alt Hacker NewsIf you can't hold it, you don't own it
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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 media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.
I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.
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 freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
Tangential, but a few days ago I started some Steam games I hadn't played in some years. I was surprised to be met with updated user agreements, which I had to agree to if I wanted to play the games I bought years ago. These were all single-player games.
> If you can't hold it, you don't own it.
Didn't some game consoles require online connectivity to play even games in physical media?[1]
It's possible for a game disc to require connecting online and forcing updates or even just updated licensing agreements.
Correct bright line might be to be able to permanently use it without online connectivity.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSupport/comments/1682s60/commen...
> So just to be clear, most games now are not actually on the disc. Most discs just contain a license that tells the store it's okay to download this game. It is Very rare that you can just put in a disc and play these days regardless of if it is on Playstation or xbox but it does still happen.
Sony's one sentence notice is pretty grim considering how much money they made from these sales (sorry licensing).
From September 1, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.
Thank you, PlayStation Store [1]
At least in 2023 it was two sentences and then they somehow negotiated new licencing arrangements after the massive backlash 10 days before the end date. [2]
Guess we'll see if this clawback has the same backlash.
[1]: https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/
[2]: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book generally cannot be removed from a shelf by a remote policy change.
It may not be able to be removed from a shelf, but if it is protected by DRM they can still remotely revoke your ability to consume it, or prevent you from consuming it to begin with (for example geolocking on blu-ray disks). And in some cases a game cartridge, or other medium for software (including games) is either actually just an access key granting access to something on a digital store, or has software that "phones home" and is unusable if it can't contact a server.
This article is quite right, but there's even more to it than that. Why should we need to hold ANY kind of relationship with the seller/provider of an article we bought? You certainly don't need a bookstore account to buy a paperback book. Nor do they get to keep your contact information. You get your article and a ticket. They get your money. End of story.
Holding it on your hand is insufficient. Using it may require an external server or certain chosen proprietary software that could be taken from you at any time or itself requiring an external server.
The bits you want to own must be entirely self-contained, and able to be screwed using whatever software you may choose, especially open source (though if the format is fully documented so that anyone can create and distribute a viewer, the software need not be open source.)
See also, The Right to Read. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
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 overall I don't think the physical form matters that much compared to DRM.
Even if you _can_ hold it, you may not own it if the player is internet-connected or even receives a firmware upgrade during maintenance or from a disc. New discs may not play unless you upgrade, and an upgrade can also remove keys, blocking you from watching discs you already have.
https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/windows-gene...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070430070403/https://www.aacsl...
My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.
Economics 101 - ownership is a bundle of rights. The basic bundle of property rights includes:
Right of possession
Right of control
Right of exclusion
Right of enjoyment
Right of disposition
The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one.
But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay for it, I sure want a non-DRM copy to sit on my hd at the end of the transaction. If the store won't supply, the pirate sites will.
I think DRM and streaming are the issues here, not digital vs physical.
For example, I can buy DRM free music from the iTunes Store, download the files, and they’re mine. I can play them back on anything that supports the file type, convert the files, back them up, etc.
Meanwhile, if I check a book out from the library, I can hold it, it’s physical, but it’s not mine and I can’t do whatever I want to it.
I have a large collection of DVDs that I've amassed over the years.
There's something nice about physical media; the bits are physically stamped into the medium. They're DVD-encrypted but I lawfully extract these bits and view them regularly.
When streaming services start on-the-fly editing for content[1] and revoking licenses, they can absolutely shove it up their butts. My old man take is that if a TV show or movie or whatever isn't worth putting onto a physical medium and distributing it to people who will buy it, I won't miss it if--I mean when[2]--it's gone. I mean, these huge movie studios act like pirates are going to ruin their massive profits, when they won't.
[1] And yes, they will absolutely on-the-fly, 1984-style edit films and TV shows for content.
[2] And it will go [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age] along with lots of other things into the memory hole of the digital dark age.
This is a wonderful collection. Portions of this, especially subscription bits, apply to SaaS and AI as it is currently served. Maybe now that B2B relationships have similar risks, more lobbying pressure will come on the side of permanent access to the things we buy.
I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem.
In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at least I was able to watch it before they removed it".
Sometimes I feel that's a lost battle. People were put to boil just like the frog in the anecdote and keep swearing it's a hot bath.
I'm reading "Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" by Byung-Chul Han, who has things to say about it. "Things" are naturally possessions to be owned; the non-things that we as a society are moving towards are information to be consumed. If you have a physical book, you can pass it along to someone else, margin notes and dogears and all, but the experience of an e-book is fundamentally different. You might feel like you 'own' the bits because they're on your local computer and have no DRM, but your relationship to the actual item is not one of ownership. Just think about leaving your favorite book as .epub to someone in your will to see how non-sensical that would be.
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 background, so I'd much rather spend $100 a month on physical media even when I don't plan on watching them immediately, than spend $100 a month on five different streaming services that I barely even use when I did subscribe to them.
I agree with the intent of the article but for what it's worth does not have to be physical. I have digital music and movies that can not be remotely disabled, censored, changed to fit current societies norms. The problem is when the dependency is on servers that belong to someone else or are controlled by someone else. I can self host my own instances of Ampache or just plain old HTTPS with auto-index enabled or SFTP or anything of my choosing. I qualify those as ownership assuming the digital media does not have some embedded code to reference a remote server and anything resembling an embedded license is stripped out. For sure I will hold onto my CD's and DVD's forever. I regret selling off a lot of vinyl.
I bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.
It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!
Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.
Physical things take up space and degrade over time. In a world where operating systems and software control licensing owning physical media is barely better than digital except for potentially reselling it.
Enjoy something when you enjoy it, however you enjoy it. In the end you can’t keep anything but that.
Usually you create shorthand rules because you want to Have a heuristic to detect things that you don’t want to do lots of thinking for. So the rule has edges it doesn’t match well on and so on.
That’s all very well. But was this rule necessary? I don’t need to do a lot of computation in most cases to tell where I land and the edge cases are worsened by the rule. So it’s not helping me make decisions.
So I own a DVD but someone (Amazon, the government) can delete something out of my Kindle library. Fine, but I didn’t need the rule to help me with that. It’s very apparent.
And then there’s the question of owning not conferring all rights. I own my body but I can’t sell parts of it. Are the embryos my wife and I have made ours? Transferring them without the clinic approving isn’t really feasible.
So the word “own” doesn’t mean much to me on its own and I don’t need to use this rule because I can somewhat tell where I have power no one can take from me and where I don’t.
In some cases, even if you hold it you don't own it.
I tend to purchase a lot of blu-rays, in fact if I don't buy the movie on Apple iTunes then it's almost always the case that I buy the blu-ray; then once I have the blu-ray I go to the torrent sites and download a version of the movie.
Why? Because I earn enough money that I feel like I have no excuse not to buy my media: but I also want it to be my media; and torrenting is more convenient than using blu-rays.
The blu-rays have one more major benefit than iTunes or the torrents though: if I'm ever without internet or my NAS dies... well, I can just dump a disc into my console and watch whatever movie I was going to watch anyway.
One time I was moving apartments, there was no internet and I hadn't set up my computers yet; decided to watch a movie with my girlfriend, grabbed a disc and set up the playstation.
Lo-and-behold... it didn't work.
Why? -- not because the disk was broken, not because the playstation had broken: but because I didn't have internet access.
The playstation has to connect to the internet to play blu-rays.
I didn't know of this because I always just used torrents and had the disks as a "license"...
So I tried my laptop: no dice either, VLC refused to play, Linux had a really bad time.
I tried with my macbook, of course no macbook came with a blu-ray player, and the one I had needed two USB-A slots, so it was a ball-ache to get the thing hooked up and I finally got something working by hotspotting my phone and googling around.
Anyway, what the fuck.
It was at that moment I realised; even physically owning things isn't actually owning them anymore.
I still don't technically pirate, but I no longer feel even the slightest derision for those that do, and I work in the entertainment industry where piracy puts people out of work (I've seen it).
It's time we change the economy for digital products and services.
* The current economy is bad: The company that can require or lure the most money from people wins.
* This would be better: The company that is liked by most people wins.
That one change would solve sooo many problems. We could get rid of a lot of laws that wouldn't be needed any more.
The same holds true of precious metals, most definitely.
If things really HTF, you're gonna want to not be blocked by a closed bank, etc.
If you can't play it you don't own it either. Support of playback of physical media is not guaranteed by the industry.
Regardless, I definitely think the all-u-can-eat, 24-7-365, instant, ephemeral media has run its course and has become... tiring?
> Streaming services rent you access. Digital stores sell you a license that can be taken away. Physical media gives you an object that is yours, offline, and in your hands. > > Physical media can be given away, inherited, or found at a thrift store decades from now. A digital license becomes inaccessible when an account is closed or deleted. A vinyl record or printed book can remain usable across generations.
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
It is important to weigh the transient nature of any purchase. A physical copy may be lost, damaged, stolen, become unusable due to lack of hardware, or just start to take up enough space that you decide its time to let it go.
In real life, as revocable as they may be, my digital purchases have withstood the test of time far better than my physical copy purchases. It matters who you buy from. It is understandably different for something you find value in having a physical collection.
> A 2020 lawsuit raised the same issue, but a California judge dismissed it in 2021 because the plaintiff had never actually lost access to her purchased videos, leaving her without standing.
Seems kinda off. They’re pointing a knife at you menacingly and have promised that in a variety of circumstances they will stab you, but because they haven’t actually stabbed you yet, you’re not allowed to complain. Feels like maybe (maybe; I’m not entirely convinced) that threat should be standing enough, just as conspiracy and attempted murder can be criminal matters, and not just a successful murder.
> The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
Frank Herbert, Dune
As long as we're nitpicking every sense of the word "own", the strongest legal sense means you're the copyright holder, and every sense downstream of that is some lesser license. Buying a disc is a license to view the intellectual property, subject to various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home.
It's a naive heuristic but if you are a not a technical expert you should provide use this until you understand enough to provide and follow a better one.
Dog eat dog Amped album is not present on Apple music and I suspect several streaming platform, and Remedy never again is not present on it as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(album)
My personal definition is if you can't resell it, you don't own it.
I think DRM is frankly a lot more of a consumer education/rights thing than some kind of outright evil.
Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not. It's a bargain I'm happy to strike, or at least I appreciate the option.
The issue starts when:
- vendors don't make it clear that they can pull the rug
- or indeed can pull the rug for no reason. A bank can close my bank account, but not for no reason - and they can't hold on to my money just because. It should be the same with DRM-protected assets
- people don't understand the tradeoff they're making. It's like complaining about reckless overspending in credit cards leading to insane interest. Yes, it's partly to do with the product, equally credit cards totally have their use when used responsibly, and a healthy society has people understanding the differences.
however - we can be idealistic - but when the rubber touches the road, a lot of things happen.
indie games only exploded due to being digital only, if Indies were to publish physical copies they would go out of business or they would be less of them.
a lot of people complain about amazon - but It has provided an avenue for out of print books to continue being sold - through on demand printing. yeah physical products gets extinct too.
the era of the cheap dvd movie financed a lot of independent films - streaming killed that.
so like everything in life - you win some, you lose some.
& yeah - if you can't hold it - you don't own it.
If you can't hack it, you don't own it.
My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore
I don't like this sentiment. There's plenty of things you can hold but you don't really own. You're probably holding one right now!
Good examples, but this one didn't make sense to me:
>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game disappeared from Xbox and PlayStation stores in December 2014 when a license expired. Players campaigned for years before a remastered edition arrived in 2021.
I mean, physical stores can also stop selling a certain game. Existing sold games were unaffected. Why does this matter?
As they say, piracy is the only true ownership.
Now let’s apply this to money and digital finance
And if you can hold it, sometimes you still don’t own it.
The sad thing is that it's also true for money.
Cash that you can hold in your hand it's yours, whereas the cash that you own at the bank is a IOU subject to the contract that you sign .
Seems the title has been editorialised, but "holding it" is a rather low bar when considering ownership. I think of ownership as having the right to modify or destroy something.
As a tangent, I'd like to point out that the world is realizing the same is true with respect to Currencies, especially the US Dollar. It used to be better than gold, lighter, easily transportable, and convertible to actual gold coin, up until FDR ended that in 1933.[1] He added insult to injury by devaluing the dollar shortly thereafter.
We still had our silver coinage, though... and that lasted until after JFK was assassinated by groups still unknown[2] 60+ years later. The subsequent decision to remove silver from coinage left us without hard money, that we could hold, and instead substituted the "Johnson Sandwich".[3]
Worldwide, however, there was still convertibility to gold, at FDR's reduced value. This was ended by Nixon in 1971.[4] Since then, the value of the dollar, relative to gold, has fallen from $38 per ounce, to ~$4000 per ounce today. That's a decline of more than 99%.
The only thing holding the dollar up at this point is the PetroDollar System[5] that Nixon helped create in which Oil is exclusively priced in Dollars, and the dollars are recycled into US markets.
It's my Personal opinion that Trump is speedrunning the destruction of this system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1965
I mean.. this claim is just untrue. "Owning" something is a social construct defined by law. Our entire society exists because we own things we cannot hold, that is, intellectual property.
What this post is actually pointing out is that intellectual property that has transferrable physical representation has more value to the consumer.
And intellectual property that does not have transferable physical representation has more value to the producer.
Reselling or gifting a book you've read to a friend is wholesome.. it feels good. Truly.. but every time we do that we also take from the artist.
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 television show on Blu-ray disc or digital download. UltraViolet does not store the actual content. When a consumer logs in, UltraViolet will verify that the consumer has purchased a film, and will then allow the consumer to stream or download their movies from a participating UltraViolet service." [2]
This was an attempt to separate the technology of streaming from the legal ownership of the asset.
But Disney never signed on, and the member studios eventually got tired of it for some reason. The whole service was shut down in 2019.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(website)
[2] Interview with CTO Mitch Singer, https://web.archive.org/web/20110717234132/http://www.homeme...