“If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

[WorldMaker]

I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)

[slayback]

When my wife and I did our estate planning we had the lawyer put specific terms in to help ensure that our future (and now current) kids would assume ownership of all digital accounts. At the time there was only one example from another state we were able to use that had been proven successful in court, so that’s what we adopted.

Now that we’ve moved to California I need to update the documents to fit our laws as well the current understanding of the law is. Point being I’m seeing a lawyer soon for this specific case alone and the wording MUST be tested in court for us to even know where to start. For anyone studying law, IP law will make some money for now and quite a while still.

P.S. if anyone can recommend a Bay Area estate attorney with this experience please let me and others know!

[stubish]

Uptake of subscription services might make this a non-issue, if it is sizable enough to make a minority of people who want to own media. If the providers of subscription services can solve the disappearing and exclusive content problems. Maybe fights over rights will be there instead, with 'exclusive' distribution rights to media being limited and a right to buy. I tend to think that a change such as requiring copyright holders to sell to everyone or no-one under the same terms would mean us consumers would no longer be stuck needing to hoard, and most of us would be happy to pay our monthly fees to have access to everything delivered to our TVs.

[wtmt]

I'm not going to debate ethics or local legalities here, but I believe that pirating (where feasible) is perfectly fine as an alternative to preserving what these sellers impose restrictions on. Where it does get tricky is, in addition to pirating, whether to pay for the DRMd walled garden items and voting with one's wallet that what they're doing is fine, so that the artists/developers behind the content get something. I don't have a black and white answer to this. Sometimes it seems like supporting these evil corporations is evil.

This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).

The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.

[znpy]

i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was.

companies came and went, my torrents are still with me.

sharing is caring.

[rchaud]

As someone who was a teen in the early '00s when torrenting became quite mainstream, I was surprised to see it fall away entirely in favour of streaming services, despite the lack of ownership of the content, and needing to subscribe to multiple services to get the shows you wanted.

I never really stopped either, but as I got older and had more money, I find that I watch/listen to a fraction of the shows/bands I used to, so I'm happy to support them by purchasing digital assets (DRM-free MP3s) and physical (vinyl, DVD).

The DVDs will be ripped to my HDD; they are mine after all.

[sneak]

I use put.io to avoid endangering my residential connections.

[ALittleLight]

I don't get it. You delete or close the account you use to access the digital content, what is the expectation here? That you can keep accessing it without an account? How would they know what you own?

[lolc]

See, the problem is with the word "own".

[jjgreen]

If I buy a cheese sandwich and there's no cheese in it, then I'm entitled to my money back. Same here, give the "purchaser" their money back.

[robomartin]

I have this problem right now, sort of. I purchased dozens of Kindle books through my personal Amazon account over the years. Now I prefer to do so through my business account. Yet, I want all of them available through the same device. Well, that’s a pain in the behind. I have to call Amazon support for help and have been procrastinating because I know it will be a one hour ordeal.

This is why I prefer to purchase digital books as PDF files. I keep them on Dropbox and my local drive and they are great to handle and read.

[shadowprofile77]

Calibre. Convert those books to DRM-free formats asap and you're good to go. They become completely yours. I do it by default for all my Amazon kindle format purchases. It's "forbidden" but if I paid near physical book retail pricing for it, as far as i'm concerned, that copy of digital content deserves to be mine.

[harry8]

Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft, apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand. Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?

[wtmt]

If there's one thing I've learned with all these app stores and digital stores, a better way to handle this when you move countries is to create a new account for that country and also retain the older account (if possible, without a payment method, just to have access to older purchases and to free items).

Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across countries as long as you can attach the appropriate payment methods. They don't do this even for content that's not controlled by giant corporations that are stuck in the past.

[NullPrefix]

What lesson did she learn?

[drummer]

Anyone remember Microsoft's Zune?

[downerending]

Yeah, super-irritating. I bought about a dozen movies through Google Play before I realized that their platform was going to fail.

[T3OU-736]

(IANAL) This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are licensed being deleted.

[DantesKite]

I've been eye-ing a lot of movies on Google Play recently. Wasn't sure about making the jump, but now I'm curious. What makes you think they're going to fail? Any big warning signs?

[wmf]

You may be able to sync those onto Movies Anywhere. I know that fixing DRM with more/different DRM isn't great but they're sort of trying.

[dredmorbius]

https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/f9d5rf/are_you_su...