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Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

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Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#51

Post by matheusmoreira »

Mistletoe wrote: post #41
imchillyb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy, of actual -tangible- goods, is theft. Piracy of digital content is -literal- copying. The original item is not modified or changed. Copying is not theft. The politicians, media journalists, and corporations spent enough monies to brainwash children into believing copying is theft. It isn't. Never was. Never is.

Digital content of songs and movies is exactly the same as the way you consume it. It is the tangible thing. It’s like having a perfect atom to atom reconstruction of the Mona Lisa you can put on your wall and stealing it. People’s jobs depend on the money made from selling digital media and making more digital media takes money. You can try to abstract it away but it doesn’t make sense. Maybe the prices or agreement…

You're comparing selling finite physical goods to selling literal numbers. That's how insane copyright is. In order to have any impact, they have to associate it with absolute nonsense terms like high seas piracy. They have to equate it with stealing, robbery and theft. Otherwise it's exposed as the utterly victimless crime it is. You're reproducing the propaganda of a trillion dollar industry with immense lobbying power, an industry that literally buys laws.

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #19
thaumasiotes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody should be expecting accurate information on either conflict. Sometimes accurate information is hard to come by. I'm not sure the problem is that platforms are being "pressured to provide the public with accurate information", though. I would guess there's far more pressure to provide information that favors certain viewpoints, whether that information is accurate or not.

I think people should expect accurate information. Kinda the same as with justice. We know justice is served by people in nice togas and juries of peers who are really a nice name for your neighbours. And yet we still demand and hopefully will continue to demand justice, even if those people make mistakes or sometimes behave fraudulently. The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn…

> The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn't available.

Yes, it is, because this...

> It is that too many people decided to side with either belligerent and are selectively accepting information.

... includes almost the entire American media and political establishment on the Israeli side, which keeps everything that isn't Israeli propaganda out of most formal information channels, and in other channels the only thing with enough juice to get through is Hamas-aligned propaganda.

> Because of the polarisation, you have to choose a lesser evil.

Nah, that's just the nature of the US electoral system. Partisan polarization is a distraction (well, its what makes the two choices substantially different, in contrast to the 1930s-1990s realignment period when political polarization was often quite high, but the salient divide was misaligned with the split between the major parties, so that the split was within each party rather than between the parties.)

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#54

Post by lotsoweiners »

burnerburnson wrote: post #43
deltaburnt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been burned too many times by streaming services: 1. Removing entire series/movies 2. Removing specific episodes in a series 3. Making changes to content (e.g. Scrubs and its soundtrack) 4. Only having the inferior quality version of some content 5. And finally, to a lesser extent, just having bad metadata (Netflix in particular has listed episodes out of order) I'm becoming more and more envious of those YouTub…

Streaming services refusing to let me watch episodes of shows like Always Sunny and the Simpsons for political reasons is my primary reason for supporting piracy. These companies care more about pushing an agenda than they do about their customers. Disney in particular is downright evil and I don't want to give them a single penny.

Yeah I spent a good 20 minutes looking for the first Lethal Weapon episode of Always Sunny on Hulu. Went through each season multiple times and finally had to look up what season it was in on Wikipedia. Didn’t realize they were going to just remove it from Hulu because black face.

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#55

Post by ocdtrekkie »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #35

Thanks for updating the title and adding a link @dang. Unfortunately, I think the linked article's title is slightly misleading. Google is only offering refunds for some unknown portion of purchased content. "Google says that some magazines will be refund-eligible because they contain interactive elements that cannot be downloaded and saved for future access." I don't know what portion of magazine subscription conten…

If the user can download a full PDF of the magazine, they still have their purchases, and are whole. In the case they cannot do this, then they will refund to ensure the subscriber remains whole despite the inability to offer the purchased content.

I see nothing wrong with this, and am actually glad to have the PDFs instead of digital claims in an app I don't use anymore.

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#56

Post by SkyPuncher »

rchaud wrote: post #53
rlnorthcutt wrote: post #50

Last line is good: "Remember, all online content purchases are really just rentals."

Partly why paying for streaming never made sense to me. You can't even take screnshots of shows you've paid to watch!

Why would I want to?

TV/Movies are largely ephemeral experiences. For the handful of content I actually care about, I can purchase it.

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#57

Post by syncbehind »

rchaud wrote: post #53
rlnorthcutt wrote: post #50

Last line is good: "Remember, all online content purchases are really just rentals."

Partly why paying for streaming never made sense to me. You can't even take screnshots of shows you've paid to watch!

You can if you use firefox ;)

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#58

Post by syncbehind »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #56
rchaud wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly why paying for streaming never made sense to me. You can't even take screnshots of shows you've paid to watch!

Why would I want to? TV/Movies are largely ephemeral experiences. For the handful of content I actually care about, I can purchase it.

> Why would I want to?

To share with friends, to make memes, to record notable scenes/moments in media you like. There are many reasons to want to screenshot streaming media

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#59

Post by gadders »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #19
thaumasiotes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody should be expecting accurate information on either conflict. Sometimes accurate information is hard to come by. I'm not sure the problem is that platforms are being "pressured to provide the public with accurate information", though. I would guess there's far more pressure to provide information that favors certain viewpoints, whether that information is accurate or not.

I think people should expect accurate information. Kinda the same as with justice. We know justice is served by people in nice togas and juries of peers who are really a nice name for your neighbours. And yet we still demand and hopefully will continue to demand justice, even if those people make mistakes or sometimes behave fraudulently. The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn…

>> It is that both sides of the conflict decided to use misinformation to bolster their media presence and their right to defend themselves.

In the wars I've seen in my lifetime, this really seems something that only started with Ukraine/Russia. I know in the Gulf War the sides would spin news to portray them in a more favourable light, but not (to my knowledge) masses of lies like in Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Hamas.

Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

#60

Post by delecti »

It seems pretty likely that everyone saying "just pirate" never had any content in the service.

I got an email with a link to a page that let me download PDFs for all of the magazines I had in the service ("all of the magazines" being 4 of them that I got for free in 2012, but the point stands). If I had pirated those magazines, I doubt the quality would have been as good as an official PDF from the source.

Lately it seems like there's a mandate at Google to make it a pretty easy experience for users when they inevitably shut things down. Between this (easy portable download of all my content) and Stadia (total refund of everything), it really seems like they're trying to lessen the risk of investing in their new products. I can't say I'm totally convinced, because it's still obnoxious and inconvenient, but it's a decent start.

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