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Am I the only person who likes ownership? I buy all my CDs and rip them to my computer. I installed Gentoo on my computers and I use programs that I have instal

Am I the only person who likes ownership? I buy all my CDs and rip them to my computer. I installed Gentoo on my computers and I use programs that I have installed. I'm using GMail right now, but that's only because I haven't taken the time yet to research and set up my own (similar) local solution. Basically, I don't like to trust my goods and information to other people, and I find it strange that so many people willingly forfeit true ownership.

pchristensen 19y ago
Owning stuff is fine (I enjoy it too). This is just another option that people haven't had before (at least not legally).
mechanical_fish 19y ago
I'm with you, but I think the trend is in the other direction. As a lifelong book collector, my eyes were opened when I heard Cory Doctorow (an even more obsessive bibliophile) state that he was thinking of selling off most of his books -- the logic being that, in a world with digitized libraries, eBay, Amazon and ABE books, it's easier and cheaper for him to just obtain a used copy of anything he wants to reread and sell it on the used market after he's done. I don't actually believe this enough, yet, to put it into practice, but it shocked me into thinking about it. It is grossly inefficient for me to have to keep a physical copy of Star Wars around in my house just to prove that I bought the darned thing. It is grossly inefficient to have my own, personally recorded collection of every single Alton Brown Good Eats episode. These things are not rare: They are treasured by zillions of fans. They are unlikely to become rare in my lifetime. I have, or will soon get, all the bandwidth I need to download them on demand. The only reason I have to cart them from one apartment to the next is that our stupid copyright laws make it easy for their creators to jerk me around -- raising prices, charging me over and over again, editing the films to make them different from what I remember, taking the films off the market for ten years, inserting artificial roadblocks that make no sense in the high-bandwidth era (like physical DVDs from Netflix instead of digital downloads from Youtube HD) -- unless I buy a physical copy and make it my own. I don't think that's going to last. Time is not on the side of that model. It's not as efficient and the people who still believe in it get older by the day.

pchristensen 19y ago

Owning stuff is fine (I enjoy it too). This is just another option that people haven't had before (at least not legally).

mechanical_fish 19y ago

I'm with you, but I think the trend is in the other direction. As a lifelong book collector, my eyes were opened when I heard Cory Doctorow (an even more obsessive bibliophile) state that he was thinking of selling off most of his books -- the logic being that, in a world with digitized libraries, eBay, Amazon and ABE books, it's easier and cheaper for him to just obtain a used copy of anything he wants to reread and sell it on the used market after he's done. I don't actually believe this enough, yet, to put it into practice, but it shocked me into thinking about it. It is grossly inefficient for me to have to keep a physical copy of Star Wars around in my house just to prove that I bought the darned thing. It is grossly inefficient to have my own, personally recorded collection of every single Alton Brown Good Eats episode. These things are not rare: They are treasured by zillions of fans. They are unlikely to become rare in my lifetime. I have, or will soon get, all the bandwidth I need to download them on demand. The only reason I have to cart them from one apartment to the next is that our stupid copyright laws make it easy for their creators to jerk me around -- raising prices, charging me over and over again, editing the films to make them different from what I remember, taking the films off the market for ten years, inserting artificial roadblocks that make no sense in the high-bandwidth era (like physical DVDs from Netflix instead of digital downloads from Youtube HD) -- unless I buy a physical copy and make it my own. I don't think that's going to last. Time is not on the side of that model. It's not as efficient and the people who still believe in it get older by the day.