You are “allowed” [NB: I do not know anything about the (varying from place to place) copyright law, and this is, explicitly, not a statement about what is legal or illegal] to make copies, rip, hack, or crack DRM in order to back up your media, format-shift [e.g., WAV → MP3], ensure operability among devices [the kid who wanted to watch DVDs on his Linux computer].
From this point of view, ripping a CD for your own personal use is ok, but (not that there is much of a market) selling a dozen pirated copies for profit, definitely not ok. Giving the original, with case and booklet, away to your friend? Interestingly, if you recall the manufacturer+industry’s SCMS copy protection system, they intended to allow you to make unlimited copies of your own original discs or tapes, but you were not supposed to be able to make copies of a copy. So, oddly enough, that scenario would have been (sort of) compatible with Congress and the RIAA and whomever. Note that your friend ends up with the original with all the art or whatever, and all you get is a stupid computer file or cheap CD-R of no commercial value (and, these days, as for the music itself, it’s all on Youtube or whatever anyway). I am not advocating that it’s “ok” according to the definition in the first paragraph, just that the industry did once think about digital copies and sharing and came up with this sort of scheme.
It’s completely relevant because that is how Mama_Zappa framed her replies to me, as a concern for the ability to make backups. If you have a problem with that, talk to her.
You didn’t lose any value at all because the ability to redownload was always going to be temporary. You got exactly what you paid for.
Whining about losing value that was never promised in the first place proves one didn’t make a smart decision as a consumer.
Do CDs really take up that much room in your house? I’ve got maybe 200 CDs that occupy one shelf in my living room. On the occasion I feel like listening to some music, I put one in the CD player on the shelf underneath the CDs, and voila! I’ve spent more time typing this paragraph than I have concerning myself with what to do with my CDs.
Mine are all in various boxes. For many years I haven’t really had reasonable shelf space to hold them. But, I keep them because I hope to make space for them again. To me, the process of picking something to listen to from an infinite selection of options (spotify, etc), leaves me overwhelmed, and I find I listen to music much less than when I would be presented by my organized shelves of CDs and records. I might be drawn for some unknown reason to a particular pattern of colors on a spine, or be reminded of an album I love as I browse through. I just have not found a way to interact with a collection (or massive streaming library) that inspires me to listen to things like that shelf does.
I kinda sorta had a decent system with iTunes for a long time, but since Apple shut down that program, I’ve been at a loss.
Anyway, to me, that’s the reason to keep them… if you find the experience of browsing a physical shelf valuable or enjoyable.
But that’s the thing. The person in question hasn’t made those purchases. They’re not whining about something they own losing value. They’re explaining why they prefer not to purchase digital music or other digital goods.
Yes, you’re correct that the companies in question don’t actually promise that the digital good will remain available from their servers forever. That word was poorly chosen. But it still can be a valid reason to prefer buying physical media.
I’m not a big music buyer. But I’ve never bought any streaming media nor do I expect to as long as alternatives still exist.
I buy physical, rip the data to my cloud storage, and pitch the physical. Now it’s mine forever (net of civilization-crashing catastrophe) AND I have all the advantages of digital storage & multi-device portability.
Seems like the best of all worlds to me. But I’m hardly mainstream.
I just buy the FLAC (or ALAC or whatever) and do the same. No need to buy more stuff I need to throw into the garbage. I have not bought a physical CD in … 20 years?
Hmmm, I didn’t mean to suggest Mama_Zappa was whining (I don’t think she was), I was saying the hypothetical person in Johnny_Bravo’s example who thinks they are losing value is whining. Maybe whining can be interpreted as a bit of an emotionally charged word, but I just meant it as a synonym for complaining.
Preferring physical CDs because she’s concerned the online store won’t hold up a promise they didn’t actually make is a valid reason? I mean, more power to her to buy from wherever she feels most comfortable, but I don’t really think that’s a great reason, no.
The problem isn’t the non-existent promise. The problem is that you can pay for something and then have it taken away from you with no recourse or recompense. People might also be reluctant to buy physical media if they suddenly disappeared or became unplayable when the company that sold it went out of business. The fact that they don’t is a point in their favor for many people, including me.
But, for like the second or third time now, that does not happen. Neither Apple nor Amazon nor any other significant store (that any average person would use anyway) uses DRM anymore for purchased music. That means they cannot take it away from you or that it will disappear if they go out of business.
You aren’t confusing purchased music for streaming subscription music, right? That’s probably the biggest reason I can think of for a misunderstanding. Or what am I missing from what you’re saying?
I wasn’t talking about music specifically, but any digital media where you may not download your entire purchased library, such as e-books or movies. Yes, Amazon (apparently) hasn’t taken any books away since the 1984 fiasco, but that doesn’t mean that it, or some other seller, couldn’t do so in the future.
I haven’t bought movies digitally, so I’m not sure; can you download movies you buy online to a local device, or is “buying” them just the right to stream them at will? I was under the impression it was the latter, at least in some cases.
Finally, WRT music, my wife bought music from Apple for her iPods and computer, and she lost some of it when the devices failed or when she migrated from one machine to a new one. It was a long time ago, I was only peripherally involved, and this may be a case of the DRM you say is no longer used, but it made me wary of digital purchases.
Apple used to use DRM on the music it sold, and a lot of people lost it due to some bobble on their computer, or whatever. The vast majority of ebooks sold today have DRM and are subject to that risk. But it’s true that most electronic music sold today (not streamed, sold outright) is DRM-free and will not accidentally disappear if the vendor goes out of business, or whatever.
It probably depends on where you buy them from. I think the standard is that you can download them, but you may need to use their proprietary app to watch them once you’ve downloaded them.
I tried looking up what Amazon says in its user agreement about digital video you purchase from them.
(What still isn’t clear to me is: if the content you purchased should become unavailable, will you still be able to watch a copy that you’ve already downloaded?)
Yes, but that doesn’t settle the question. It’s at least theoretically possible that they could take away the right to download a video (maybe because they lost the right to host it on their servers) but leave you the right to play it if you’d already downloaded it.
Fine, but what you were replying to was very specifically about music and your reply just does not apply to digital music purchases at all, just so you know. The world of digital media is not monolithic.
Well, then it’s something you don’t have to be wary about any longer. For digital music purchases.
Thanks, @Thudlow_Boink, for looking further into the movie issue. Netflix doesn’t rent or sell, only streams, but it does let you download movies to your device within their app. But they lose rights to shows all the time, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to view a download after they’d lost the rights. (I’m conducting an experiment: I just downloaded an episode of a show that’s leaving on Dec. 27. I’ll check the next day and see if I can watch it. Bet I won’t be able to.)
I just want to say that although I was reluctant to buy digital media at first, and haven’t bought many songs or movies in digital, I’m not a hard liner on this issue. One factor is that I’ve moved several times in the last decade, and that plus getting older have made me less interested in owning stuff.
As I’ve said here several times, having lots of books is great until it’s time to move. Then they’re a pain in the ass. Disposing of well over 1,000 books before our last move, and keeping most of the remaining 1,000 in storage now, because we don’t have room for them in our present tiny house, has led me to resolve never to buy another physical book if I can help it.
I read books with the Kindle app on my tablet. Until this thread, I hadn’t given much thought to the conflict between this practice and my preference for keeping the physical forms of my movies and music. For convenience, I don’t bother to keep all of my Kindle content downloaded on my tablet, so I have no plan for what I would do if Amazon suddenly disappeared. Not likely, sure, but is there anything?
Another irony is that for more than a decade I recorded lots of shows and movies off of cable onto my DVD recorder, but they’re all standard def. If I really wanted to watch any of them now, I’d stream them in HD. So not really much point in keeping those physical media. In any case, they’re all in the remote storage space. A problem for another day.
