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One extra detail. They reserve the right to revoke your license but they still reserve the right to keep selling the product if the laws allow. This allows the

One extra detail. They reserve the right to revoke your license but they still reserve the right to keep selling the product if the laws allow. This allows the following hypothetical situation: 1. You buy content A from producer X through a company 1 2. Producer X and company 1 decides to finish the distribution agreement for whatever reason 3. Company 1 revokes your access to content A. 4. Now producer X seals a deal with Company 2 for distribution rights and company 2 has no obligation on giving you access to content A, because why would they. 5. If you want access content A now you have to buy it again from company 2 without guarantee that it will still exist.

neycoda 3y ago
> If you want access content A Right, _access_. To the companies selling cloud content, like a movie or song that can only be used with the internet, you're just buying _access_ to the content. Because the TOS means they can restrict that access or remove the content, you're really just paying for a key to a door that may or may not exist, to something in the building that may or may not be there, and that building may someday not even be there. You're really paying for the right to access something as long as the underlying capability enabling that right exists. It's the kind of thing that allows a lot of wiggle room for the sellers and holders of the content. This is why I prefer buying physical copies of media, like DVDs and CDs. It's mine for as long as I can manage it or a personal copy of it.
- the_gastropod 3y ago
  Yeaaa. This bothers me, too, on a conceptual level, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a NAS and doing the whole Plex thing. But on a practical level, I’ve “owned” movies and tv shows on (the service formerly known as) iTunes for like 15 years without issue. I question whether, on average, I’d be able to do as good a job, and how much effort it’d take.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    If you start and aren’t happy with it, at least you learned something along the way. Time and format shifting are allowed acts under copyright law (though possibly not DMCA), so I’d consider it a great way to backup the things you bought.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Obligatory IANAL. Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on. If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
      - jonhohle 3y ago
        Also, NAL, but unfortunately, with the exception of Red Book CDs and ROM-Data, archiving commercially published optical media requires circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Unfortunately, "space-shifting" was considered and explicitly not added to the list of recommended exceptions to that rule by the Librarian of Congress[0]. It seems like no one appeared to defend this position, and it is not one of the exemptions allowed for circumventing copy-protected works. 0 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
  - jerf 3y ago
    One of the patterns I've personally really been noticing over the past couple of years (not related to any big events in those years, just the time period I happened to notice them in) is that a lot of theses situations are a bona fide slippery slope. The further in you get, the harder it is to leave. The sooner you bail out, the less it impacts your life at all. I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it. By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them. Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits. More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.) I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle. Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!" This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found. Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.
- hooverd 3y ago
  There needs to be a truth in labeling act so every DRM'd e-book and digital download clearly states that you're buying a license to it and not it.
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  The reason why I stopped buying digital media; I buy physical books, vinyls etc. (mostly second-hand). That said I do have an Apple One subscription that includes Music, for the convenience of having access to a large catalog of music from any of our devices (mostly my kids use it, in the car, etc.). But if it's something I care enough about to actually own or listen to in the future, I get a physical copy. Also, the authors/artists get more that way too. (Edit: As for video, I only do streaming, and that's because I rarely if ever watch a movie or TV show a second time, so I don't care about owning it.)
RecycledEle 3y ago
That is not a hypothetical. A company I can not mention because I am certified by them 14x over did that to me, many times.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  They revoke a license I paid for, then demand I buy another license for the exact same thing. The licenses were NOT supposed to expire.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    If only an anonymous account would appear and name names. I recently watched A Bug’s Life with my kids. It’s actually a pretty good commentary on the abuses of the ruling class and the norms inability to see their own value: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
    - klondike_klive 3y ago
      Not surprising it has such a deep philosophical core, it's a remake of the Seven Samurai.
- dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
  I smell Microsoft…
  - lsh123 3y ago
    I smell Cisco…
    - seanp2k2 3y ago
      I smell any company that charges subscription fees to creatives for content they’re selling from other creatives and taking a huge cut of.
Sakos 3y ago
This is why I can never accept the idea that we're just buying a license. Laws need to be made that ensure once you buy the rights to access a piece of content, that you keep that right regardless of who the current owner is or if the distribution method changes. If I buy a book, I never have to worry about it being taken away or what happens if somebody else gains ownership of a property.
- eek2121 3y ago
  For movies, this is mostly a solved problem. If I buy a movie on iTunes, I can access it on other participating platforms.
  - toss1 3y ago
    >>I can access it on other participating platforms. "participating" is doing a LOT of work there...
Joeri 3y ago
I have an album that I bought digitally in itunes that was revoked and republished identically by the publisher (i think by accident). The consequence is that as far as apple music is concerned, that album is not in my account. The physical files will still activate and play, but I have to copy them manually to every device. Apple support was unable to help. Microsoft has also multiple times started an ebook store only to later shut it down and prevent the purchased books from being read. The first time this happened in the mid-2000’s I lost over a dozen ebooks.
- smugma 3y ago
  When did you buy that album? iTunes went DRM free 15+ years ago.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - danaris 3y ago
    ...and at the time, all previously-bought content (AFAIK) was eligible for upgrading to DRM-free status. And while I've never had this particular weird problem, I have tens of gigabytes of music in my iTunes library that were never bought from Apple in the first place, which sync to my other devices just fine. No manual copying required. And, um...how would you even "manually copy" music to an iPhone or iPad? The only way I know of puts it in the Files app, rather than the Music app, leaving it unable to be played "as music" (though you can, of course, still play the audio files one by one). Something doesn't seem right here.
    - likeclockwork 3y ago
      You can't manually copy music to an iPhone or iPad? This is basic functionality.
      - turquoisevar 3y ago
        It depends on your definition of “manually copy”. The file system on iOS isn't exposed, so you can't browse around in the files and folders and copy it somewhere there. Instead, each app has its own little container with files, so you can use iTunes on Windows or Finder on macOS to copy it into either a specific app’s container or the Files app’s container. If you do the latter, then you can access it on the device via the Files app and third-party music players. The stock Music app provided by Apple doesn't get access to the files in the Files app. Instead, it maintains its own library synced with other devices, with the option to import your music files into that library. The optimistic reading of this is that this prevents apps from accessing files that they have no business looking into. The pessimistic reading is that this prevents users from messing around with files and prevents them from tweaking or hacking apps. I think the truth is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
interestica 3y ago
They don't need to revoke a license. They can say the "license verification servers are too expensive to keep running" so you need to rebuy the product. This is literally what Adobe has done with previous versions of their Creative Suite.
- seanp2k2 3y ago
  And this is also why Adobe software is some of the most frequently-pirated software of all time. After all these years and all the other examples of the correct way to do this, they still refuse to see the light of “free for personal use” licensing to get more people trained on and in love with your software, so those that do go on to use it commercially will demand it and have their companies pay the license fees.
  - pierat 3y ago
    And as someone who pirates, I highly discourage pirating proprietary programs that save your data in their locked-in formats. Your data is more important than to be locked into a data-roach-motel. The companies know this, and count on piracy. From there, the pirate user has MB's of content locked into something they cant convert out of. And then, it's pretty easy to force a sale, or worse yet, a rental. Looking at you Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
    - zzo38computer 3y ago
      You are right. However, possibly someone can figure out how to write a converter, if necessary.
      - iggldiggl 3y ago
        With non-destructive editing capabilities that gets complicated rather quickly, because then the file format starts depending on the precise implementation of all the various available filters that can be applied.
chaxor 3y ago
I'm confused. What happened to company 12 initially mentioned and content A.4?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thewileyone 3y ago
Using a similar logic, deleting the pirated content absolves you of the action as well.

neycoda 3y ago

> If you want access content A Right, _access_. To the companies selling cloud content, like a movie or song that can only be used with the internet, you're just buying _access_ to the content. Because the TOS means they can restrict that access or remove the content, you're really just paying for a key to a door that may or may not exist, to something in the building that may or may not be there, and that building may someday not even be there. You're really paying for the right to access something as long as the underlying capability enabling that right exists. It's the kind of thing that allows a lot of wiggle room for the sellers and holders of the content. This is why I prefer buying physical copies of media, like DVDs and CDs. It's mine for as long as I can manage it or a personal copy of it.

the_gastropod 3y ago
Yeaaa. This bothers me, too, on a conceptual level, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a NAS and doing the whole Plex thing. But on a practical level, I’ve “owned” movies and tv shows on (the service formerly known as) iTunes for like 15 years without issue. I question whether, on average, I’d be able to do as good a job, and how much effort it’d take.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  If you start and aren’t happy with it, at least you learned something along the way. Time and format shifting are allowed acts under copyright law (though possibly not DMCA), so I’d consider it a great way to backup the things you bought.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Obligatory IANAL. Copying something for personal use is perfectly legal, it's the distribution of those copies to the public en masse that most people end up tripping on. If you just want to archive your collection of optical disks onto a NAS for personal use, you can legally do that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      Also, NAL, but unfortunately, with the exception of Red Book CDs and ROM-Data, archiving commercially published optical media requires circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Unfortunately, "space-shifting" was considered and explicitly not added to the list of recommended exceptions to that rule by the Librarian of Congress[0]. It seems like no one appeared to defend this position, and it is not one of the exemptions allowed for circumventing copy-protected works. 0 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
- jerf 3y ago
  One of the patterns I've personally really been noticing over the past couple of years (not related to any big events in those years, just the time period I happened to notice them in) is that a lot of theses situations are a bona fide slippery slope. The further in you get, the harder it is to leave. The sooner you bail out, the less it impacts your life at all. I started my MP3 collection in the late 1990s as CDs became practical and computers finally got to the point they could rip them. A while back I even went fully legit and stripped out all the, ah, "stuff of dubious provenance", or, err, you know, a friend may have done that. The first streaming music service I've ever used was about a year ago and I'm still using it more for discovery than as my actual music service, because as a result of ~25 years of personal collection building, I don't need a streaming service to have probably something on the order of two week straight's worth of music I like. With a lot of stuff no streaming service has, and that not because I'm some sort of exotic collector but just because I have things that were popular enough at the time but just never made it. By contrast, if all you did was pay for a subscription music service, you're completely beholden to them. Obviously I can claim no "credit" here; I didn't "bail out" of a bad deal in 1998, because that "bad deal" wouldn't exist for another decade and a half or so. But the fact I didn't do it out of any sort of foresight doesn't mean I don't end with the same benefits. More recently, I've been digging myself out of the video subscription crappile, and doing more purchase of media instead of using video streaming services. Again, I had a buildup from the pre-streaming era I could carry in which helps, but at the rate I watch movies anyhow it turns out the delta between just buying things as they strike me and streaming them is not very large in dollar terms. (I don't buy very many things on release day, I do a lot of bargain bin surfing for things.) I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying it to show the point. It extends to a lot of things. Best way not to get stuck with subscription features on your car is to put your foot down day one and say I'm not buying that. And this extends to so many things in life; as we correctly tell our children, best way not to get addicted to any drugs is to never touch them at all, and that's not because of the obvious logical fact that if you never do dose 1 you'll never get to dose 1,283, but because there really is a slope there. It's a very applicable principle. Note, slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of actual slippery slopes in real life. It merely means the fact that you are on a slippery slope can not be correctly logically argued to imply the 100% probability of slipping further down. But I'm not even making a logical argument here in that sense. I'm just pointing out that there are rather a lot of slippery slopes, and this includes some that are really hard to see because they're brand new. In 2001, there simply wasn't anybody 20 years down the slippery slope of using DRM'd hardware who could metaphorically yell up to those of us at the top to tell us "Hey, this kinda sucks! Try to avoid this!" This is one of the greatest challenges of living in the late 20th and 21st centuries, honestly. The foresight to look at something like "paying for a video subscription" and thinking to look 20 years down the road at what happens if everyone does this is rare, and not terribly well respected when found. Anyhow, back here on practical Earth land, I really do recommend that everyone who is even slightly interested look into Plex or an equivalent service, because you can turn this process on its head, too. Half-heartedly start acquiring your favorite media physically when you see it on discount for a couple of years and get it into a Plex setup, and before you know it you're far enough down that slope that the idea of being independent suddenly doesn't seem so absurd. You can also use the principle of a slow buildup over time that adds up to more than you'd expect in your favor, too.
hooverd 3y ago
There needs to be a truth in labeling act so every DRM'd e-book and digital download clearly states that you're buying a license to it and not it.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
The reason why I stopped buying digital media; I buy physical books, vinyls etc. (mostly second-hand). That said I do have an Apple One subscription that includes Music, for the convenience of having access to a large catalog of music from any of our devices (mostly my kids use it, in the car, etc.). But if it's something I care enough about to actually own or listen to in the future, I get a physical copy. Also, the authors/artists get more that way too. (Edit: As for video, I only do streaming, and that's because I rarely if ever watch a movie or TV show a second time, so I don't care about owning it.)

RecycledEle 3y ago

That is not a hypothetical. A company I can not mention because I am certified by them 14x over did that to me, many times.

RecycledEle 3y ago
They revoke a license I paid for, then demand I buy another license for the exact same thing. The licenses were NOT supposed to expire.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  If only an anonymous account would appear and name names. I recently watched A Bug’s Life with my kids. It’s actually a pretty good commentary on the abuses of the ruling class and the norms inability to see their own value: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
  - klondike_klive 3y ago
    Not surprising it has such a deep philosophical core, it's a remake of the Seven Samurai.
dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
I smell Microsoft…
- lsh123 3y ago
  I smell Cisco…
  - seanp2k2 3y ago
    I smell any company that charges subscription fees to creatives for content they’re selling from other creatives and taking a huge cut of.

Sakos 3y ago

This is why I can never accept the idea that we're just buying a license. Laws need to be made that ensure once you buy the rights to access a piece of content, that you keep that right regardless of who the current owner is or if the distribution method changes. If I buy a book, I never have to worry about it being taken away or what happens if somebody else gains ownership of a property.

eek2121 3y ago
For movies, this is mostly a solved problem. If I buy a movie on iTunes, I can access it on other participating platforms.
- toss1 3y ago
  >>I can access it on other participating platforms. "participating" is doing a LOT of work there...

Joeri 3y ago

I have an album that I bought digitally in itunes that was revoked and republished identically by the publisher (i think by accident). The consequence is that as far as apple music is concerned, that album is not in my account. The physical files will still activate and play, but I have to copy them manually to every device. Apple support was unable to help. Microsoft has also multiple times started an ebook store only to later shut it down and prevent the purchased books from being read. The first time this happened in the mid-2000’s I lost over a dozen ebooks.

smugma 3y ago
When did you buy that album? iTunes went DRM free 15+ years ago.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- danaris 3y ago
  ...and at the time, all previously-bought content (AFAIK) was eligible for upgrading to DRM-free status. And while I've never had this particular weird problem, I have tens of gigabytes of music in my iTunes library that were never bought from Apple in the first place, which sync to my other devices just fine. No manual copying required. And, um...how would you even "manually copy" music to an iPhone or iPad? The only way I know of puts it in the Files app, rather than the Music app, leaving it unable to be played "as music" (though you can, of course, still play the audio files one by one). Something doesn't seem right here.
  - likeclockwork 3y ago
    You can't manually copy music to an iPhone or iPad? This is basic functionality.
    - turquoisevar 3y ago
      It depends on your definition of “manually copy”. The file system on iOS isn't exposed, so you can't browse around in the files and folders and copy it somewhere there. Instead, each app has its own little container with files, so you can use iTunes on Windows or Finder on macOS to copy it into either a specific app’s container or the Files app’s container. If you do the latter, then you can access it on the device via the Files app and third-party music players. The stock Music app provided by Apple doesn't get access to the files in the Files app. Instead, it maintains its own library synced with other devices, with the option to import your music files into that library. The optimistic reading of this is that this prevents apps from accessing files that they have no business looking into. The pessimistic reading is that this prevents users from messing around with files and prevents them from tweaking or hacking apps. I think the truth is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

interestica 3y ago

They don't need to revoke a license. They can say the "license verification servers are too expensive to keep running" so you need to rebuy the product. This is literally what Adobe has done with previous versions of their Creative Suite.

seanp2k2 3y ago
And this is also why Adobe software is some of the most frequently-pirated software of all time. After all these years and all the other examples of the correct way to do this, they still refuse to see the light of “free for personal use” licensing to get more people trained on and in love with your software, so those that do go on to use it commercially will demand it and have their companies pay the license fees.
- pierat 3y ago
  And as someone who pirates, I highly discourage pirating proprietary programs that save your data in their locked-in formats. Your data is more important than to be locked into a data-roach-motel. The companies know this, and count on piracy. From there, the pirate user has MB's of content locked into something they cant convert out of. And then, it's pretty easy to force a sale, or worse yet, a rental. Looking at you Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
  - zzo38computer 3y ago
    You are right. However, possibly someone can figure out how to write a converter, if necessary.
    - iggldiggl 3y ago
      With non-destructive editing capabilities that gets complicated rather quickly, because then the file format starts depending on the precise implementation of all the various available filters that can be applied.

chaxor 3y ago

I'm confused. What happened to company 12 initially mentioned and content A.4?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thewileyone 3y ago

Using a similar logic, deleting the pirated content absolves you of the action as well.