If you download something from a torrent, that's digital ownership too, and it doesn't suck. The "digital" is not the issue here, the "ownership" is.
If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.
And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).
I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.
Let's sketch a "law" for digital goods. This law is entirely about how digital products are labeled and advertised.
If the seller uses "ownership" words like "own", "buy", or "purchase", then the product must be usable _indefinitely_. If at any time it becomes not usable, e.g. due to a server shutting down, a full refund must be provided to everyone who "purchased" the product. Also, there must be some way to lend the product; it's OK if this lending deprives the original owner of the product while it is lent.
One way to satisfy the "ownership" clause is to sell the product without DRM. Another alternative would be to sell it with DRM initially, but remove the DRM when you want to shut down your hosting servers. An online-only multiplayer game that requires a central server cannot feasibly be sold by "ownership", because the seller would eventually lose all their money when they shut down the server.
So the next option is "rental", where the seller can use the word "rent" along with a clear time period like "for 1 year" or "through 2024". The product must be usable through this time period, or you get a full refund. No requirements about it being lendable to friends.
I imagine almost all companies would pick the second option. This is fine! Consumers still get two benefits: (i) clear labeling, including knowing how long they can expect to use the thing for, and (ii) a full refund in case the content gets removed before that time period.
As for getting banned from an online game: this is completely allowed via the "rental" option. The company just needs to give the player a full refund.
Labeling and advertising is definitely a good angle to ensure that customers aren't hit by surprises:
I would also require a standardized disclosure box that must be included in the promotional materials. The disclosure box could contain information such as ownership period and so on, and consumers will get used to reading that box before purchasing digital goods.
The way the law is currently structured, there is no such thing as digital ownership, only licensing. And since there is an enormous disparity in negotiating power between consumers and massive copyright owners, the prevailing licensing terms overwhelmingly favor the copyright holders.
The solution is to change the law. But the disparity in power between corporate copyright holders and consumers manifests itself in politics just as it does in the market.
As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
Note the use of "purchased" (not "licensed"). To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing". US consumer protection law sucks goat ass - language around digital content licensing could easily be "fixed" (but won't because our government is a revolving door with industry insiders).
Yeah, they definitely pretend you've purchased the content. But you've only purchased a license, and even the license is so weak that it effectively says "you can use this as long as we arbitrarily decide you can, and we can take your license away at any time without refunding your money." So you're not really buying anything at all.
Polls have found that the average person in the US can't tell you many of the basics of how their government works. The laws aren't based on people taking the time to understand them. It is complex enough there really isn't the time. Especially if you spend the average amount of time staring at rectangle screens.
"our government is a revolving door with industry insiders" ... this is partly due to government compensation compared to the free market and our present desire for those with the ability to navigate this complexity to want to make piles of money. It's all about the benjamins. Which is also why IP holders use the law the way they do.
For me if DRM is involved it is always a rental, license or no, as I am left unable to legally keep an archival copy to retain access to the purchased item beyond the undisclosed access window.
A license is a license. They don't have to expire either. I can sell a perpetual license to something.
> For me if DRM is involved it is always a rental, license or no, as I am left unable to legally keep an archival copy to retain access to the purchased item beyond the undisclosed access window.
Call it whatever you want. The correct term is a license. You were licensed something in accordance with a bunch of terms that may have included, for example, DRM. It's a license to use the good in accordance with the terms of the license. Why confuse things?
In my view, you my friend are the one who is confused. “Purchasing a license” is lawyerese nonsense. How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim? That cannot reasonably be called purchasing in my view. Either ownership transfers in a way that the seller loses control, or they retain control and no transfer of ownership occurs, only a transfer of possession. Now I know IP law says something else, but just because a bad idea is encoded into law does not make it a good idea.
Or think of it like this: what if I “purchase a license” to use a hammer, and as part of that license the hammer’s owner can ask me to return the hammer at a time of their choosing. Am I buying the hammer, or am I renting the hammer? Don’t get distracted by the nonsense of “buying a license to use the hammer”. What am I doing with the hammer?
I guess you need to take it up with a lawyer, then?
>How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim?
same way with a physical license. I have a license to drive, I still need to pay every year to renew my license to ensure my car meets safety standards and that I'm a registered citizen and whatnot. I also need to be re-tested every so often and my picture retaken every year to update my likeness or that license is rendered null.
I don't see it as any different from a digital license. No one would say I "rented my license".
> Either ownership transfers in a way that the seller loses control, or they retain control and no transfer of ownership occurs, only a transfer of possession
Those aren't technically impossible. Just not a feature in enough demand for anyone to implement. Car metphor works here too: I can't transfer my license to drive to another person.
>Now I know IP law says something else, but just because a bad idea is encoded into law does not make it a good idea.
not at all. But it's what you need to argue against and challenge to make any real change. And "it's nonsense" isn't the most sound argument. We can interpret all we want here, but ultimately it does nothing to society at large.
>Or think of it like this: what if I “purchase a license” to use a hammer, and as part of that license the hammer’s owner can ask me to return the hammer at a time of their choosing. Am I buying the hammer, or am I renting the hammer? Don’t get distracted by the nonsense of “buying a license to use the hammer”. What am I doing with the hammer?
sounds like something that can happen if you tweak it slightly. s/Hammer/Gun (albiet we now enter controversial territory) and you see how it settles in. You need a license to own a gun, you can buy and own a gun, but you can have that gun revoked for crimes that may not even be related to the gun itself.
People would still say you own the gun and have a license to operate one. But you can have it taken away. A bit strong armed for a metaphor to video games, but this is more to show that the model of ownership and revoking of possession isn't necessarily stuck in the digital realm.
>> “Purchasing a license” is lawyerese nonsense. How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim?
> same way with a physical license. I have a license to drive, I still need to pay every year to renew my license...
What do you mean? Did you "purchase a driver's license"? Have you ever heard someone use that phrase?
I didn't buy my license, no (or maybe I did in various misc. fees back then. But that's not the largest barrier to owning one). But I do need to purchase the ability to operate my car on my country's roads. Which effectively means my license costs money in some way or form to be usable.
And no, I've never heard anyone say they "bought a license". But I've never heard anyone say they "rented a movie in perpetualty" either. Real life conversation generally isn't that verbose.
After one day's thought, "rented a movie in perpetuity" is almost as bonkers as "bought a driver's license". Yesterday, I was only asking for more explanation why you introduced the latter into the conversation.
> But I do need to purchase the ability to operate my car on my country's roads. Which effectively means my license costs money in some way or form to be usable.
I see a gulf between "costs money" and "bought". FWIW, I paid registration fees for my driver's license -- aka taxes.
No, everybody who bought a digital movie rented it in perpetuity (until license is withdrawn), so the point is just getting people to use a different language by changing the button
I never ever read or heard "buying a driver license", but I "buy" videogames and audiobooks every time, even though it's a license, and that's the problem
That's...exactly the issue at hand. These companies are not doing much, if anything, to educate their customers on the difference between purchasing a license and purchasing the thing itself. This is, of course, deliberate.
The problem here is, that it shouldnt even be labeled as "purchase" (well, "buy" usually), but "rent". Purchasing a licence to rent the content is weasel wording around stuff that is well known and consumers expect it to work in a certain way (eg. buying a dvd or renting a dvd, where in the first case you actually own the dvd, and in the second, you know that they expect you to return it after some time). In every other business, "buy" means "buy", buy a dvd, buy a sandwich, buy a car, buy this, buy that... nowhere else are you expected to return the item (at least not without a refund, eg. in case of a recall).
Weird, never seen this complained of in the context of purchasing a software license, which I assume is something the HN crowd is familiar with.
It's not "weasel wording" it's the accurate term. It can also be true that the media companies can make it more clear that what is being purchased is a license which is subject to terms.
I think buying a DvD is the perfect analogue here. You own the shiny disc, you don't own the contents on that disc.
We're just taking away the shiny disc in the digital era. It's not a perfect term, but for 99.999% of people, "indefinitely rental for years until the servers die", would associate with "buy".
But in the dvd case you don’t expect someone to effectively repossess your dvd a couple years down the road without reimbursing you. You don’t own the content but you do own your dvd which allows you to indefinitely watch the content.
I mean, yes. You are not allowed to circumvent the terms of the license. Why would you think that you would be able to do that? Do you make archival copies of keys to AirBnBs so you can retain access to the purchased room after the access window?
You didn't purchase a room, you rented a room for X days. Imagine buying (purchasing) an apartment at full price, and after a year or two living there, someone comes and "we made a whoopsie with our licences, we need your apartment back".
The text on the button on their site was “purchase” as of a few years ago (it’s now “reserve”). Also, the apartment analogy is a good one. There are a lot of clauses in apartment leases which can get your lease revoked. In no case would it be ok for you to have made an archival copy of the key to keep access.
>Imagine buying (purchasing) an apartment at full price, and after a year or two living there, someone comes and "we made a whoopsie with our licences, we need your apartment back".
2008 housing crash in a nutshell. Your metaphor would work if you were rich enough to not require a mortgage and can truly buy it outright, but the vast majority of people don't "buy a house", unfortunately. They seek a mortgage (fancy term for "loan"), the seller gives the home to the bank, and the buyer gains the deed when they pay off the loan, likely for an amount greater than the cost of the home.
This is just a huge tangent, but your example was a sad reality for some unlucky "homeowners" when the system failed.
Sure, that's what I said. But the distinction between "license to a thing" and "own a thing" is lost of most people, especially when the seller goes out of their way to make the "licensing agreement" look like a normal sale.
Nothign about the law precludes you from owning anything digitally. I can sell you a digital copy of a photograph, giving you the copyright and everything. No need for a license. What makes you think otherwise?
You've answered your own question here. It's not so much about what precludes you from selling something digitally, as it is about what precludes that person from simply making copies and distributing them for the marginal compute cost plus some profit. The answer is copyright law, which has been steadily strengthened over the years in response to the lobbying of corporate copyright holders. In order to sell even one digital copy to another person, they'd have to buy the copyright from you. And why would you sell the copyright to them when you can leverage it to sell licenses instead?
Agreed that I should've said "there is no such thing as digital ownership in practice", at least for consumers.
This is why I download fitgirl repacks. I bought an eBook 10 years ago and it disappeared. Moral, Legal or not, I personally favor consistency and predictability.
Nothing is forever. PirateBay died how many times now? Less than Limewire, that's for sure.
even fitgirl repacks will die one day. be it a legal issue, lack of interet from the pirates providing content, or a change in ownership crashing the site to the group. Change is the only constant
I agree, in principle, but "ownership" is almost too nebulous. To get down to brass tacks, to look for unambiguous features that cannot be weasel-worded away, we're really looking at remote revokability or, the Bizarro cousin to that, the ability of any other party to suspend or cease playable activation via DRM.
Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.
We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline. If I go and buy a set of LEGOs, i get that set of legos, i can lend them to someone, can resell them, can use them after 10 years, etc. Having a "buy" button for a movie should mean the same (as it does when you "buy" a dvd). LEGO can't come to your house and demand the bricks you bought and paid for back, why should sony?
If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.
>We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline.
Due to the ease of reproduction, you really can't. That's why we really shouldn't rely too heavily on that analouge for comparisons. You can't clone 1000 more insteances of your lego set, you can't upload your lego set to the internet to be cloned further. Even if we get to that point in 3d printing, "pirating" a lego set properly requires resources to your 3d printer to produce those legos. Materials you may not have on hand, or that cost just a much as buying the lego set yourself.
>If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy".
You could make that distinction, but the colloquial mind treats "perpetual rental until we are forced to remove content from servers" as "buy". both types of purchase go down once that part of PSN servers decide to shut down like they want to do soon-ish for PS3/Vita (they wanted to do it last year, but consumer backlash delayed it).
The end user expects some connection between “buying a Lego” and buying digital content. We use metaphors such as “a cart” or “add to your library” that make a user think this is just like buying from a store bringing something home — it is in my library. If we aren’t going to keep these metaphors true, we should stop using them. It’s not in “my library”, it’s more like an amusement park I have perpetual access to until it one day closes.
Ownership isn’t fuzzy though, it has a clear definition. The problem is that clear definition makes pirates angry because they want it to mean something other than what it does, so they try to make the situation cloudy.
If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.
No, my point is about whether ownership has a clear definition or not. It does. This is separate from whether or not we like the way the system works for licensing content, and it’s important that people not muddy the waters here.
Did people "buy" something? Was that the word used? If so, shouldn't they have an expectation of "ownership"? If so, then Playstation has destroyed or stolen someone's property.
That's why I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of "What does to mean to own something?" because it appears that there are various groups, not just pirates, who would like to impose their own definitions, just as the RIAA attempted to state that copying was equal to theft, despite copying not depriving anyone else of the use and enjoyment of the original property.
You are certainly welcome to your opinion. This is how the industry has worked for decades at this point though, so it’s hard to argue that the people doing the standard thing with the standard words are the ones creating confusion.
Yes, they bought a license. They own a license, which means they own the ability to exercise the rights included with that license under the terms and exclusions included in the license. Sony lawyers know what they’re about, you’re welcome to go read the license to find out exactly how they worded their claims about giving you access to material owned by Discovery.
In a way, I'm glad you disagree with me, it proves my original point that "buy" and "owns" have become terms where differing parties can't seem to agree on what they imply, and so we need to be more specific about it.
You could say that about literally anything by just refusing to accept the actual definition, though. One person not accepting that the word means what it means doesn’t mean that the word is unspecific.
That’s not muddy at all. You presented cases where one owns something and cases where one owns a license to use a thing and seem surprised that they’re different.
You think it’s muddy because you want owning a license to mean owning the thing. It doesn’t, it never has, and the license terms are clear (if of course a bit verbose).
Purchasing a license is not the same as purchasing the thing, and everyone knows that. It’s not 1997 anymore.
Whether they have an enforceable claim to access the content depends on the terms of their license, and while I haven’t read it I think we all know they won’t.
Please, please let me know before you fly next. I cannot wait to hear you explain to the gate agent that you purchased a ticket so legally the plane is now yours.
The better example would be when I'm kicked out from am over-sold flight.
The difference would be that airlines usually make up for it. Meanwhile in this case „purchased“ stuff is gone for good. No refunds or transfer of purchases to Warner's platform.
Reversions are a common clause in leases, which nobody would call ownership. It’s certainly the case that the word could be viewed to have a confusing meaning if it’s misused in situations where it obviously doesn’t apply.
You can own a partial stake in something, either real or not, and have an enforceable claim which is to less than total control or subject to conditions. You can also have a purchase a contract which provides access or use in some way but isn’t ownership. The latter is very common digitally and is the subject of this thread.
"If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it."
Let me repeat myself for clarity. You can own a property with a reversion. You can own a leashold with a reversion. They are both enforceable claims. You can exclude people for the term of your lease. How is that not an enforceable claim? You said an enforceable claim means ownership. I think you were mistaken in saying because it's not true.
Now you are caveating it to portions of a whole. But a leasehold is for the entirety, just for a term.
Suppose I "buy" a piece of digital media, which let's agree for the sake of argument actually means "bought a license for". Suppose I also then torrent a copy of that same media for the purpose of backup and/or offline access. Is it still piracy? After all, I have a license for it.
Legally you can make personal backups of media you purchase, subject to any licensing restrictions.
That said technically it's still piracy if you're sending chunks to other peers since you don't have distribution rights. This is why copyright cases usually go after the seeders
You should be careful with that advice, as virtually all media that you might want to backup contains drm, and there is no exemption to the DMCA for bypassing drm for personal or archival (unless you’re a museum) use. There are such exemptions for things like critique and education.
>and there is no exemption to the DMCA for bypassing drm for personal or archival (unless you’re a museum) use
Sure, there technically isn't. But in reality, there's no practical way to enforce this without breaking much bigger laws. So very few companies care about some single person breaking DRM, if they are made aware at all.
The main exception would come from online games. But the "worst" retaliation you'd get is your account being banned. THey may not even bother sending a C&D despite companies technically being able to detect it unless you were cheating (which breaks the EULA, different from DMCA).
Your comment isn’t responsive to what I wrote. I was making a very narrow point responding to the phrase “Legally you can make personal backups…” by pointing out that you frequently cannot legally make those backups. Whether it’s possible and whether you’re likely to face consequences have no bearing on it's legality.
>Whether it’s possible and whether you’re likely to face consequences have no bearing on it's legality.
If a law is written but never enforced, is it really a law? On a technical level, yes. On a practical level, no. A law that is practically impossible to enforce is at best an add-on charge for someone being thrown the book for an actually enforced law, not one people worry about when weighing consequences.
I don't think it's too productive to only talk in terms of spherical cows in a vacuum, so it's a point worth keeping in mind for anyone interested in such conversation.
In practical terms for most people most of the time this is going to be a purely moral question; you're not going to face any consequences so it's just down to what you consider legitimate.
Legally, "owning" an episode of a TV show on Playstation Network (to take the current example) doesn't give you any right to download a copy from elsewhere. Same for owning (this time in a more real sense) a copy on disc. Maybe you could make a fair use argument fly; I'm skeptical.
The “it” for which you have a license is not the media you torrented. It’s the version you access from the licensor via the licensed mechanism.
These kind of faux-legal arguments are extremely tiresome because they’re proposing gotcha hypotheticals which are clearly covered in the text of the license.
Sure sure, we can grant them their fig leaf. Note however that the same logic applies to their “Linux ISOs”. Possession does not imply ownership.
Edit: there’s no need to give these reminders, btw. Everyone knows that torrents have theoretical uses beyond piracy. Just like everyone knows they’re almost entirely used for piracy.
Agreed, imagine if you bought a car and the purchase agreement stipulated having to store that car in the manufacturer's garage, and after six months of minor incremental changes performed during downtime the car was nothing like the product you actually bought, the product you wanted to begin with.
Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.
I think there is a misconception. Most of the time you don't own the digital asset. This is an intentional quirk around money, contracts, etc. You have the right to use it in the present form through the platform as long as the platform has a contract with the IP owner to enable that.
For this to change there either needs to be incentive for the platform and IP owners or there needs to be legal changes to require it.
Also, blockchain means that anyone who has your ID can know you entire catalog of ownership. This removes privacy.
Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.
Why would any content creator (outside of those specifically pushing it on idealogical grounds) want to lose control over the distribution of their content by using blockchain and cloud storage technologies?
> Why would a consumer want a game, that they can't even resell?
Because it's less valuable than one that could be resold, and thus should be obtainable more cheaply.
What goes unsaid in all these threads is that people don't just want "ownership", they want it for the same price that they're currently getting whatever it is they're getting today. The inability to resell or lend something is priced in; the market has established that people will pay $x for a license to access something that they can't lend or resell.
Gabe Newell once said "piracy is not a pricing issue, it’s a service issue", but it's not, it's a value issue. The reason content providers don't provide the service people want is because they know no one would pay the price at which they would consider offering it, so they don't bother.
> The inability to resell or lend something is priced in
Why are the physical versions of games the exact same price as the digital version? Shouldn't the digital version be much cheaper because you can't copy, lend, or resell it?
Probably due to pricing parity agreed upon by physical retailers. You're right in that they should be cheaper, but Walmart/Gamestop et al. were smart enough to negotiate that early on in digital distribution. For the same reason, many early Steam releases was not beholden to this and thus cheaper.
Nowadays, there's enough market capture that they can simply charge the same amount due to greed, though. But there are early reasons for that.
I hear about this all the time, but how is the hard side that is content delivery solved? It is really not about ownership, but delivery or then unlocking the local copy? Which gets pretty messy with enforcement and so on...
I keep seeing things that seem like they would be good uses for blockchain security and then I remember that all the investment in that space has gone into trying to print money.
Then for content it will never be possible to "buy" it, according to your view.
(Because it would mean I would be able to lend my copy to the rest of the US population and the original seller would never make more money than from my 1 copy.)
At least with a digital lend, you should be able to revoke the lend status and have it "returned" for the owner's usage again. This would be much more satisfying than lending your physical item to a friend who then moves across the country before returning the borrowed item.
If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.
And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).
I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.