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posted by chromas on Wednesday September 19 2018, @01:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-reminder dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

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/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:26AM (4 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:26AM (#736991) Journal

    Another good use for ebooks is textbooks. It's nuts to make kids carry around 30 lbs of dead tree in their backpacks. Loading everything up onto a large tablet makes much more sense.

    Textbook publishers, however, will never go for that, so we ought to shift our education culture to use open source textbooks instead. There are only so many ways to teach the quadratic formula, and my experience with textbook explanations is that they have gotten worse over the decades as math and tech phobes have gained more control of education.

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  • (Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)

    by Taibhsear (1464) on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:05PM (#737056)

    They're slowly coming around. Either that or my recent instructors are just picking books that tend to have ebook versions. Got my last ~$200 text book for $30 as a pdf (legally) and not some nonsensical "e-rental."

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:34PM (#737097)

      yeah with fucking drm included which is what this article was about to begin with...people who pay taxes and send their kids to slave indoctrination centers and still have no rights to the books they bought are ridiculous fucks.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:14PM (#737537)

      I've taken a bunch of courses now with ebooks online
      I can't access any of them anymore
      Complete BS

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:21PM (#737089)

    Textbooks, manuals, and other reference material are the one thing I prefer real books for. Ebooks don't make it easy or convenient to find what you want in a large work. Hopefully this will improve, but trends in UI seem to be toward less utility rather than more so I'm not holding my breath. The kindle is great for novels, but I have a hard time with anything useful.