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The case for physical media ownership

dervis.de

251–260 of 392 posts

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#251
post #44

I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it. I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV. I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical…

> people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth.

Passkeys are still your keys. You can put them on hardware authenticators you control entirely offline separate of other services. You can store them in software vaults you manage.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this…

You can buy it on DVD. Then you don't need to worry about what streaming service (if any) currently holds the rights.

I tried this with Halt and Catch Fire (and some others). I was able to get season one, but it turns out they don’t produce a lot of stuff on physical media anymore, and if they do, it’s often only briefly.

Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#253
post #44

I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it. I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV. I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical…

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I had to do a refund earlier this year, gog processed it very quickly.

It could have been automated though.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#254

Unfortunately many game disks only contain a downloader nowadays and you often need to bind them to an account to play. Plus the version on disk without updates is probably buggy. Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's edition is an example that has a disk, but isn't really any better than a Steam key. On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download. So…

Definitely not the case with the PS5 version, which I can install and play offline to my heart 's content.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#255
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, pirating doesn’t stop you or anyone else from sending money to the copyright holder via whatever means the copyright holder prefers.

Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.

That’s a nice way of saying they’re full of shit. They want stuff for free, and that’s the whole of it.

It’s reasonable to not want to do that, even if it’s not the most severe kind of unethical or illegal act.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#256
post #44

I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it. I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV. I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical…

We should really just abandon the notion of ownership when it comes to data. When I own data, sometimes it refers to data I created. Other times it refers to data about me. Other times it's something I've been sold. Other times it's my responsibility to ensure that data's accuracy. There are probably a few I'm missing.

I happen to like the notion of ownership that you're describing, but I think we'd all have more fruitful discussions about data if we dispensed with: "_____ is not ownership because of _____" and instead just came up with entirely different words for each kind of relationship one can have to data. Then stasis could move away from arguing what words mean and closer to doing something about the problems that arise around data "ownership".

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#257
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.

I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be. As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that…

It's not that hard to imagine a better system. Abolish all copyrights

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#258
post #44

I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it. I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV. I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical…

[flagged]

They just released four games yesterday and looking at the news reel it seems they release a bunch of games every day. They're also running a summer sale right now. I doubt they're anywhere close to being dead.

They are known to take their time when it comes to developer submissions (and that time can be quite long) but that was the case since pretty much forever, not something that happened with the new/original owner.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#259
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want. I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!

This perspective has been beaten down to death but, just so you know, whenever you went to see a movie at friend's house, you also didn't contribute and were in fact pirating the content.

Nah. That’s already accounted for in home vs public performance rules.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#260
post #3

Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use. There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline. These rips can be…

That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.

I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.

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