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The closest analogy I can think of is this: Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. Yo
by vivegi 4y ago
The closest analogy I can think of is this:
Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. You enjoy the facilities -- pool, spa, restaurants etc., during your stay. At the end of your stay, you lose the privileges of staying at the resort/using the facilities.
Even if you bought a timeshare in the resort, you still do not own it. Heck, the property developer also doesn't own it (remember, they just hold the 99 yr lease)!
Electronic-sell-through/Download-to-own is pretty much that esp. if the player is controlled by the platform. You may download the artefact (or the player software may do it for you), but playability is dependent on the platform still holding rights. This is implementation dependent and you have to look through the Terms of Service to really be sure.
All streamers who license third-party content do it for a limited period (from a few months to several months or a year). I wouldn't be surprised if many of the platforms have licensed the "Download to own/Electronic-sell-through" titles only for a finite period. Those titles will go away / become unplayable at some point in the future (unless you downloaded them from a DRM-free platform). When the eventual consumer backlash occurs, the platforms will point to their ToS.
And to add to this complexity, copyright rules are quite different across jurisdictions.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoReal property like resorts all exist in the real world. There is no copying a resort. You can't just instantly copy a building. You can't just create more physical space on this planet. The limits of physics renders such property inherently scarce. Data is different, it is infinite. You can copy it infinitely at nearly zero cost. You can transmit it to anyone anywhere in the world at nearly zero cost. Any attempt to own bits fails because of the inherently infinite nature of data. Any notion of property is imaginary, an illusion. Intellectual property degenerates into number ownership, it's that ridiculous. If you follow this logic to its conclusion: > the player is controlled by the platform Then intellectual property will lead to the end of free computing as we know it today. We cannot have computers that do what we want while simultaneously preventing us from copying data some rightsholder "owns". The copyright industry will lobby the government until free computing is illegal and all computers come pwned from the factory so that we can only execute "legal" code. This also goes hand in hand with government desire to control cryptography, paving the way for total surveillance and oppression.
- LocalH 4y agoThe color of bits simultaneously doesn't exist at all, and yet is very real
- vivegi 4y agoThe reason why the long-term property lease analogy is accurate is because in most jurisdictions copyrights lapse after a stipulated period. That is inspite of corporations like Disney that have used copyright law to their benefit to extend the lifetime of their IP. Taking your point about "free computing", I wonder why we haven't had the equivalent of open source software and the success we have seen over the last few decades hasn't spawned open content movement where we could get great movies, music, books etc., Sure, there are pockets of availability that is an exception, but not the kind of mainstream success that we have seen with open source software.
- selfhoster11 4y agoLeasehold is a scam, and should not be legal in the first place. It benefits no-one except the original freeholder's great-grandchildren or whatever, and vastly complexifies matters for everyone else.