If buying isn’t owning, then pirating cannot be stealing. These corporations are literally herding people back onto the seas. I need to go get myself a new flag with a skull and bones, since I tied my boat to the pier about fifteen-twenty years ago.
Pirating is not and never has been stealing. You do not deprive anyone of anything when you make a copy of something.
Copyright is a dumb as shit system of artificial scarcity and always has been.
Its kinda true. I like to think of gog and gog-games. One is a storefront. One is a clean ui with all the games downloadable for free.
I think many would still use the free one vs paid. Myself, there’s something about owning it.
I pirated doom eternal back in the day. I was enjoying it so much I just bought it instead. 🤷
I get what you’re saying with “copying” vs “stealing”, which is true. But if you could clone your friends car for free you don’t need to buy a car and the business loses a sale.
The business loses a sale of what though? A copy they never created or had possession of in the first place?
If I go home and build a PC, can Dell claim that I deprived them of a sale of a copy of one of their computers?
Buying is renting, pirating is owning
Well, aren’t you quaint. Next thing you’ll be asking for is seed corn that you can replant year after year from the corn it grows, heated seats in your cars without a subscription payment, replaceable batteries in your battery powered electronics.
Don’t forget a subscription free garage opener/motor camera.
I think I got the last one of those, but mine did come with a “free” phone app to open/close the door. The app turned into an advertising platform about 3 years after I put the opener in - no options out, gotta see the ads if I want to use my opener via app.
Buying is renting, pirating is owning
It’s fucked up that this is basically true now
Listen, me hearties…
Beyond the obvious problem of paying but not owning, it’s impossible to watch/listen without that data being stored on a massive corporation’s server and likely sold to hundreds of advertisers. Last I saw Spotify had over 300 venders they share data with. I’ve seen sites with over 1000.
So you’re not only paying for something you don’t own, but you’re also paying to have a larger profile in the surveillance capitalism machine.
have a larger profile in the surveillance capitalism machine.
This is why, when I’m not watching, I’ll set Netflix to stream movies I like.
I saved all my DVDs because the pawn/sale price wasnt worth it… So glad I did.
Films are still physical in my home. PC games are only digital, preferably bought at gog so I can download and store them. Music is also digital since I don’t have any cd player. But I will continue to my films as blu ray discs as long as my blu ray player works and the films are released. Well, there needs to be stores that sell the films as well, that looks like the first thing to fall.
I love gog too, but I’m a sucker for classic/retro games. Playing Star Flight atm, forgot how hard these older games are!
I do still have a shit ton of CD’s. I actually forgot about them until you mentioned it. Yet nothing to play them on lol. The rest is .MP3 or ripped from my CD’s
I do have an old whatever the other version of blue ray player was. They were giving them away and they can play DVDs so I grabbed on as that format failed.
Got VHS and a deck, also got an Hi8 deck but thats more for vacation movies\4 wheeling when I was a kid.
I do have a bunch of laser disc’s but never bought a player. I need to as I have all the original Star Wars and others waiting to be played :)
GAH now I remember: “HD DVD”
I do, raise the black flag and you can too.
Only way I feel I can push back is by also saving it locally 🏴☠️
I never built up a CD collection but I now started a digital DRM free local collection. Yes, I am actually buying that stuff (call me stupid if you like) but only loss free.
One of the few disks I own is sadly too corruoted for error free ripping, luckuly I still have it as mp3. That album simply does not wxist online anymore, anywhere. Possibly not even in the darker corners of the net. I think that happens more often than many believe.
I mean, you can do that.
But it’s inconvenient and expensive and takes up space. So most folks choose not to do that for pragmatic reasons. Physical media still is broad available for books and music. Less so for films and TV shows, but many are still available in physical formats at online retailers.
I have a lot of physical books, like 500+. People tend to be quite negative about it and have so for a long time, because the popular conception is that physical media is stupid and wasteful. A lot of people take pride in owning nothing physical and regard that as ‘minimalism’ and are more than happy to purchase digital rentals or subscriptions only to further this aesthetic.
But it makes no sense to continue to produce physical media if only a niche audience is buying it, unless the product is niche, cheap to produce and has a high mark up. That’s why Vinly works, folks are willing to pay $30 per record and records cost pennies to physical reproduce.
I didn’t read the article, so I’m not sure how hung up they are on physical media, but the title is about owning vs renting/subscriptions. There are still places were digital copies can be purchased and downloaded to own, DRM-free. Personally, I prefer to store bits on HDDs and SSDs rather than CDs. Of course, that option is limited. Digital music can still be owned (eg bandcamp,Q-something,etc), same for audiobooks (shout out libro.fm), ebooks less so, but still possible and workarounds exist (deDRM).
Movies and TV are where it really runs dry. There’s a few indie creators you can buy from directly, but for everything else, if you don’t want to have a bunch of dvd/blu-ray cases taking up space your only non-rent/subscription options are borrowing from the library (my jam, but a limited collection), or pirating.
That’s what I’ve been saying for years. If you’ve bought digital multimedia like movies, TV shows, software, etc from large corpos, you don’t own it and you are at their mercy. Contracts can expire and licenses can be revoked. Corps want you to own nothing and be grateful for them allowing you the privilege of paying them for a product or service they can rescind at any time for any reason, because fuck you, that’s why.
Realistically we shouldn’t need laws for this. We should all just vote with our wallets. If we can’t own then you go out of business.
However there should be laws against companies changing the terms of the contract after sale.
We got frog boiled in the 2010s to accept renting out media. Me and my sandisk Sansa clip still go for walks listening to mp3s. I wonder if devices like this will see a resurgence under the idea that owning it gives you control of your media.
We thought we were signing up for libraries. We forgot the “Public” part of how libraries work.
i think browsing webpages should be the same.
load it once, then store it locally andor host a torrent for it🏴☠️
