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Sadly, disowning the customer is very common in the new age of digital copyright enforcement. For example, your itunes collection is specific to you. If you di
by est31 8y ago
Sadly, disowning the customer is very common in the new age of digital copyright enforcement.
For example, your itunes collection is specific to you. If you die, it's deleted and is not transfered to your heirs. Similarly, Amazon is removing any books you purchased from your kindles if the seller sold them illegally. Also, if you violate any of their terms of service, they often delete the entire collection as well.
IMO there should be a law requiring digital licenses of any content to be fungible similar to physical copies. You should be allowed to transfer them to another service, even if the service stops existing, or they believe you breached some contract.
This would make licenses even more fungible than bank money is today: right now if a bank goes bankrupt, you might not see any money in your accounts, even though it's your money and you are no investor or anything. It's because every bank is "minting" it's own currency. There are models which are different where you have a central bank handing out digital money to the banks.
- Operyl 8y agoI'm curious how something like transferring to another service would work. The other service has a cost to endure per item, too (CDN costs, etc). It would seem unreasonable not to compensate the new "host". Do we have a fee to transfer from, say, Amazon Videos to iTunes of 10-15% of the market rate for the content? EDIT: yeesh, downvotes galore for something I figured only made economical sense ..
- sokoloff 8y agoThe CDN and storage costs are close enough to $0 that I think they could fairly safely be ignored in light of the river of money flowing to those licensing content.
- Operyl 8y agoDeveloping, support, and other costs are not $0. I'm all for portability, but I'm also for compensation to keep it working smoothly..
- colejohnson66 8y agoSo what the prison should do is take a hit for their mess up and compensate the new service so everyone can keep their music.
- Operyl 8y agoIn this case, yes, I was generalizing the future in general.
- UncleEntity 8y agoIn theory the content provider has already been paid so the main cost would be a simple database import IMHO. Though if I were the company who just lost such a juicy contract I'd tell them to go pound sand when they asked for a database dump.
- Operyl 8y agoI'm referring to more than just this case. In the future, if I purchased from Amazon a movie, and I transferred it to iTunes, how did iTunes get paid? They didn't.
- stordoff 8y agoCould they not just accept it as a cost of doing business? If I can transfer my library to iTunes, I'm more likely to spend money with them in the future.
- ghaff 8y agoThat’s pretty much true with DRM free music files though isn’t it? That’s one of the few bright lights in the whole digital media space. My MP3s aren’t tied to either Apple or Amazon.
- est31 8y agoThe file is fungible and that's great, but the license isn't. It's still bound to Amazon/Apple etc. and you can't give it to someone else, without Apple's/Amazon's permission. With CDs/DVDs, Walmart or wherever you bought the CD from, has no say onto what you do with it afterwards. Whether you give it to someone else, sell it, etc. Of course, if you have a perfectly fungible system, you could have websites where you are being lended a medium for a short time (e.g. one day) for really low amounts of money and of course this would be bad for content creators as it would dramatically lower the sales. However, that can be countered by other means e.g. minimum restriction on lending duration (e.g. one day) and fees that content creators get on ownership transfer and each lending interaction (e.g. 5% for the first 5 years after movie release, afterwards 1%).
- ghaff 8y agoAll that (may) be true in theory. In practice, absolutely nothing keeps you from sharing MP3s with friends so long as it’s not with your 10,000 closest friends and I’m not sure how seriously the publishers even care about that any longer given the rise of streaming.
- ilikehurdles 8y agoThey were for ages. I’m not really sure how non-drm won out but I’m glad it did
- ghaff 8y agoIt’s an interesting question and it’s a function of the dynamics of the time. Steve Jobs probably deserves a fair bit of credit.
- aquabeagle 8y agoDidn't the iTunes Store stop using DRM (m4p) for music files a long time ago?
- chipperyman573 8y agoThe files themselves aren't encrypted any more but the licence they use still restricts you more than a physical CD would.
- ascorbic 8y ago> This would make licenses even more fungible than bank money is today: right now if a bank goes bankrupt, you might not see any money in your accounts, even though it's your money and you are no investor or anything. It's because every bank is "minting" it's own currency. There are models which are different where you have a central bank handing out digital money to the banks. Not true. Banks aren't minting their own money, and your money is insured. https://www.fdic.gov/ https://www.fdic.gov/
- UncleEntity 8y ago> Not true. Banks aren't minting their own money, and your money is insured. Totally true (aka fractional reserve banking) and is one of the main reasons (a portion of) your deposits are insured.
- EliRivers 8y agoThey don't physically mint it, but they certainly create money out of nowhere to put into bank accounts that people can then go out and spend.
- ascorbic 8y agoThere's a lot of misleading stuff said about fractional reserve banking. People imply that banks are allowed to just create as much new money as they want out of nowhere, when it just means lending some of the money that they've received in deposits. Sure it does increase the money supply, but it's not "minting their own currency".
- nicoburns 8y ago> Sure it does increase the money supply Not only does it increase the money supply, but the extra money created belongs to the bank. It's pretty much equivalent to being able to print money (with the caveat that there are limit's on how much hey can "print"). We could have a system where that money was simply given to people, not given to banks who then loan it out to people. And IMO that would have a very positive effect om our economy.
- m-p-3 8y agoThis is why I do not feel any guilt in acquiring a DRM-free copy of media I purchased digitally (not talking about subscription-based lease like Spotify, etc). If I bought a eBook or any kind of media without an expiration date, I want to be in full control. I will buy first from DRM-free stores like Bandcamp or GOG.
- thirdsun 8y agoAt least with music it's a solved problem. Pretty much any digital music you can buy today is DRM free already.