The case for physical media ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#221

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #212

I love physical media as a ritual, but loathe it as a storage medium - it's fragile, it rots, and manufacturers can't be trusted to create long-lasting products anymore. Not to mention the fact that UHD drives used to rip modern content are almost entirely defunct, with the remaining few going for nearly half a grand in the current climate. Personally, in light of AI getting a hand-wave on massive piracy for training…

>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,

That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.

Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.

I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#222

Post by jjav » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

knaik94 wrote: 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…

> I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically.

I mean sure, but you can think of it analogously that if the file lives on a hard disk/SSD that you own and can hold in your hand AND the file is in some open format that can be used with open source software (as opposed to some proprietary player that checks some external license to work), only then you own it.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#223

Post by SpacePortKnight » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

But the apartments which people can afford has gotten smaller now and also with the rise of the minimalistic culture, I have no space to put movie and games discs. I am ok with renting media. Like most people I don't re-watch movies and re-play single player games often.

imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#224

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #132

It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media, I'm seeing more blu-rays and DVDs at retailers. There are just too many streaming services, each with distinct catalogs which creates two problems: it's too difficult to find specific titles when you know what you want to watch, and it's too difficult to find anything worth watching when you don't. I'm not someone who keeps the TV on in the backgro…

>It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media,

Your physical media should be hard drives. The 20tb drives are at my sweet spot, I don't feel like I'm wasting a bay to put one of those in it. haugene/transmission-openvpn in docker is bulletproof, you'll never get an ISP email. Stream it with Plex/Emby to any device anywhere, yours or friends'. Use RAID for some redundancy if you can afford it. Upgrade and expand. Build a library that will outlive you.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#225

Post by Touche » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #219

Touche wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over. Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothi…

>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over. I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying. Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it…

I had a FreeNAS I bought around ~2010 and didn't use it for a couple of years at one point and when I went to use it again I could no longer update it, which meant I was on an ancient version of FreeBSD and none of the modern software ran on. So this literally happened to me already.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#226

Post by arkaic » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #174

ryandrake wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of…

Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.). You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are…

Can't you use bluray players without a network connection?

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#227

Post by inquirerGeneral » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

ripe wrote: post #172

Since I don't see it mentioned yet in the comments: In 2011, movie studios created a digital ownership service called Ultraviolet. You could own titles in your "UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker" and access them from multiple devices via third-party streaming services. [1] "The UltraViolet Digital Rights Locker will keep track of all of the consumers’ UltraViolet digital purchases, whether they bought a movie or tele…

[dead]

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#228

Post by brendoelfrendo » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #80

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal reality is that you probably purchased a license, tied to your PlayStation account, and revocable at any time for any reason. You don't buy a movie, you buy access to watch it as many times as you want during the period in which it is licensed to you. This is, of course, bullshit; this doesn't or can't apply to a physical DVD, or even a DRM free digital copy, so it is a measurable step backwards for consume…

When the legal reality does not align with actual reality, there is injustice of the worst kind. The button says "buy" not "rent" or "license". That should be enough to defeat all the fine print, click wrap hidden clause clever maneuvering bs. The merchant is lying to the buyer. The merchant should bear liability for deceiving the buyer. The merchant (Sony) knew what they were selling. They lied to make it seem like…

I agree. I'm sure someone will try to split hairs and say that "well, buying a license is buying something, just maybe not the thing you wanted," to which I say, it should be disclosed up front. Simple as.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#229

Post by vlian2088 » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC

knaik94 wrote: 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…

>I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods.

I fear the opposite is more likely. cars are already getting government-mandated connectivity.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#230

Post by jchw » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

galleywest200 wrote: post #206

autoexec wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of…

Steam's DRM is entirely optional. It is up to the game publishers to use it.

AFAIK Steam really has three things you could consider part of the DRM strategy.

- The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup.

- Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator.

- And then finally the ticketing system, which allows third-party servers to validate that a user owns a given game according to Steam.

Of them the ticketing system is the most serious: it's something you can't really bypass easily. However, it also is only applicable to things that require servers. I know in Valve's own games, its only something that comes up with game servers, and I don't even know if it's forced on in their dedicated server. It seems like a stronger version of dedicated servers that used to have CD key checks.

DRM is DRM, and these mechanisms impact your ability to use things the way that you should be able to. That I would never deny. However, I will say that because it's relatively lightweight, for software that sticks to just what Steam offers and doesn't try to get creative, they're mostly only going to prevent casual piracy, and I think the main purpose of these mechanisms is mostly to just clear the technical bar for being a copy protection mechanism by law. When it comes to preserving these games beyond the end of the Steam service, it probably won't be a big deal, and it will actually be third-party DRM options like Denuvo and SecuROM that are harder to deal with and could potentially pose a threat for preservation and keeping access to games you own.

So while I don't really like Steam DRM, severity matters. If "no DRM" was just simply not on the table, I'd take Steam-native DRM as a good second choice. It is still a problem that it is technically illegal to break those locks to just be able to use something you bought with your own cash, but I think that's something we need to fix in the law, and I think we can, and honestly, despite the direction things are going, I do believe we will. Just a shame that I'm less sure I'll live to see the day at this point.