The case for physical media ownership

evrydayhustling

> A Blu-ray disc, game cartridge, or printed book cannot be remotely erased, edited, or deactivated. It is a physical object you can own, resell, lend, archive, or play offline indefinitely. Isn't this untrue with surprising frequency? Decoding devices phone home, come under new copyright laws, etc etc etc.

blfr

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.

drooby

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.

CodesInChaos

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.

andai

https://xkcd.com/1150/

ForceBru

> 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.

QuiCasseRien

> The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. Frank Herbert, Dune

simianwords

I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things. The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place. I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons 1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself 2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article 3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity 4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.

ermantrout

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

foobarbecue

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.

threetonesun

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.

axegon_

It's a bit more subtle than that, I'm afraid. In many instances lately, physically owning a product no longer means that you own it: the fact that BMW tried to introduce subscriptions for heated seats, VW blocking out Graphene users from connecting their phones to their cars, Insta360 asking you to install their app to use their camera, which does not need to be connected to a cloud service to function, bambu labs trying to shutdown open source projects, the list goes on - that's manufacturers openly denying you from owning the products you paid for(and can hold). There's another side to that as well: many people (contentiously or not) realized that when something is free, then you are the product. Now look at penai, anthropic, google, etc. Anyone that has basic GCSE level math skills can work out that their pricing does not cover their costs. Some people are in denial about it, some don't care and some truly believe that they are not the product cause they pay what is effectively a symbolic subscription. Or all three, but still, you are paying for something you don't own. I don't come from a wealthy family and when I was a kid, all the software I used for making dumb games like flash, photoshop, etc were pirated. Same with music and movies. Eventually I switched over to Linux and open source projects. When I grew up and could finally afford those things, it only felt right to pay for a netflix subscription, spotify and whatnot. But due to the vile invasion in my personal space and the 0 guarantee that I'll have access to my favourite song the next morning, I got fed up and went back to self-hosting and pirating(to a degree). One of my best friends is a musician and I know that spotify is a big f-u to most artists since they have a winner-takes-all policy which makes me feel a lot less guilty. And frankly, if it is something I enjoy, I'll just head on over to the artist's website and buy a digital copy as a form of gratitude(even though I have often already downloaded the music): an album which I had very high hopes for dropped yesterday, I listened to it, liked it, downloaded it and bought a digital copy about an hour ago. Despite having it on my navidrome library since last night. At the end of the day, the artist will get a better compensation that way compared to what they'd get if I was listening to them on spotify, even on repeat. So while the author has the right idea, sadly it's only part of the story.

brookst

TIL I don’t own my thoughts :(

functionmouse

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!

cube00

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/

dzonga

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.

carra

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.

dijit

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).

doginasuit

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.

knaik94

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.