6 ms·

It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Purchasing the right to see a movie, l

by rajat 8y ago

It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Clearly, most of us don't appreciate the difference between what it meant to purchase something, and what it means today in the digital, subscription world. So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.

saidajigumi 8y ago
I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Actually, I'd put this on Apple legal: the contracts should specify that customer purchases can continue be hosted, and served to those customers in perpetuity. It's possible that Apple didn't have the leverage or foresight to negotiate these terms, but the "fix" here is straightforward because it's an issue of contractual terms, not some notion of "legality".
- thedaemon 8y ago
  I have purchased many movies on Google Play that are no longer available for purchase. They are still available for me to watch.
derefr 8y ago
> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker. Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library. If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them. Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)
- cjmoran 8y ago
  Do you know whether Google Play Music's upload feature works in the same way?
  - daeken 8y ago
    Google Play Music actually keeps your files, rather than doing any kind of finger printing, as far as I can tell.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Amazon used to offer this in their Amazon Music offering, but they recently shut down the ability to store arbitrary files that you uploaded yourself. If you had any self-uploaded files in your library, they were purged. It's difficult to understand this move from a customer service perspective. Does anyone know what's going on?
  - derefr 8y ago
    Amazon Drive used to offer unlimited file storage. They stopped because people from https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ were uploading their 100TB video library. Now there's an arbitrary-file storage limit, and while Amazon Drive still offers unlimited photo storage, this proviso exists in the features page: > If you are a Prime member, in addition to the list above, you can also store unlimited photos at no additional charge. However, the Amazon Photos unlimited photo benefit only applies to files recognized as photos. If a photo is encrypted, and Amazon Drive is unable to identify it as a photo, the file will count toward your storage limit. Videos also count toward your storage limit. This is because, to get around the imposed limits, the data hoarders attempted to use a storage client that would chunk their large arbitrary files (probably pirated videos and game ISOs) into many smaller files that appeared to be collections of photos. The "photos" created by the chunking client were just arbitrary data with a .jpg extension, so scanning for "is this file of a valid image container format" was enough to thwart them. But, even if the data hoarders tried harder and made a new version of the chunking client which encoded their files as e.g. valid PNGs, 1. that's have really high bandwidth overhead, and 2. it'd still be pretty simple on Amazon's part to use more advanced ML to detect whether a given valid image is actually "a photo", or is just compressed binary data. So the data hoarders stopped while they were ahead. I would guess that Amazon Music restricted their offering because of the data hoarders as well—unlike with photos, it's impossible to say whether arbitrary binary data constitutes "music" as long as it's stored as a stream in a valid media container file-format. It would have been fairly easy to create a new version of the data hoarders' chunking client that stored its arbitrary files as valid .flac containers. So Amazon just applied a policy solution instead.
jstarfish 8y ago
Yep. Nothing is immune from this principle. You buy a book on Amazon, they can take it away. You buy a movie on Apple, they can take it away. Now everybody gets to experience the thrill of a visit from the repo man! Even Steam isnt immune. With some games they will maintain two copies for past and future customers reflecting a change in license but Rockstar removed a significant portion of the soundtrack to GTA4 for all customers a few months ago.
xienze 8y ago
> So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it. Highly recommended. I buy disc copies of all my movies and rip them directly to my NAS with no additional transcoding, then serve them up via Plex. All the advantages of digital distribution, none of the drawbacks (the biggest one being "oops, we don't have the rights to that movie anymore").
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  The time invested into learning how to setup a NAS, ripping discs, maintaining that infrastructure all seem like drawbacks.
  - xienze 8y ago
    Well like a lot of things the best option isn't always the cheapest and easiest. It's worth it depending on what you value.
    - mulmen 8y ago
      I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time. I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        > I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time. OK... > I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach. Do you know how to do that? Why would it matter if that's what you'd rather have? You don't have it now.
    - nradov 8y ago
      Doing a lot of extra work just to gain access to entertainment content seems to be kind of missing the point of entertainment in the first place.
  - 8y ago
Alex3917 8y ago
> It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Even if you have your own copy, Apple will still delete your stuff. E.g. iTunes no longer makes an actual backup of the contents of your phone when it tells you it has done so, so when you get a new phone you need to redownload all of your apps from the cloud. Assuming they are still there, which often they are not.
dvdhnt 8y ago
> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. Yeah, that's a no-go, chief. Even if it's somehow baked into the terms of service, I don't think it's reasonable for the average person to assume the content they are purchasing (not leasing, not renting, not subscribing to, but purchasing) might someday disappear, outside of the service shutting down forever. As a technical person, I understand that may happen, but in this case, it's surprising. This is more evidence that we are not doing enough to police marketing and legalese. Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon. Good contracts can only be interpreted one way. The same should be true for almost every part of our economy - leases, sales contracts, mortgages, investments, employment agreements, terms of service, etc. Personally, I believe we need to reign in the "unlimited" data claims, "adjustable" APRs, non-compete agreements, and privacy policies.
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon. An apropos typo ….
- fastball 8y ago
  Buying a DVD gives you the right to view that content, but that "right" disappears if you scratch the DVD.
  - clear_dg 8y ago
    Unless you have a private copy, which is allowed in many countries. As long as you keep a backup, you effectively have this "right" for life. And what if the publishers break into your home and are the ones to scratch the DVD? That reflects better what happened in the article.
    - fastball 8y ago
      You can keep a copy of your iTunes media, it's perfectly legal. Apple is not the publisher, they are the distributor. They are not "coming into your home and scratching your DVD", an actually analogous analogy would be they stop supporting the DVD format with new disc players they release.
6stringmerc 8y ago
Apparently you haven't been following the battle between Redbox and Disney - not even a physical copy can side-step strong DRM via access codes. From what I can see thus far Disney is winning the battle in court. So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium. Thanks a lot, Mickey Mouse /s
- xienze 8y ago
  > So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium. Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that. It's illegal (breaking the encryption), so they could theoretically pursue legal remedies.
    - xienze 8y ago
      Yeah, if they knew about it, which they won't unless you're distributing copies. I put laws ripping my own purchased discs for personal use (DMCA) in the "kiss my ass" category.
  - ta76567656 8y ago
    They can if you're Redbox, which is what the parent was talking about. With DRM bullshit they can circumvent the Right of First Sale principle.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    Breaking the law is unethical because the benefits apply only to you. Copyright and truth in advertising law as it is today is not protecting consumers. Rather than being content circumventing the law those of us that understand the problem should work to fix it.
    - 8y ago
danShumway 8y ago
It probably shouldn't be called a purchase then. Consumers understand the distinction between buying a car and leasing a car. Nobody says in common conversation, "I bought Spotify," they say, "I subscribed to Spotify." It's no accident that companies like Apple lean on terminology like "purchase" instead of "license." Apple knows that the iTunes buy button would be less attractive if it used language that was more transparent. So instead they are capitalizing on that confusion - they want the customer to feel like this is a permanent transaction. They want a movie license to feel the same as the experience of buying a DVD. If most consumers don't understand the difference, then businesses should use less confusing language within marketing and store interfaces. If they're OK with consumer confusion or if that consumer confusion is actually the point, then they should also be OK with the blowback they get when customers eventually feel misled or betrayed. They have to take the bad with the good.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download. This concept is more noxious with apps, where it's nearly impossible to transfer defunct apps across iOS devices. The concept is not new. If I buy perpetual rights to software on DVD, I don't have an unlimited period of time to obtain media. If my grandchildren are running a computer with Windows NT4 that I purchased in 1999 in 2100, my estate owns the right to use the software, but Microsoft or its successor has no obligation to provide me with media. If you care, buy physical media with download codes.
  - xienze 8y ago
    > It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download. In this context, they're "supposed" to be one in the same. What good is a right to view content if you can't actually get it?
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      No, it’s not. Folks may assume that because they don’t read the terms of sale. Apple and others do that to simplify user experience, but rights holders ultimately dictate the terms. No movie studio will ever allow perpetual distribution. In the case of Apple, they offer a simple solution: download it to your computer.
apostacy 8y ago
I don't know why anyone is surprised by this. Apple has a long history of getting touchy-feely with our computers. I can't count the number of times Apple has burned me. Going back over a decade, with the iTunes 4.01 "upgrade" that only removed the ability to stream my music collection over the internet. And the countless shenanigans with the app store, like silently deleting old versions of apps. Several times I had regressions introduced and no way to go back. And that is really just the tip of the iceberg. In particular, Apple completely ruined my iPad 4[1] I can no longer read it in bed because I can't change the light filter. My favorite apps no longer work. And I did NOT want it, but they did it to me anyway. I really think that we should have a threat model for manufacturer updates. I now have to research exactly what an update does before I install it, because it could very well rob me of functionality that I enjoyed. And the theme of dishonesty by manufacturers is more than enough reason not to trust them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500
sandov 8y ago
>or make a digital copy of it And do so in a computer you control, not in one controlled by someone else. I'm not talking only about having physical possession of the hardware, but also controlling what instructions that hardware executes. i.e. run free software. The Amazon 1984[0] case comes to mind, where not running free software meant losing your data. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
wongarsu 8y ago
> Purchasing the right to see a movie, [...] will never be the same as holding a physical copy. If I buy a game on Steam, I can download it in perpetuity. Even if the game is later taken off Steam, I can still download my copy. Technically the contract only gives me a revocable license, but in practise it behaves in every way like a purchase of a physical copy. It reliably does what people expect, and in return everyone uses Steam instead of physical media. If the media industry doesn't allow this model, I am not sure how they expect digital purchases and streaming to replace physical media and piracy.

by rajat 8y ago

saidajigumi 8y ago

I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Actually, I'd put this on Apple legal: the contracts should specify that customer purchases can continue be hosted, and served to those customers in perpetuity. It's possible that Apple didn't have the leverage or foresight to negotiate these terms, but the "fix" here is straightforward because it's an issue of contractual terms, not some notion of "legality".

thedaemon 8y ago
I have purchased many movies on Google Play that are no longer available for purchase. They are still available for me to watch.

derefr 8y ago

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker. Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library. If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them. Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)

cjmoran 8y ago
Do you know whether Google Play Music's upload feature works in the same way?
- daeken 8y ago
  Google Play Music actually keeps your files, rather than doing any kind of finger printing, as far as I can tell.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
Amazon used to offer this in their Amazon Music offering, but they recently shut down the ability to store arbitrary files that you uploaded yourself. If you had any self-uploaded files in your library, they were purged. It's difficult to understand this move from a customer service perspective. Does anyone know what's going on?
- derefr 8y ago
  Amazon Drive used to offer unlimited file storage. They stopped because people from https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ were uploading their 100TB video library. Now there's an arbitrary-file storage limit, and while Amazon Drive still offers unlimited photo storage, this proviso exists in the features page: > If you are a Prime member, in addition to the list above, you can also store unlimited photos at no additional charge. However, the Amazon Photos unlimited photo benefit only applies to files recognized as photos. If a photo is encrypted, and Amazon Drive is unable to identify it as a photo, the file will count toward your storage limit. Videos also count toward your storage limit. This is because, to get around the imposed limits, the data hoarders attempted to use a storage client that would chunk their large arbitrary files (probably pirated videos and game ISOs) into many smaller files that appeared to be collections of photos. The "photos" created by the chunking client were just arbitrary data with a .jpg extension, so scanning for "is this file of a valid image container format" was enough to thwart them. But, even if the data hoarders tried harder and made a new version of the chunking client which encoded their files as e.g. valid PNGs, 1. that's have really high bandwidth overhead, and 2. it'd still be pretty simple on Amazon's part to use more advanced ML to detect whether a given valid image is actually "a photo", or is just compressed binary data. So the data hoarders stopped while they were ahead. I would guess that Amazon Music restricted their offering because of the data hoarders as well—unlike with photos, it's impossible to say whether arbitrary binary data constitutes "music" as long as it's stored as a stream in a valid media container file-format. It would have been fairly easy to create a new version of the data hoarders' chunking client that stored its arbitrary files as valid .flac containers. So Amazon just applied a policy solution instead.

jstarfish 8y ago

Yep. Nothing is immune from this principle. You buy a book on Amazon, they can take it away. You buy a movie on Apple, they can take it away. Now everybody gets to experience the thrill of a visit from the repo man! Even Steam isnt immune. With some games they will maintain two copies for past and future customers reflecting a change in license but Rockstar removed a significant portion of the soundtrack to GTA4 for all customers a few months ago.

xienze 8y ago

> So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it. Highly recommended. I buy disc copies of all my movies and rip them directly to my NAS with no additional transcoding, then serve them up via Plex. All the advantages of digital distribution, none of the drawbacks (the biggest one being "oops, we don't have the rights to that movie anymore").

lotsofpulp 8y ago
The time invested into learning how to setup a NAS, ripping discs, maintaining that infrastructure all seem like drawbacks.
- xienze 8y ago
  Well like a lot of things the best option isn't always the cheapest and easiest. It's worth it depending on what you value.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time. I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time. OK... > I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach. Do you know how to do that? Why would it matter if that's what you'd rather have? You don't have it now.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Doing a lot of extra work just to gain access to entertainment content seems to be kind of missing the point of entertainment in the first place.
- 8y ago

Alex3917 8y ago

> It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Even if you have your own copy, Apple will still delete your stuff. E.g. iTunes no longer makes an actual backup of the contents of your phone when it tells you it has done so, so when you get a new phone you need to redownload all of your apps from the cloud. Assuming they are still there, which often they are not.

dvdhnt 8y ago

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. Yeah, that's a no-go, chief. Even if it's somehow baked into the terms of service, I don't think it's reasonable for the average person to assume the content they are purchasing (not leasing, not renting, not subscribing to, but purchasing) might someday disappear, outside of the service shutting down forever. As a technical person, I understand that may happen, but in this case, it's surprising. This is more evidence that we are not doing enough to police marketing and legalese. Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon. Good contracts can only be interpreted one way. The same should be true for almost every part of our economy - leases, sales contracts, mortgages, investments, employment agreements, terms of service, etc. Personally, I believe we need to reign in the "unlimited" data claims, "adjustable" APRs, non-compete agreements, and privacy policies.

JadeNB 8y ago
> Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon. An apropos typo ….
fastball 8y ago
Buying a DVD gives you the right to view that content, but that "right" disappears if you scratch the DVD.
- clear_dg 8y ago
  Unless you have a private copy, which is allowed in many countries. As long as you keep a backup, you effectively have this "right" for life. And what if the publishers break into your home and are the ones to scratch the DVD? That reflects better what happened in the article.
  - fastball 8y ago
    You can keep a copy of your iTunes media, it's perfectly legal. Apple is not the publisher, they are the distributor. They are not "coming into your home and scratching your DVD", an actually analogous analogy would be they stop supporting the DVD format with new disc players they release.

6stringmerc 8y ago

Apparently you haven't been following the battle between Redbox and Disney - not even a physical copy can side-step strong DRM via access codes. From what I can see thus far Disney is winning the battle in court. So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium. Thanks a lot, Mickey Mouse /s

xienze 8y ago
> So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium. Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that.
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that. It's illegal (breaking the encryption), so they could theoretically pursue legal remedies.
  - xienze 8y ago
    Yeah, if they knew about it, which they won't unless you're distributing copies. I put laws ripping my own purchased discs for personal use (DMCA) in the "kiss my ass" category.
- ta76567656 8y ago
  They can if you're Redbox, which is what the parent was talking about. With DRM bullshit they can circumvent the Right of First Sale principle.
- mulmen 8y ago
  Breaking the law is unethical because the benefits apply only to you. Copyright and truth in advertising law as it is today is not protecting consumers. Rather than being content circumventing the law those of us that understand the problem should work to fix it.
  - 8y ago

danShumway 8y ago

It probably shouldn't be called a purchase then. Consumers understand the distinction between buying a car and leasing a car. Nobody says in common conversation, "I bought Spotify," they say, "I subscribed to Spotify." It's no accident that companies like Apple lean on terminology like "purchase" instead of "license." Apple knows that the iTunes buy button would be less attractive if it used language that was more transparent. So instead they are capitalizing on that confusion - they want the customer to feel like this is a permanent transaction. They want a movie license to feel the same as the experience of buying a DVD. If most consumers don't understand the difference, then businesses should use less confusing language within marketing and store interfaces. If they're OK with consumer confusion or if that consumer confusion is actually the point, then they should also be OK with the blowback they get when customers eventually feel misled or betrayed. They have to take the bad with the good.

Spooky23 8y ago
It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download. This concept is more noxious with apps, where it's nearly impossible to transfer defunct apps across iOS devices. The concept is not new. If I buy perpetual rights to software on DVD, I don't have an unlimited period of time to obtain media. If my grandchildren are running a computer with Windows NT4 that I purchased in 1999 in 2100, my estate owns the right to use the software, but Microsoft or its successor has no obligation to provide me with media. If you care, buy physical media with download codes.
- xienze 8y ago
  > It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download. In this context, they're "supposed" to be one in the same. What good is a right to view content if you can't actually get it?
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    No, it’s not. Folks may assume that because they don’t read the terms of sale. Apple and others do that to simplify user experience, but rights holders ultimately dictate the terms. No movie studio will ever allow perpetual distribution. In the case of Apple, they offer a simple solution: download it to your computer.

apostacy 8y ago

I don't know why anyone is surprised by this. Apple has a long history of getting touchy-feely with our computers. I can't count the number of times Apple has burned me. Going back over a decade, with the iTunes 4.01 "upgrade" that only removed the ability to stream my music collection over the internet. And the countless shenanigans with the app store, like silently deleting old versions of apps. Several times I had regressions introduced and no way to go back. And that is really just the tip of the iceberg. In particular, Apple completely ruined my iPad 4[1] I can no longer read it in bed because I can't change the light filter. My favorite apps no longer work. And I did NOT want it, but they did it to me anyway. I really think that we should have a threat model for manufacturer updates. I now have to research exactly what an update does before I install it, because it could very well rob me of functionality that I enjoyed. And the theme of dishonesty by manufacturers is more than enough reason not to trust them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500

sandov 8y ago

>or make a digital copy of it And do so in a computer you control, not in one controlled by someone else. I'm not talking only about having physical possession of the hardware, but also controlling what instructions that hardware executes. i.e. run free software. The Amazon 1984[0] case comes to mind, where not running free software meant losing your data. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

wongarsu 8y ago

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, [...] will never be the same as holding a physical copy. If I buy a game on Steam, I can download it in perpetuity. Even if the game is later taken off Steam, I can still download my copy. Technically the contract only gives me a revocable license, but in practise it behaves in every way like a purchase of a physical copy. It reliably does what people expect, and in return everyone uses Steam instead of physical media. If the media industry doesn't allow this model, I am not sure how they expect digital purchases and streaming to replace physical media and piracy.