The fight against labeling long-term streaming rentals as "purchases" you "buy" | Hacker News Reader

The fight against labeling long-term streaming rentals as "purchases" you "buy"

arstechnica.com

61 pointsmakeitdouble14 comments

If I buy something, not only should I be allowed to keep it until I die, but I should also be allowed to pass it on to someone else after I die. I should also be allowed to give it or to sell it even before I die. That's currently impossible with many of these so-called digital purchases.

It's a huge bummer that Steam has trained a whole generation to give up their right to own a game disc they can loan, trade or resell. And see it as a good thing because now all their games are in one "place".

A lot of games I bought on Steam are so heavily discounted I’m willing to take the risk.

If it goes missing, I will still have spent less than it would have cost me to rent it for a week back in the day.

No single loss of any digital good will ever break anyone. The point is that digital "ownership" was normalized and the rights have been lost period.

What happens if your steam account gets hacked/banned/deleted out of your control? Then you can lose hundreds to thousands of game purchases.

What happens if my house burns down? Or somebody steals my car full of CDs?

Those problems also exist with physical belongings.

Which is why you should be able to back them up too! DMCA laws are also unreasonable

Steam came at a time where publishers were already fighting to stop resells. For instance copy protection was abused to expand to single use codes.

In a way, the lower price of Steam helped swallow the disappearance of the second hand market. I see the point, but wouldn't set it as a positive thing (neutral at most?)

Oh this I can get behind, it's my pet hate, especially when the rental is taken away.

Some slogans used to say "to buy and keep".

- Why would you buy it and not keep it? The word "Keep" is clearly used to manipulate you into thinking it's the same as owning.

- Keeping something you buy (not rent) implies ownership as long as you want, not what they want, so this goes against its definition too.

Start your archiving engines! There is the possibility all of these laws go against the consumer. When the economy gets bad, companies invent new fun ways to make number go up. After the last few years I stopped caring about streaming media due to all the pricing tiers, coming and going of shows, and ads(!). There’s too many platforms all with their own dumb rules and tiers. Download once, your brain knows you have it. Drives are cheap, data is expensive.

Yes this needs to end

The worst part is, you can't transfer your 'purchases' to someone else, or even leave them to someone when you die.

In the world where you don't own things you buy, then you can't "steal" it either, so "pirating" becomes the only sane way to get your digital media. You'll own nothing and be happy™

I largely agree with the sentiment behind the statement you're referring to, but I disagree with its framing.

Piracy has never been stealing, nor theft, in the entire period of time when "piracy" has existed as a term for "copyright infringement". Stealing involves depriving someone of a piece of property, not merely the profit from selling it. I'm not aware of anyone, ever, who has been charged with criminal theft because they duplicated an existing work.

Piracy has never been stealing, but until somewhat recently, buying was always owning (in terms of the physical copy, not in terms of the copyright).

If it were possible to scan an object that is protected by patents/trademarks/copyright and later reproduce it with perfect fidelity from raw materials, should that be considered "stealing"? Of course not. It might violate, in some sense, one or more of the rights often lumped into the colloquial term "intellectual property". But it cannot be theft, as the owner of the original object was not, in any way, deprived of their property.

Bring it on!

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