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“If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

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Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#31

Post by wtmt »

sneak wrote: post #15
znpy wrote: post #10

i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was. companies came and went, my torrents are still with me. sharing is caring.

I use put.io to avoid endangering my residential connections.

That looks quite expensive and doesn't disclose details about the kinds of disks used (upfront) and the connection speeds allotted. The seed times are also too short with the ratio "or" time clause. Anyone wanting to seed to maintain an archive of content for the future may find this tedious. There seem to be many others that provide more (cheaper, faster and more features/flexibility).

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#32

Post by wtmt »

harry8 wrote: post #18

Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft, apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand. Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?

If there's one thing I've learned with all these app stores and digital stores, a better way to handle this when you move countries is to create a new account for that country and also retain the older account (if possible, without a payment method, just to have access to older purchases and to free items).

Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across countries as long as you can attach the appropriate payment methods. They don't do this even for content that's not controlled by giant corporations that are stuck in the past.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#33

Post by bubblethink »

wtmt wrote: post #31
sneak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use put.io to avoid endangering my residential connections.

That looks quite expensive and doesn't disclose details about the kinds of disks used (upfront) and the connection speeds allotted. The seed times are also too short with the ratio "or" time clause. Anyone wanting to seed to maintain an archive of content for the future may find this tedious. There seem to be many others that provide more (cheaper, faster and more features/flexibility).

put.io isn't a traditional seedbox. They do caching + dedup + transcode + chromecast etc. It's sort of like seedbox + plex and the UI is quite clean. It's not geared towards the private tracker crowd. It's for casual users who use public trackers, and it's a pretty good service for that. Casual users don't care about ratios. They just don't want to get notices from their ISPs.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#34

Post by wtmt »

T3OU-736 wrote: post #5
downerending wrote: post #2

Yeah, super-irritating. I bought about a dozen movies through Google Play before I realized that their platform was going to fail.

(IANAL) This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are licensed being deleted.

> We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view.

(IANAL) That part is the same even if you buy a music CD or a Blu-Ray disc. You're only granted a license to play it for your personal use (and you're not even allowed to play at a public event or broadcast it). But, you're legally allowed to make backups for yourself and (in certain instances) encode them for use with a different mechanism. That's one of the things that iTunes (taking a popular example) helped revolutionize, with CD ripping and place-shifting the content for convenience. DRM, along with making the breaking of DRM illegal (is it still illegal for all kinds of content? I haven't kept up) is what messed this whole thing up.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#35

Post by wtmt »

downerending wrote: post #11
DantesKite wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been eye-ing a lot of movies on Google Play recently. Wasn't sure about making the jump, but now I'm curious. What makes you think they're going to fail? Any big warning signs?

That was too aggressive. Better to say that it's failed for me, and I suspect it will fail for others. YMMV. In my case, I lost access to one of my Google accounts, for no apparent reason, and I have been unable to regain access. The movies I have are actually attached to my other account, but the message seems clear--they can go away at any time with no recourse. In principle this is true for Amazon, Apple, and othe…

I'm curious about your account loss. Was it a Gmail address that was your Google account? Did it have a verified phone number linked to it?

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#36

Post by wtmt »

anticodon wrote: post #30
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre. Convert those books to DRM-free formats asap and you're good to go. They become completely yours. I do it by default for all my Amazon kindle format purchases. It's "forbidden" but if I paid near physical book retail pricing for it, as far as i'm concerned, that copy of digital content deserves to be mine.

I was unable to do this for any recent purchase. Calibre could strip DRM only from very old books, like 7-10 years old.

This is why pirating is alive and popular, because it makes people's lives convenient, while the real sellers do many things to make people's lives difficult. You as a buyer are expected to bend and give in to their way of usage and their restrictions.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#37

Post by wtmt »

I'm not going to debate ethics or local legalities here, but I believe that pirating (where feasible) is perfectly fine as an alternative to preserving what these sellers impose restrictions on. Where it does get tricky is, in addition to pirating, whether to pay for the DRMd walled garden items and voting with one's wallet that what they're doing is fine, so that the artists/developers behind the content get something. I don't have a black and white answer to this. Sometimes it seems like supporting these evil corporations is evil.

This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).

The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#38

Post by heavenlyblue »

wtmt wrote: post #32
harry8 wrote: post #18

Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft, apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand. Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?

If there's one thing I've learned with all these app stores and digital stores, a better way to handle this when you move countries is to create a new account for that country and also retain the older account (if possible, without a payment method, just to have access to older purchases and to free items). Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across countries as long as you can attach…

What if you owe the apps on your phone?

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#39

Post by rchaud »

znpy wrote: post #10

i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was. companies came and went, my torrents are still with me. sharing is caring.

As someone who was a teen in the early '00s when torrenting became quite mainstream, I was surprised to see it fall away entirely in favour of streaming services, despite the lack of ownership of the content, and needing to subscribe to multiple services to get the shows you wanted.

I never really stopped either, but as I got older and had more money, I find that I watch/listen to a fraction of the shows/bands I used to, so I'm happy to support them by purchasing digital assets (DRM-free MP3s) and physical (vinyl, DVD).

The DVDs will be ripped to my HDD; they are mine after all.

Re: “If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

#40

Post by downerending »

redis_mlc wrote: post #22
T3OU-736 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(IANAL) This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are licensed being deleted.

> This is fairly pedantic Congrats on reaching self-awareness, HN!

I was going to pedantically point out his spelling error, but it seemed a bit over the top.
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