alt Hacker NewsGoods / services. You probably need a relationship to use a warranty.
The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between. Especially when the delivery mechanism is streaming, and/or DRM keys that need to be renewed.
Sure, many people want a one-time download with no promise or obligation to re-deliver it in the future. Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
This whole thing is basically just “different people want different models of commerce for digital content”
Replies
> DRM keys that need to be renewed
The solution to this is to not have DRM
It's a very different thing to stop serving a download link to a purchased good from blocking access to the user's local copies altogether.
> Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
Agree that people want this - but this is an undue burden on the provider side. You have to perpetually maintain and provide access to content FOREVER including all the systems and support staff to auth.
> The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between.
That's the thing. If they are truly goods, they cannot be in between! Otherwise they are being handled as services and as such they will be terminated at some point. So unless we redefine the word, a true "purchase" can never depend on future actions from the provider (like renewing some DRM).