought a physical copy it was yours for whatever version of perpetuity you'd like to use.
Of course libraries exist, as do rentals, but it's clearly understood what the deal is with such services.
The specific issue i see here is that this is changing retroactively and without recourse, the ability to download a copy of the item you purchased, which was the deal at the time of purchase.
If you buy anything from now on, however, knowing the details of the sale, that's on you.
This was true of physical media (books, phonographs, etc.) and is true of downloaded media. You might own a paper copy of your favorite book, but you don’t own its words, and the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself. If the book is destroyed in a fire, you must buy a new copy.
Similarly, you might own your Kindle, but you don’t own the content in it. You can read the content, but you can’t copy it.But there’s a minor advantage of a digital license: if your Kindle is destroyed in a fire, the publisher allows you to read-download the content to a new device.
In theory, the law only applies to distribution. Also, fair use and fair dealing exist in multiple jurisdictions, which includes personal-only usage. A company would have a hard time achieving a legal judgement against you for the mere act of copying a book. Distributing it? Sure.
Copyright law explicitly allows for backups, at least in the US, which is where most of the companies exhibiting this anti-ownership behavior are located and thus bound by US law, especially when the consumer is also US.
Owning a license means nothing when the other party to the license can revoke it at any time without further consideration.
> Regardless of that view, personal backups are absolutely allowed under copyright law
Under which section of the Copyright Act? Under which court ruling?
Keep in mind that "fair use" is a legal doctrine that is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not an absolute shield a defendant can raise as an impenetrable defense. No court has ever held that a licensee can, without exception, make a copy of a protected work as a backup.
Where are you getting this bogus information from?
Regardless, people should be aware of what the law is. It’s a different choice to decide to violate the law and take one’s chances than it is to rest comfortably knowing that something is entirely within their rights.
And-also-yes, the copyright scam is pretty much over. The marginal cost of another copy is zero, “for a limited time” means “forever minus a day”, and our culture is being stolen from us via inability to preserve it, use it later if we did acquire it “legitimately” but someone no longer feels like running their “permission to have that” servers later, and by being dynamically retconned such that “bad things” are dynamically edited out and, if you remember that they existed, you’re wrong (and getting gaslit over it).
It was basically a “social contract” that, while not everyone agreed with, they mostly admitted “existed”. Not so much now.