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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: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:51AM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:51AM (#737001) Homepage Journal

    I regard dead tree books as a good investment.

    So did I until there was no more room in the house for books. Then we had to move to a smaller place. The books in a storage cell are not very useful, and having to pay for storage is a liability.

    I might buy an eBook reader and some technical books if I travel for work, but that's the only scenario I can imagine that would lead me to do so.

    I read ebooks a lot now. They're the ones I can get copies of easily. And, yes, I back them up. and I don't use a kindle, so Amazon has little power over my library.

    Where ebooks often don't work is for mathematics. In the middle of a paragraph, I suddenly encounter "Recall formula 6.43." And I have to page around awkwardly to find it and then I've lost my place and I can't recall why I needed to recall it. That's a flaw in the book formatting and the ebook reader of course, but it's still a problem. Less of a problem with modern browsers and html, but that's not how e-math s published.

    Also art reproductions aren't great in ebooks, but this is really a problem with display technology.

    -- hendrik

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