Posted on 12/13/2010 2:02:03 PM PST by Still Thinking
We keep hearing about it—the “all-digital future”: easier, more convenient, no need to drive to the store. Download all the content you want instantly. Thus, iTunes, OnLive, Steam, and various other services were born. But this convenience bears a steep price. In our rush to embrace the all-digital future, we’ve sacrificed fundamental property rights.
Time and again, record labels, software developers, and movie studios have expressed their displeasure with physical media. The overhead is too steep. There’s too much piracy. The second-hand market is immoral and equivalent to piracy. Technophiles love to debate the merits of streaming media, but it’s the entertainment companies, not consumers, who are promoting an end to physical media.
At first glance, the iTunes, PlayStation and X-Box online stores seem like a godsend—you can purchase movies, music, or games from the comfort of your living room, and they’re delivered instantly (or as quick as a download). Win-win right? But the devil, as they say, is in the details. The iTunes and PlayStation Stores both adhere to draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM), placing heavy restrictions on downloads and usage.
When you download content from iTunes, it’s authorized for up to five computers. Understandably, this DRM restriction prevents rampant piracy, but it has the effect of restricting property rights. The X-Box Live Marketplace ties purchases to your account, so if you switch game consoles, you must be logged in to re-download your content. No internet access means you forfeit your downloads. The PlayStation Network restricts downloads to up to five consoles.
Software developers have made no attempt to hide their contempt for the secondary market. They believe they should control every aspect of distribution, bending the rules in the process. “Licensing” their software (rather than selling it), allows these companies to redefine the first-sale doctrine.
“OnLive” is one of the latest attempts to combat piracy, preserve DRM, and control the means of distribution. OnLive is a downloadable software client that allows users to stream PC games via cloud computing. Gamers can browse an extensive library of titles, some costing as much as their physical brethren. Games are hosted on remote servers, and thus, users don’t need high-end gaming rigs to play the latest releases. That’s the good news. The bad news is a total loss of property rights.
As CNET points out, “unlike Steam, you're not actually buying the game, but just the right to access it via OnLive's servers, ‘while it is available on the OnLive gamer service,’ which the company says will be until at least June 2013 for the games currently listed.”
In other words, you don’t own the games, and your “right to access” eventually expires. So you can pay $29.99 to “own” Assassin’s Creed II for three years, or pay the same amount to Best Buy and own it indefinitely. The choice seems clear.
The “all-digital future” seems inevitable. For media companies, it’s a utopia—they control the means of distribution, eliminate the secondary market, and curb piracy. But I’d urge caution. In our headlong rush to embrace digital media, we risk surrendering fundamental property rights. What’s mine is mine.
I have to laugh at stories like this. The great and powerful Cloud, where all-things-media will be stored and accessed when wanted.
I have just two words:
Broadband caps.
There is a hack to remove the DRM.
However, it is too convenient to use the music as is.
Yep. The radio frequency spectrum is not infinite.
Sooner or later you run out of bandwidth.
I only need to see a movie once. Why would I want to own a stupid disk I will never use again?
I am a sports photographer and I own the rights to all of my images from colleges throughout the region.
Everyday I go online and see various newspapers, students, and other web sites using my work. It is all copyrighted, but it is almost impossible to contain it once is it let loose on the world.
Some places are really good about protecting my rights, but others don’t care. Students, parents, and others think that if it is on the web it is free—so they just right click away and paste it all over facebook and other sites.
I find that most of these people are not malicious, just ignorant. But, my pocket is hurting from a sharp decline in secondary market sales (families, friends, and the athletes themselves.) We are down nearly 80% since the peak in 2007.
Well let’s see.
Best buy, I have to walk for about 5 minutes to get to the store, or drive. Then I go and buy the CD. I pay 50 bucks full price. The consequence being that if the CD gets damage or worn from use, that I can no longer use the programs that I’ve bought. This is bad.
The other business model would be direct downloads from a library, limited to a certain number of downloads a day. This works for relatively small files. You’d charge for the ad space, and you could get quite a few hits.
This is what I don’t understand is why don’t the software publishers do this with their older games? Put them up on their own websites for direct download and go from there. This way rather than resales being their enemy, extended demand is their friend.
I’m a writer. I’m not sure there’s any value in trying to protect stuff available online.
Do you have a website up where people can access your photo shoots?
“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world”
-——John Lenin (Yes, I know.)
Don’t get the segue (unless you just mean farewell to owning stuff cause all the producers have us by the short and curlies). Doesn’t seem like collectivism is the problem, but rather people who sell you something, then don’t think you own it.
That's quite different. In your case at the very least I'd get a form-letter DMCA takedown going to their ISP. Beyond that I'd register the work and then at least for every for-profit infringement I'd sue for statutory damages. Going to court with the registration in hand and a copy of their web site is pretty much an open-and-shut case if they used your photo in-whole and for-profit, without the usual exemptions like commentary and parody.
On the other hand, would you sell a person a copy of one of your photos and then say you have the right to pull it back at any time? That you can prevent them from showing it to too many friends? That they can't sell it again to another person? IMHO that's abuse of copyright, and it's becoming all too commonplace these days.
Article is a bit disingenuous; there are plenty of alternatives out there one can use. He even briefly mentioned Steam which is an excellent platform where you can either buy a game in store or dl it to as many computers as you want…although you can only play on one at a time. Same goes for X-Box Live, if you don’t like content delivered online just buy the game.
Now I’ve used OnLive, bit laggy over wireless but otherwise an excellent platform. I can play the latest games on my old laptop with it. Truth be told, I won’t be playing most games in three years and the ones I will play (like half-life or Alpha Centauri) I buy the physical disks.
And as for music and ebooks, I don’t use I tunes but it doesn’t use DRM anymore and you can backup your music whenever. When I buy an ebook though, I crack the DRM asap and save it just in case though.
...Or you can buy from publishers that don't use DRM to restrict your rights. If you're a Sci-Fi fan, check out Baen Publishing. Baen has a large number of books available through their Free Library.
Personally, I like spending money with businesses that don't trieat me like a thief, and I love recommending such companies to others. (I have no relationship to Baen. I've just been extremely satisfied with them even though I've spent more money with them than any other publisher in the last 5 years.)
I am a big sci-fi fan and I do like Baen but they’re library is small and don’t have a lot of the books I want. For instance I pre-ordered a Star Trek book from B&N, Baen doesn’t carry those.
Of course its the publishers, not the distributors that insist on DRM. Baen gets around it by of course being a publisher themselves and making their own decisions.
Actually I CAN sell the photos to places and still hold the copyright. For example, I have photographed many NBA players while they were in high school. I can sell those to several magazines over time, and still retain the copyright.
The sales to parents and individuals are understood to be pretty much an abdication of the copyright. I appreciate that.
I have gone after some online publications and they have taken down the photos.
I register most of my work, especially where there are potential future sales. Not really worth it for a low level D3 W hockey team....but it is for some schools where the athletes will graduate to be President some day.
That's not what I'm talking about. You always retain copyright. But I doubt you think that if you sold a print of a photo to someone, you can strictly control what they do with it afterwards, such as showing it to friends or framing it, or that you can years later suddenly tell them they are no longer allowed to look at their copy of the photo. That's what they're doing with software and e-books, trying to retain strict control of all of the copies they've sold.
The sales to parents and individuals are understood to be pretty much an abdication of the copyright. I appreciate that.
When you sell or give a copy to an individual you always retain copyright. However, you have exhausted your rights to control that one copy under first sale. But those parents don't have the right to copy and redistribute that photo since they don't have the copyright. What you are doing with magazines is allowing them to reproduce and distribute your photo, a license in the true spirit of copyright.
Not really worth it for a low level D3 W hockey team....but it is for some schools where the athletes will graduate to be President some day.
Registration only helps to prove to the court that it's yours, and it plays into the ability to go for statutory damages. Obviously producing the RAW or negative of a photo will still prove it's yours when the other guy only has a jpeg, but you'll have to go after actual damages, not statutory.
I am very strongly for copyright, but I'm also very strongly against abuse of copyright. Usually when you hear the word "license" in relation to software or downloadable content, you are looking at abuse of copyright to some extent.
Somebody understands the problem.
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