11 ms·

It's frustrating that the word 'purchase' is used for this kind of transaction. Like 'unlimited', it's use is fundamentally dishonest and vendors get away with

It's frustrating that the word 'purchase' is used for this kind of transaction. Like 'unlimited', it's use is fundamentally dishonest and vendors get away with it because everyone knows they lie. If I buy a paperback book or a drm free ebook, that's a purchase. If I pay for a drm movie or kindle book, that's a long-term rental.

wongarsu 8y ago
If I buy a game from Steam then contractually that is a rental, but it behaves like a purchase. I can install it anywhere I like, I can back it up to a physical disk, and most importantly I can redownload it in perpetuity; even if the same item is no longer for sale on Steam. The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.
- afandian 8y ago
  I don't know anything about Valve. But if I cancel my Amazon account, I doubt that I would be able to keep all the books I bought.
- androidgirl 8y ago
  As an aside, some games on Steam are DRM free and/or can be run without steam. Stardew Valley and Kerbal Space Program spring to mind. There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
  - plussed_reader 8y ago
    How often do you replace the NAS?
- kipchak 8y ago
  A concern I've heard brought up is if games are no longer supported on a new version of Windows, but steam and steamworks DRM is no longer able to run on an old version of Windows that the game is compatible with. Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible. To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.
- patmcguire 8y ago
  Or you file a chargeback, or someone playing on your account uses an aimbot, or anything else that attracts their unilateral ire.
- eslaught 8y ago
  Or they delete your account. I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The majority of users may never experience this, but the fact is that when you use a service like this you're at the mercy of the service provider, even for basic things like maintaining access to your account. What I'd like to see is some sort of movement towards "if it looks like a purchase, then it is a purchase". That is, if I pay a one-time up-front free for access to something (even with DRM), we should pass legislation to make it behave like a purchase and limit the shenanigans that providers can pull. (Granted this is a very ill-formed idea and there are lots of details to work out in order to implement it.)
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    > I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The worst part about this is that it often happens when consumers exercise their legitimate rights to e.g. chargebacks. And yes, Steam does it too: if you chargeback a Steam purchase, even a fraudulent one where the CC company sides with you after the investigation, usually this will result in your account getting locked and held hostage until you undo the chargeback and eat the cost.
    - felix_nagaand 8y ago
      That's when it's time to sue.
      - Analemma_ 8y ago
        The Steam user agreement includes a binding arbitration clause preventing you from suing: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11 https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11. There is no escape.
        olzd 8y ago
        Actually there is: be a EU resident. It's even explicitely stated there.
- slezyr 8y ago
  Steam can lock your games too. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_steam_region_lock_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_s...
- diffeomorphism 8y ago
  > The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt Or that somebody phishes your login data or that your account is banned for some reason or that the drm servers for a game you bought are now offline (you still have the installer, but can't use it anymore)... . I also like steam, but it is still very much "all eggs in one basket" and while some of the games on there are drm-free many aren't. gog.com is better in that regard.
- komali2 8y ago
  >back it up to a physical disk Really? How? It still needs the steam client to run, yea?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC. Not entirely, since there's still some dependency on their client to put the game in 'offline mode', which requires phoning home to Valve. A better example would be gog.com, which gives you the game binary/installer to download and no requirements for phoning home or any other shenanigans for being able to install/play it.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    It's my understanding that the DRM and phoning home is completely optional and up to the developer. Steam is happy to deliver your games DRM-free and without any dependency on their client if the developer/publsiher chooses to do so.
  - Lorkki 8y ago
    They don't really advertise it, but there's no requirement to use DRM on Steam: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
- always_good 8y ago
  I found out the hard way that you can't play a single Steam game if you haven't connected it to the internet in 30 days. Nothing clarifies the difference between purchase and rental when you try booting Steam up on a laptop for a 12 hour bus ride across Mexico and you can't play a single game. You just have this "meh, hasn't affected me" mindset.
  - gspetr 8y ago
    Wouldn't adjusting the system's clock circumvent this? I do agree with your point that this is a bad thing in the first place.
    - xg15 8y ago
      I might be wrong, but don't modern TPMs have their own internal clocks to prevent exactly this?
    - always_good 8y ago
      That's the first thing I tried but it didn't work. Maybe it would've worked before I booted Steam in the first place, but you'd think Steam would've coded around that obvious circumvention.
- mcguire 8y ago
  https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/im-longer-buying-games-steam-opinion/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/im-longer-buying-games-steam-o...
- xg15 8y ago
  Yes, and those rentals-that-feel-like-purchases seem to be increasingly how new products and services are distributed whenever the providers can get away with it. You don't just see them with games, but also with movies (as described), music, e-books and, more recently, software suites, IoT devices and cars(!). Which makes sense: For the involved businesses there are enormous upsides to this kind of deal: Instead of giving your product out of hand, you enter a long-term relationship with the consumer, you get the money and remain in full control over the product, you can define in unprecedented detail how your customers are permitted to use the product, you can use that control as leverage in contracts with other businesses, etc, etc. Consumers usually don't mind because, indeed, it feels like you own the product. Until stuff like the OP happens and they realize it was a lie.
watertom 8y ago
It's not a long term rental, it's an limited rental, and the rental period is determined by the "landlord", solely at their discretion. We've all become digital serfs, digiserf, if you will.
- behringer 8y ago
  Not all of us, some of us don't buy digital goods with DRM embedded. Most of the friends I talk to that buy drm stuff buy it thinking it will be around forever. They just don't conceive of a world without iTunes or Amazon.
  - jklinger410 8y ago
    >They just don't conceive of a world without iTunes or Amazon. Many of them trade this for convenience and assume there will be an off-boarding process.
    - behringer 8y ago
      If you think Amazon will refund you 3000 dollars worth of digital goods in 50 years if they go bankrupt, you're dreaming. If you're very lucky, whoever bought them out might let you keep your stuff, or more likely, let you buy it again.
      - eecc 8y ago
        In 50 years their code will be cracked or the root keys leaked (especially during a bankruptcy meltdown). Of course that’s not something to count on, but history is a proven record that opsec failures will produce the opportunities for “liberation”
        behringer 8y ago
        No need to wait 50 years if you wish to break the law. Right now you can steal all the content you like. Don't forget removing DRM in the US is illegal, and laws will undoubtedly only get more draconian.
crispyporkbites 8y ago
If you buy a paperback book you're purchasing the physical materials in the book (i.e. the paper and ink), and a license to the copy of the material in the book. You can't do whatever you want with the content - e.g. you can't copy it and sell it on. It's only now that the materials and the content can be explictly and easily separated that we see this logic actually apply in more meaningful ways. This is going to apply to more and more things in the future (e.g. cars, phones, etc.) so we better get used to it, unfortunately.
- afandian 8y ago
  Or, as I said in a different comment, use new vocabulary.
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  you can't copy it and sell it on. But you can share with others. You can even sell the book. It is very convenient to have hundreds or even thousands of books in a tiny device, especially for someone who has very little space to keep physical books (and those who move a lot). While nothing can replace physical books, ebook readers are a fairly good compromise. Plus, it is possible to reduce the cost of books (and less dead trees). But we can't share, unless we share the ebook reader device itself :( As with most things, humans will put commerce first, and I don't see this situation changing anytime soon. Amazon has won the ebook reader race and they are likely going to stay there for a while.
  - seandougall 8y ago
    You're right about the resale part, but at least with the Kindle you can loan books for up to 14 days: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200549320 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_...
- zucan 8y ago
  The important difference is that the only "license terms" for paperback copies are laws designed to protect publishers, whereas digital licenses can be as arbitrary as a publisher chooses to as long as they don't conflict with laws designed to protect consumers.
rayiner 8y ago
I disagree. Vendors "get away with it" because "purchase" is, in practice, a more accurate description of the transaction than "rental." Everyone knows what a movie rental is--it is where you have access to a movie for some fixed, usually short (a few days) period of time. A "purchase" on iTunes does not fit into the mold of what people think of as a rental. The fact that there are some conditions attached doesn't change that result. Note that this also comports with what "purchase" means as a legal matter. You can "purchase" land and get an interest short of a fee simple absolute. E.g. your interest might be preempted by the occurrence of some event. Such an interest is still an ownership interest, as opposed to a leasehold (rental) interest.
- Drakim 8y ago
  I disagree with your disagreement. In the common layman's mind, if you "purchase" something, then the company should not be able to take it back from you. Especially since it's not like Apple is guaranteeing that you get to keep the product for a minimum amount of time. They could just as well delete your purchase a minute after you bought it. There isn't a single human on planet earth who thinks of such a transaction that gets withdrawn after one minute as a regular legitimate "purchase" of a product. Even "rental" doesn't quite cut it, it's more in the land of "fraud".
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Note that this is not about Apple taking content back. It's about Apple not allowing content to be re-downloaded after it has been deleted locally, if it has been pulled from the iTunes Store in the meantime. We're an all-iTunes household, as are my parents and in-laws, and the fact that iTunes "purchases" are subject to this condition has never elicited a comment from anyone I know.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    I'm not sure we can equate deleting a purchased digital asset with taking back a physical item. I'd imagine deleting something would be more akin to selling a product that is designed to break after a certain amount of time. There's a pretty wide variance of what people consider acceptable from purchased things, e.g. People generally accept the idea that a mattress will eventually need to get changed even if it comes with a lifetime warranty.
trumped 8y ago
I pay for Netflix but I "record" whatever content that I really like because I know that there is a good chance that it will become unavailable in the future: https://reelgood.com/blog/netflixs-us-catalog-has-shrunk-by-more-than-2-500-titles-in-less-than-2-5-years/ https://reelgood.com/blog/netflixs-us-catalog-has-shrunk-by-...
- jld 8y ago
  Interesting. I don't think many have the expectation that they have the right to watch a Netflix movie they streamed in perpetuity, as they do with Kindle books or iTunes purchases.
  - abraham_lincoln 8y ago
    It would have been crazy 20 years ago to subscribe to HBO and record a movie to your VCR, that you could watch later, or at a friend's house.
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      But it would not have been crazy, 25 years ago, to record a song playing on the radio to a tape recorder, so you can replay it back later.
  - eloisant 8y ago
    People don't have this expectation because Netflix is already pulling out content all the time. A few years ago you could get pretty much any DVD from Netflix mail service, you could also walk in a video rental store and find all the classic, as well as all the blockbusters from the past 10 years. It's really sad that a technological advance lead to such a regression.
    - stevenwoo 8y ago
      I don't know if it's the exception, but in Santa Clara County, the public libraries have a somewhat better selection of DVD's than Netflix. I just cross referenced my list recently (about 20) and the local library had five older that were not available (as out of print most likely) on Netflix and Netflix had two (older foreign releases) that were not in the library. I'm probably cancelling my Netflix DVD subscription soon.
pessimizer 8y ago
"Purchase" doesn't really mean anything, because being property isn't a quality of an object that can be analyzed. What being property means is dictated by anyone with the means to enforce their preferred meaning. The definition of owning a book doesn't include the right to read it out loud, for example. I may own a small piece of land in the city, but I'm told that I must build a single-family home or grassy field on it rather than a parking lot, skyscraper, or open sewer. The problem is that property rights are defined by people with the most property in a way that expands their control over that property.
- louisswiss 8y ago
  Apart from the other problems in your comment, `purchase` !== `own`.
taobility 8y ago
if you buy a paperback book, the book can still be lost. if you buy a digital movie from iTunes, and you downloaded it local, you own it forever.
fandango 8y ago
For software it has never worked that well in the first place. I have a couple of game purchases (on disc, prior to the Steam era) that simply don't work anymore. You have to rely on the publisher to support newer OS versions, drivers etc. For the best games, I usually rebuy them anyway as digital downloads on gog.com or similar.

wongarsu 8y ago

If I buy a game from Steam then contractually that is a rental, but it behaves like a purchase. I can install it anywhere I like, I can back it up to a physical disk, and most importantly I can redownload it in perpetuity; even if the same item is no longer for sale on Steam. The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.

afandian 8y ago
I don't know anything about Valve. But if I cancel my Amazon account, I doubt that I would be able to keep all the books I bought.
androidgirl 8y ago
As an aside, some games on Steam are DRM free and/or can be run without steam. Stardew Valley and Kerbal Space Program spring to mind. There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
- plussed_reader 8y ago
  How often do you replace the NAS?
kipchak 8y ago
A concern I've heard brought up is if games are no longer supported on a new version of Windows, but steam and steamworks DRM is no longer able to run on an old version of Windows that the game is compatible with. Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible. To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.
patmcguire 8y ago
Or you file a chargeback, or someone playing on your account uses an aimbot, or anything else that attracts their unilateral ire.
eslaught 8y ago
Or they delete your account. I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The majority of users may never experience this, but the fact is that when you use a service like this you're at the mercy of the service provider, even for basic things like maintaining access to your account. What I'd like to see is some sort of movement towards "if it looks like a purchase, then it is a purchase". That is, if I pay a one-time up-front free for access to something (even with DRM), we should pass legislation to make it behave like a purchase and limit the shenanigans that providers can pull. (Granted this is a very ill-formed idea and there are lots of details to work out in order to implement it.)
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The worst part about this is that it often happens when consumers exercise their legitimate rights to e.g. chargebacks. And yes, Steam does it too: if you chargeback a Steam purchase, even a fraudulent one where the CC company sides with you after the investigation, usually this will result in your account getting locked and held hostage until you undo the chargeback and eat the cost.
  - felix_nagaand 8y ago
    That's when it's time to sue.
    - Analemma_ 8y ago
      The Steam user agreement includes a binding arbitration clause preventing you from suing: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11 https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11. There is no escape.
      - olzd 8y ago
        Actually there is: be a EU resident. It's even explicitely stated there.
slezyr 8y ago
Steam can lock your games too. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_steam_region_lock_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_s...
diffeomorphism 8y ago
> The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt Or that somebody phishes your login data or that your account is banned for some reason or that the drm servers for a game you bought are now offline (you still have the installer, but can't use it anymore)... . I also like steam, but it is still very much "all eggs in one basket" and while some of the games on there are drm-free many aren't. gog.com is better in that regard.
komali2 8y ago
>back it up to a physical disk Really? How? It still needs the steam client to run, yea?
craftyguy 8y ago
> This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC. Not entirely, since there's still some dependency on their client to put the game in 'offline mode', which requires phoning home to Valve. A better example would be gog.com, which gives you the game binary/installer to download and no requirements for phoning home or any other shenanigans for being able to install/play it.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  It's my understanding that the DRM and phoning home is completely optional and up to the developer. Steam is happy to deliver your games DRM-free and without any dependency on their client if the developer/publsiher chooses to do so.
- Lorkki 8y ago
  They don't really advertise it, but there's no requirement to use DRM on Steam: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
always_good 8y ago
I found out the hard way that you can't play a single Steam game if you haven't connected it to the internet in 30 days. Nothing clarifies the difference between purchase and rental when you try booting Steam up on a laptop for a 12 hour bus ride across Mexico and you can't play a single game. You just have this "meh, hasn't affected me" mindset.
- gspetr 8y ago
  Wouldn't adjusting the system's clock circumvent this? I do agree with your point that this is a bad thing in the first place.
  - xg15 8y ago
    I might be wrong, but don't modern TPMs have their own internal clocks to prevent exactly this?
  - always_good 8y ago
    That's the first thing I tried but it didn't work. Maybe it would've worked before I booted Steam in the first place, but you'd think Steam would've coded around that obvious circumvention.
mcguire 8y ago
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/im-longer-buying-games-steam-opinion/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/im-longer-buying-games-steam-o...
xg15 8y ago
Yes, and those rentals-that-feel-like-purchases seem to be increasingly how new products and services are distributed whenever the providers can get away with it. You don't just see them with games, but also with movies (as described), music, e-books and, more recently, software suites, IoT devices and cars(!). Which makes sense: For the involved businesses there are enormous upsides to this kind of deal: Instead of giving your product out of hand, you enter a long-term relationship with the consumer, you get the money and remain in full control over the product, you can define in unprecedented detail how your customers are permitted to use the product, you can use that control as leverage in contracts with other businesses, etc, etc. Consumers usually don't mind because, indeed, it feels like you own the product. Until stuff like the OP happens and they realize it was a lie.

watertom 8y ago

It's not a long term rental, it's an limited rental, and the rental period is determined by the "landlord", solely at their discretion. We've all become digital serfs, digiserf, if you will.

behringer 8y ago
Not all of us, some of us don't buy digital goods with DRM embedded. Most of the friends I talk to that buy drm stuff buy it thinking it will be around forever. They just don't conceive of a world without iTunes or Amazon.
- jklinger410 8y ago
  >They just don't conceive of a world without iTunes or Amazon. Many of them trade this for convenience and assume there will be an off-boarding process.
  - behringer 8y ago
    If you think Amazon will refund you 3000 dollars worth of digital goods in 50 years if they go bankrupt, you're dreaming. If you're very lucky, whoever bought them out might let you keep your stuff, or more likely, let you buy it again.
    - eecc 8y ago
      In 50 years their code will be cracked or the root keys leaked (especially during a bankruptcy meltdown). Of course that’s not something to count on, but history is a proven record that opsec failures will produce the opportunities for “liberation”
      - behringer 8y ago
        No need to wait 50 years if you wish to break the law. Right now you can steal all the content you like. Don't forget removing DRM in the US is illegal, and laws will undoubtedly only get more draconian.

crispyporkbites 8y ago

If you buy a paperback book you're purchasing the physical materials in the book (i.e. the paper and ink), and a license to the copy of the material in the book. You can't do whatever you want with the content - e.g. you can't copy it and sell it on. It's only now that the materials and the content can be explictly and easily separated that we see this logic actually apply in more meaningful ways. This is going to apply to more and more things in the future (e.g. cars, phones, etc.) so we better get used to it, unfortunately.

afandian 8y ago
Or, as I said in a different comment, use new vocabulary.
justaguyhere 8y ago
you can't copy it and sell it on. But you can share with others. You can even sell the book. It is very convenient to have hundreds or even thousands of books in a tiny device, especially for someone who has very little space to keep physical books (and those who move a lot). While nothing can replace physical books, ebook readers are a fairly good compromise. Plus, it is possible to reduce the cost of books (and less dead trees). But we can't share, unless we share the ebook reader device itself :( As with most things, humans will put commerce first, and I don't see this situation changing anytime soon. Amazon has won the ebook reader race and they are likely going to stay there for a while.
- seandougall 8y ago
  You're right about the resale part, but at least with the Kindle you can loan books for up to 14 days: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200549320 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_...
zucan 8y ago
The important difference is that the only "license terms" for paperback copies are laws designed to protect publishers, whereas digital licenses can be as arbitrary as a publisher chooses to as long as they don't conflict with laws designed to protect consumers.

rayiner 8y ago

I disagree. Vendors "get away with it" because "purchase" is, in practice, a more accurate description of the transaction than "rental." Everyone knows what a movie rental is--it is where you have access to a movie for some fixed, usually short (a few days) period of time. A "purchase" on iTunes does not fit into the mold of what people think of as a rental. The fact that there are some conditions attached doesn't change that result. Note that this also comports with what "purchase" means as a legal matter. You can "purchase" land and get an interest short of a fee simple absolute. E.g. your interest might be preempted by the occurrence of some event. Such an interest is still an ownership interest, as opposed to a leasehold (rental) interest.

Drakim 8y ago
I disagree with your disagreement. In the common layman's mind, if you "purchase" something, then the company should not be able to take it back from you. Especially since it's not like Apple is guaranteeing that you get to keep the product for a minimum amount of time. They could just as well delete your purchase a minute after you bought it. There isn't a single human on planet earth who thinks of such a transaction that gets withdrawn after one minute as a regular legitimate "purchase" of a product. Even "rental" doesn't quite cut it, it's more in the land of "fraud".
- rayiner 8y ago
  Note that this is not about Apple taking content back. It's about Apple not allowing content to be re-downloaded after it has been deleted locally, if it has been pulled from the iTunes Store in the meantime. We're an all-iTunes household, as are my parents and in-laws, and the fact that iTunes "purchases" are subject to this condition has never elicited a comment from anyone I know.
- lhorie 8y ago
  I'm not sure we can equate deleting a purchased digital asset with taking back a physical item. I'd imagine deleting something would be more akin to selling a product that is designed to break after a certain amount of time. There's a pretty wide variance of what people consider acceptable from purchased things, e.g. People generally accept the idea that a mattress will eventually need to get changed even if it comes with a lifetime warranty.

trumped 8y ago

I pay for Netflix but I "record" whatever content that I really like because I know that there is a good chance that it will become unavailable in the future: https://reelgood.com/blog/netflixs-us-catalog-has-shrunk-by-more-than-2-500-titles-in-less-than-2-5-years/ https://reelgood.com/blog/netflixs-us-catalog-has-shrunk-by-...

jld 8y ago
Interesting. I don't think many have the expectation that they have the right to watch a Netflix movie they streamed in perpetuity, as they do with Kindle books or iTunes purchases.
- abraham_lincoln 8y ago
  It would have been crazy 20 years ago to subscribe to HBO and record a movie to your VCR, that you could watch later, or at a friend's house.
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    But it would not have been crazy, 25 years ago, to record a song playing on the radio to a tape recorder, so you can replay it back later.
- eloisant 8y ago
  People don't have this expectation because Netflix is already pulling out content all the time. A few years ago you could get pretty much any DVD from Netflix mail service, you could also walk in a video rental store and find all the classic, as well as all the blockbusters from the past 10 years. It's really sad that a technological advance lead to such a regression.
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    I don't know if it's the exception, but in Santa Clara County, the public libraries have a somewhat better selection of DVD's than Netflix. I just cross referenced my list recently (about 20) and the local library had five older that were not available (as out of print most likely) on Netflix and Netflix had two (older foreign releases) that were not in the library. I'm probably cancelling my Netflix DVD subscription soon.

pessimizer 8y ago

"Purchase" doesn't really mean anything, because being property isn't a quality of an object that can be analyzed. What being property means is dictated by anyone with the means to enforce their preferred meaning. The definition of owning a book doesn't include the right to read it out loud, for example. I may own a small piece of land in the city, but I'm told that I must build a single-family home or grassy field on it rather than a parking lot, skyscraper, or open sewer. The problem is that property rights are defined by people with the most property in a way that expands their control over that property.

louisswiss 8y ago
Apart from the other problems in your comment, `purchase` !== `own`.

taobility 8y ago

if you buy a paperback book, the book can still be lost. if you buy a digital movie from iTunes, and you downloaded it local, you own it forever.

fandango 8y ago

For software it has never worked that well in the first place. I have a couple of game purchases (on disc, prior to the Steam era) that simply don't work anymore. You have to rely on the publisher to support newer OS versions, drivers etc. For the best games, I usually rebuy them anyway as digital downloads on gog.com or similar.