Do you actually own anything digital?::From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no
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Well, I have 10 Tb of pirated digital content sitting safely at my own home, so I would say yes, yes I do own a lot of digital stuff.
Right there with you buddy, 13TB and growing. Self hosted media servers are the best.
Those are rookie numbers. Need to start getting entire TV shows in 4k and things you’ve seen previously but may want to watch again in the future quickly and easily.
Y’all are chumps.
I got 6TB SSD and 16TB HDD.
But I guess it’s less than half full so… Idk, maybe Im the chump with too much headroom.
Sitting on 25.2tb of actual media with 7.25tb free. 4k movies and 34k episodes.
If I can figure out a way to make my next server upgrade a tax write off, I’ll flex back.
Damn, those are some high resolution episodes.
What media are we talking about? Movies? Porn?
Just general movies+tv shows.
It started as a classic Disney film collection and has expanded quite dramatically over the last 7ish years.
Now a days I’ve got a half a dozen users feeding requests into Ombi along with a bunch of imdb lists being monitored; growing the library entirely automatically.
/edit: who am I kidding, it’s just hundreds of copies of one man one jar with different filters applied…
Torrent that Shit so that it can leave forever
I do 😉
Can it be taken from you, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all?
If yes, then you don’t own it.
I mean, that technically applies to everything. The government can seize your land, the police are in the news every few days for straight up taking money out of people’s homes and vehicles and shooting dogs, robbery is still a living profession, etc
There’s really not a lot that sentence doesn’t apply to, if anything at all.
Can the US government cease my land?
Yes, imminent domain. You don’t own land you only lease it from the government.
Can they stop your land?
I think you mean seize. And I guess it depends on where you live in the world.
When it comes to the US government at least, there are 4th Amendment protections in place, so no, your property can’t be seized “for any reason or no reason at all”.
Theft is a thing, but it’s random and you have the right to defend yourself in your own home. You also aren’t at risk for losing EVERYTHING. Not in the way you are if your digital library license gets revoked.
If a cop can take your property with no consequences and you will be arrested or killed if you defend yourself and your property, then what the law says doesn’t matter as the defacto state of reality isn’t concerned with such petty things as laws.
You clearly don’t know about the state of seizure laws in the US over the last years. Having cash is reason enough for them to seize it and they don’t have to suspect you of a crime. They can simply find the cash as suspicious and take it and you have to prove the legality of your cash or property at your own cost/expense to get it back.
You clearly don’t understand the status of civil forfeiture in my state, but it’s cool, we only changed it 23 years ago…
https://www.osbar.org/publications/bulletin/06nov/forfeiture.html
You said the Fourth Amendment, not your state law. The fourth amendment should protect from this but historically it hasn’t. One good state doesn’t change that.
This comment is so fucking frustratingly ignorant of the realities of living in the US. Is this a troll comment?
In MY state at least, it’s absolutely a fact but it does vary by state:
https://www.osbar.org/publications/bulletin/06nov/forfeiture.html
The fourth amendment of the Constitution of the United States does give us protection against unreasonable search and seizure, but the unreasonable is its weak link and as such your protections have been gutted by SCOTUS since the 1990s and the War on Drugs.
If law enforcement seizes everything you own via asset forfeiture, or kills you in cold blood when you are neither armed nor resisting, your estate can sue to get your belongings back or compensation for wrongful death, but a ruling against law enforcement in your favor is the exception in the US, not the rule.
Avoid engagement with US law enforcement. Ever. And if you must deal with them, do not expect any right to be respected. Under no circumstances should you call law enforcement to respond to a situation.
Yes, because I go out of my way to make damn sure of it.
How ? Please share so that people like me can learn. I’ve started watching Louis Rossman YouTube videos and that guy actually makes sense about how companies are treating their customers.
Not the OP, but I’m buying DRM free ebooks and software only, and for every album, movie or series I purchase, I’ll download a pirated copy that I add to my offline storage + backup.
If a book I want is not available without DRM, I’ll buy a hardcover and a pirated copy.
Also you can remove some types of DRM with DeDRM plugin for calibre.
For music, buy a record on Bandcamp to support the actual artists instead of the record label and they give you free FLAC or high quality MP3 downloads along with all physical media. Otherwise pirate the album for a digital copy and buy the physical in a store.
Pirate stuff. That’s the easiest way to make sure you own it
It all depends on the licence. Even if you buy something on physical media you may not technically own it. If something has a FOSS licence MIT, BSD, GPL, etc Then yes you do own your copy and no one can change that.
I may only have a license to view the contents of a dvd, but at least I’ll always be able to view it as long as it’s in my possession and I have a dvd player.
Content you can only access remotely via someone else systems (or requiring remote authorization via there systems) can be taken away at anytime regardless of the terms of your license, even supposedly “indefinite/permanent/lifetime” licences.
Both of these items use the same term ‘purchase’. This term used to refer to the first situation only, but now it covers both.
If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing.
- FOSS licenses are distribution licenses, not EULAs. You have the right to own and use software you acquire even without agreeing to them; they only “kick in” when you decide to do something that would otherwise violate copyright law.
I liked the explicit way version 2 of the GPL explained it:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Version 3 says the same, but less clearly (note that “affirms” is entirely different from “grants”):
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.
- EULAs presume to “grant” you something you already have due to the First Sale Doctrine (namely, the right to use your property) and are therefore complete bunk as they lack “consideration.” If you believe EULAs are somehow valid just because the copyright cartel’s shysters say so, you need to learn to quit taking advice from the enemy!
If I can actually download it and it’s DRM-free, yes.
The only certain way to own digital products is apparently to pirate it illegally.
Gog provides DRM free installers when buying games at their store
Nah, you can buy it legally and break the drm illegally. That is what someone I know very well does with my, ahm, their ebooks.
Removing DRM from content you bought is actually legal
What’s illegal is doing so for the purposes of sharing whatever was DRM’d in the first place
Not that it stops me
Fyi, steam doesn’t add additional DRM to games. So long as the maker hasn’t added anything significant, you can often just copy the game folder out, and run it independently. There’s nothing (in theory) to stop you backing it up yourself.
Steam itself is drm though. If you have a pc that can’t connect to the internet or is no longer compatible with steam (like an XP pc for example), even if you have the game files, you can’t play then without first installing and updating steam.
I have an XP pc for period-era gaming and I can’t touch anything steam related for it so instead I have to either look for them on the internet archive or hope there is still a torrent for such an old game. Or failing both, actually find a physical copy. This still means I can’t really play Valve’s XP games though because of their requirement of Steam no matter how you bought the game.
Sort of, but only if you’re launching through Steam. You can launch DRM-free Steam games through the executable file without launching Steam if you already have the files downloaded.
Games on Steam don’t require Steamworks or any other DRM, if your game won’t launch without Steam running that’s a choice by the game developer and not a restriction imposed for Steam.
There is a whole list of drm-free games that will work without the launcher or with instructions on how to make them run without the launcher. If a game makes use of Steam’s APIs, it won’t run without proper authentication when opened with the launcher even if it is drm-free. You would need to launch it directly from the game’s files in that case.
There’re few games that work like that. Many use the steam basic drm, making the game not launching if a valid steam session is not running.
That’s why I have the generic steam crack. In case they pull the plug some day.
I think I own my fingers, so them.
Those who down voted you are either idiots, or hate clever wordplay
or they just hate OP for still having their fingers
If it’s on my Jellyfin server, I own it as much it’s possible to own anything.
If they wanted me to pay for it, maybe they shouldn’t have dicked me around, watering down my subscribed services while simultaneously jacking up the price.
No. Not unless you have it stored on media that you own and control.
I own a digital watch
The only “digital” I download, is something that I can put on my personal storage. If I can download it to Nintendo Switch and then move it to USB or SD card, then I can clone the sd card and therefore I own it. (immediate usage might be different, and they may chose to delete if it is put back on the Switch. But I still own it, I just need to find an alternative method to use it).
Same goes with games/movies/whatever. If I can download it and store it on my NAS, I own it.
If you are paying for “digital” but you cannot acquire a copy of it, then it is NOT “Digital” it is streaming. You are paying for the privilege of using some services’ electronic library, but you do not own anything on it.
I’ve been watching this argument lately, and its amusing. The whole Sony thing about Discovery (or whatever it was) has nothing to do with ownership. You were paying to access a library that Sony curated. Sony dropped the contract with the other party, and chose to tidy their library. You just have access to it, because they let you. You do not have any ownership whatsoever.
People seem to have a hard time using words like “content”, “streaming” and “digital” vs “electronic copy”, “local digital copy” and “DLC”; and then confuse "ownership and “content access”.
We still own all our CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays, so them as long as the players still exist.
You wouldn’t pay to not own a car
Idk, lots of people lease… So I guess they would
Ahem, what about car rentals when you travel? 😜 Just kidding: in this case you know very well you’re not owning the car and only using it for a very short time
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You technically own the car, but some functionality is behind software locks and these days even paid subscriptions. How much do you really own?
Yes I own things because I simply don’t pay for something if I’d need to open proprietary software or pay a subscription fee to use it.
It’s really quite simple and remarkably easy to do, it’s just more mental load to decide what to buy and people just want to pay monthly and forget about it and get mad when it stops magically working.
Does anyone?
IMO, nobody owns ideas. Only execution.
not the guillotine
Doesn’t work on entropy.
If you’re on Lemmy, you almost certainly understand the problem and know how to acturally own digital stuff.
The problem is all the normies who can’t even see the problem. We need everyone to be protected by law and it all to be citizen oriented. As the moment, it’s all stacked in favour of exploitive multinational companies. Maybe ever was it so, but we need to fight that.
We treat it as a tech problem, something to work round, but it’s a political problem and we need to solve it politically.
