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

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

#41

Post by downerending » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

wtmt wrote: post #35

downerending wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes to the first, and pretty sure about the second. And the two accounts were intertwined in many other ways: one was the recovery address for the other, one forwarded its email to the other, they were both accessed at the same time from the same IP over the years.

The only trigger I could see was that I had not logged into the account I lost for a while (months).

Baffling, but it clarified that relying on a single company for multiple services was quite foolish, and I've since spread my accounts around to multiple vendors. Highly recommended.

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

#42

Post by WorldMaker » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

slayback wrote: post #20

WorldMaker wrote: post #13

I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)

When my wife and I did our estate planning we had the lawyer put specific terms in to help ensure that our future (and now current) kids would assume ownership of all digital accounts. At the time there was only one example from another state we were able to use that had been proven successful in court, so that’s what we adopted. Now that we’ve moved to California I need to update the documents to fit our laws as wel…

Yes, it's going to be an interesting up hill legal battle that will either need a lot of expensive court cases or some really smart people in legislatures, and in this climate it feels like we can count on the former a lot more than the latter.

Many terms of service agreements terminate with the "owner" and are very explicit that accounts are "nontransferable", and both are problems that are going to be big fights.

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

#43

Post by WorldMaker » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

stubish wrote: post #17

WorldMaker wrote: post #13

I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)

Uptake of subscription services might make this a non-issue, if it is sizable enough to make a minority of people who want to own media. If the providers of subscription services can solve the disappearing and exclusive content problems. Maybe fights over rights will be there instead, with 'exclusive' distribution rights to media being limited and a right to buy. I tend to think that a change such as requiring copyri…

I'm more afraid that uptake of subscription services will hit that worst case scenario problem of prolonging the fight just long enough that people give up on the fight in a war of attrition before subscription services simply prove again why (digital) landlords cannot be trusted and (digital) renters have no rights.

A big part of my concern here is that copyright terms are so long today that any subscription/rental-focused world is a multi-generational digital feudalism. With a larger and "closer" to the current generation public domain it might be much easier to trust competition among subscription companies. You allude to this indirectly in trying to open the market, but there will always be "exclusive" distribution rights so long as copyright casts such a long shadow from the big castles on all the lowly consumer sharecroppers.

While I doubt we'd see much legislative interest in shortening copyright terms and enlarging the public domain, fighting for digital asset rights from digital retailers that use words like "own" and "purchase", given long histories of consumer protection laws and consumer protection court cases, seems a lot more plausible, and a lot more worth fighting. I worry that a lot of people won't care to fight so long as the castles make subscription services seem like good sharecropping just long enough for most people to give up, and then it will be too late and there won't be a big enough public domain to protect us.

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

#44

Post by wtmt » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #33

wtmt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now I get what put.io is for.

I was commenting earlier from the perspective of preserving content for longer and also making sure that it can be available for people in the future. From that angle, this service doesn’t help. For example, there are many people building and maintaining content archives for the long term.

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

#45

Post by shadowprofile77 » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

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.

I had this same problem and what worked for me was to download an old version of Kindle for PC, regardless of the age of the books. I think version 1.17 works. Have copies download to it and then try the Calibre conversion again.