151–160 of 162 posts
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> Download the MP3 from where? My guy, this has been solved for about 25 years.
Not everything is ripped and waiting to be downloaded…
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Content I have bought and downloaded should be as irrevocable as a book on my bookshelf. "Licensed" is a made up word. Did I buy it? It's mine. Did I rent it? It's no longer mine after the rental period is over. End of story.
Licensed isn't any more made up than buy and rent, all words are made up. Being able to articulate what exactly you are allowed to do with something you buy is a useful legal fiction, much like property rights, contracts, and all of the other useful legal fictions we enforce on the world.
But people would probably be less likely to push the button, so I guess it's better to lie to customers about what they're paying for.
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I agree (or at least see the argument) if it's like the original creator who decided they want to keep their hands on the work (or maybe like if a company wants to withdraw one edition of a book to sell a new edition), but in cases where works are orphaned, or the rights are in limbo, or a huge corporation merges with another huge corporation and permanently deletes creators' works for a tax break, I don't think ther…
Basing something like this on someone else's motive doesn't seem like the best idea to me because in most situations you can only guess the motive. So it ultimately just boils down to your assumptions.
There's no way to get these things perfectly, but I also want to add that I don't consider it ethical to pirate things made by indie creators, or books (with the exception of textbooks), and that I'm probably unusually prone to outright buying new books or indie games or legal first-party mp3s of music, because I consider it a bit of a duty to support media that I appreciate or want to see more of.
At the end of the day, I think I do more to contribute to creators I appreciate than the average consumer, but I don't lose much sleep when I literally cannot access an old classic at a reasonable price and I flip a coin between "stealing it" or just doing something else. Nobody was going to get my money either way, and I only have so much patience and willingness to try to do things "the right way" before I decide they've made it unreasonably expensive or complicated on purpose and screw 'em.
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"Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that." Today. Young people being fine with that when they are still in flux is not a new thing. A 21-year-old being nostalgic is almost the basis for a comedy sketch more than a serious concern. I'm not yet convinced they've broken any human patterns when they're still fitting fairly comfortably into the existing patterns on that. If anything I'd bet th…
Photo albums and music recordings didn’t even exist until the 20th century. What did we do for tens of thousands of years before that? Told stories. And what is TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day? The modern means for telling stories. The 20th century was an aberration of human history. We don’t need to cling to it.
The 20th century is indeed an abberation; the 21st a bigger one.
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Basing something like this on someone else's motive doesn't seem like the best idea to me because in most situations you can only guess the motive. So it ultimately just boils down to your assumptions.
If someone incidentally acquires a license to a product, quietly removes the product from the market, makes no announcement about some moral justification or about a new version coming out, and makes no movement for several years, I consider it acceptable to label that product "abandonware" and pirate it. If the license holder later comes out with a new version of the product, the right thing to do would probably be…
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Photo albums and music recordings didn’t even exist until the 20th century. What did we do for tens of thousands of years before that? Told stories. And what is TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day? The modern means for telling stories. The 20th century was an aberration of human history. We don’t need to cling to it.
Told stable stories, generally in a stable culture. The 20th century is indeed an abberation; the 21st a bigger one.
If so, I would argue those are cultural stories.
I was thinking more along the lines of family stories, personal stories, friends stories and things like that.
If not, then what is a stable story?
I'm passionate about media ownership. When people question what I'm doing, wonder why anybody would want CDs, or tell me I should just give up, I think about all the transient services and missing media. I'm in this for the long haul, and I'm not going to give up. Media ownership means something, and I'm fighting to make it a reality.
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> the ones I purchased This is were you went wrong.
Incorrect. They actually purchased them and could download them, DRM-free. (At least if the other services listed are like Bandcamp.) You should archive them yourself after downloading. The fact that you can download them again from the server, or maybe stream them, is an additional service, it's not the thing itself. That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload…
Perhaps you plan on taking a break for a couple of years and then sell the item again?
Just because someone else really wants your item, does not automatically give them the right to access it or make it available to others, if you as the rights holder disagree with that.
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Incorrect. They actually purchased them and could download them, DRM-free. (At least if the other services listed are like Bandcamp.) You should archive them yourself after downloading. The fact that you can download them again from the server, or maybe stream them, is an additional service, it's not the thing itself. That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload…
I disagree with the latter notion. If you hold the rights to something, it should be you who gets to make the shots on how - or whether or not at all - you would like to monetize said thing. Perhaps you plan on taking a break for a couple of years and then sell the item again? Just because someone else really wants your item, does not automatically give them the right to access it or make it available to others, if y…