I’d like to get the community’s feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we’re really doing is purchasing a “license” to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.
Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?
P.S. I know there’s pirating and all, but that’s not the focus of my question.
Hmmm…never thought of it like that. That certainly does put things into perspective. Even so, it does feel like we’re being cheated out of our money when we pay for something and are not able to access it later. I’m currently on an audiobook platform called Libro.fm, and when I purchase an audiobook there, I am given the option to download a separate audio file that allows me to listen to the audiobook in another media player (e.g. VLC). Can’t these movie and tv show platforms do the same thing?
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It depends on what their license with the copyright holder says. If the platform is the copyright owner, then they absolutely could do that if they wanted to (unless the media includes other sublicensed media, in which case they’d possibly need that owner to also allow it - that’s related to why sometimes certain media just can’t legally be purchased anywhere). Most of the time those owners don’t want to allow that.
It’s a legal problem, not a technical one.