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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

If a book falls apart are you owed a replacement by the publisher?

I would ask for a replacement if the seller and the law said "I am renting the book."

Buying a book doesn't give you any more rights or privileges that buying a dvd. Although I guess it's a lot easier to take a book and give all your favorite people a portion of it. You're paying for the physical object and have a license to read it or view it, but not to copy it (other than what fair use provides). Many books have an explicit statement of this on the copyright page.

The seller and law say you own the book but you don't own the content of the book. That is, you are free to read the book as many times as you like, you aren't free to start printing out and distributing copies of the book as "backup" for all your friends and family.

The laws around DVDs are the same. You have a right to access and view the contents of the DVD. You don't have a right to make copies of the dvd.

I'd also point out products like cheap paperbacks which obliterate themselves after 4 or 5 reads.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for some good reforms and regulations around copyrights and media access, especially in the digital age. I just think it's a little bit ridiculous to expect purchased media to never degrade.

> I just think it's a little bit ridiculous to expect purchased media to never degrade.

Nobody expects that. We just expect to not have to pay for the content again just because the media degraded and needed replacement.

If the books falls apart not from regular wear and tear but from a manufacturing defect that gives it a far shorter life than expected/advertised - then likely yes.

But WB never made a claim about how long the DVDs should last when they were sold.

And would anyone have paid the extra money for a 20+ year warranty for some DVDs? Absolutely not.

This article is new, but to be clear the disks started rotting within ~5 years of purchase, not just now after 20 years. The issue has been known for a long time, like in 2012:

> > Apparantly most releases from Warner Bros on HD-DVD have laser rot. I have many titles that just freeze in the middle of the movie. I thought it was a problem with my player, but I read on other forums that this is a manufacturing fault from the discs...

https://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?p=10181&sid=5039399ce60...

https://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=840

Or in 2015, where some forum users narrow down the year range and manufacturing code:

> > It seems like the problematic discs were produced from 2006 to 2009 or so. I haven't found any DVDs from before or after those dates that exhibit these problems (even the original DVDs I bought in December of 2000 still look and play perfectly).

https://nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=20399&sid=3238...

If you buy a monitor and it fails after a week of use, should you be SOL? If the failure is due to a manufacturing defect, and not the user's treatment of the product or just the expected lifespan of that product class, consumer protection laws should protect the consumer.

My copy of "things fall apart" in middle school had the title, "things fall apart" printed on the spine of the book under where the cover should be.

30 years later, still sticks with me.

If I'm not allowed to scan it into a PDF copy when I buy it, then I should be.

You aren't legally allowed to do that.

That's the point of a "copy right". That only one entity holds the legal right to make copies.

Right. If they're not going to let me preserve my copy myself, then they should have to do it for me.

Yeah, the 20 year timeline here requires some discussion.

We have the concept of the finite warranty. And part of that is because there's a point where it's infeasible to expect everything you buy to last forever nor someone to be on the hook forever for things that don't last forever.

Car warranties are typically three years.

But what about DVDs that break due to a defect after 20 years?

Maybe companies should be able to pick how long the warranty lasts on the media they distribute their copyrighted work on, but with the catch that the copyright ends early the same time the warranty does.

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