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In this day and age ownership of digital media is often an illusion. When you buy a book or movie there are severe restrictions on what you can do with these files. In some cases, purchased content can simply disappear overnight. These limitations keep copyright holders in control, but they breed pirates at the same time.
[...] Millions of people have now replaced their physical media collections for digital ones, often stored in the cloud. While that can be rather convenient, it comes with restrictions that are unheard of offline.
[...R]esearchers examined how the absence of the right to resell and lend affects people's choice to buy. They found that, among those who are familiar with BitTorrent, roughly a third would prefer The Pirate Bay over Apple or Amazon if they are faced with these limitations.
These rights restrictions apparently breed pirates.
"Based on our survey data, consumers are more likely to opt out of lawful markets for copyrighted works and download illegally if there is no lawful way to obtain the rights to lend, resell, and use those copies on their device of choice," the researchers concluded.
The paper in question is two years old by now, but still very relevant today. While we don't expect that anything will change soon, people should at least be aware that you don't always own what you buy.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/you-dont-really-own-that-movie-you-bought-but-pirates-180915/
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Wednesday September 19 2018, @05:01PM
> people should at least be aware that you don't always own what you buy.
True but is this really the problem?
There are many stories out there of big company X arbitrarily deciding to change their store or DRM and simply not caring one bit about totally cutting off everyone that already bought DRM'd stuff.
Are all those people that continue to buy cloud rather than hard media really not aware of any of those stories, or even of that possibility?
I'm guessing people aren't that stupid so that really isn't the usual case. I think they know but still stupidly choose convenience/convention over risk, partly because that's how their phone/favourite app/media player is also pushing them.
They already know, but only start caring after they got caught and its too late,
The bottom line is people need to wise up, and only buy physical formats that you control and even sell on if you want.
Next best is only media that is both DRM-free and downloadable, but that's a poor second because you still cant re-sell it.