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/
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:07PM
Paper wears out. I don't know how many books I've discarded over my life because the spine broke. With correct archiving I'm not worried about bit rot.
Paper can burn. Unless you like photocopied 'backups'... Every ebook I own is backed up and stored offsite.
Paper has bulk. Size required to store 200 novels? Maybe 6000 in^3. Size required to store 200 ebooks? 1 microSD, about .5 in^3.
I love paper too, but for all my novel reading give me ebooks. Ones where I own the file and they, are not DRM'd, and while I like my e-Readers I can read them on any machine that can run Calibre.
This sig for rent.