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https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/06/30/do-we-really-own-our-digital-possessions/
During 2019, Microsoft announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers' consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers' eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the service – even those bought many years ago – will no longer be readable after July 2019. While the company has promised to provide a full refund for all eBook purchases, this decision raises important questions of ownership.
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We Don't Really Own the Digital Possessions That We Buy Online
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 5, Interesting) by captain_nifty on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:55PM (7 children)
This is why you break whatever DRM crap they put on and keep a local copy, or shop wherever you can find it without the DRM.
For ebooks and music this is fairly easy, even for video it isn't too hard to find utilities to strip out the DRM and make a copy.
Crap like this is why I have ~24TB of backups, it's not yours if you can't access it without an active internet connection.
The cloud is a lie meant to sell you the content again and again.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
For tape backups LTO-4 drives are the sweet spot for price per Gb. I bought an IBM LTO-4 drive for $35 on eBay. Its a fiber channel interface and those cards and cables are dirt cheap too. They don't fit very well in desktop cases but who cares. If you keep an eye out you can snag new tapes for $10 each. That's 800Gb of long term stable storage.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:42PM (1 child)
Even at those prices, I don't know why you'd bother unless you're really hording a lot of data. You can get a 4-5TB USB-connected backup HD for under $100 now, and with that you can plug it into any computer (there's no way for me to connect a fibre channel drive to my laptop), and you can access files randomly whenever you want to restore something, or just back up a few things, or do a sync, or whatever.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:40PM
One of the reasons why HDD are a great choice is that on top of just overwriting the parts of the backup that might have changed, you can easily verify the integrity of all the files on the disk. It can take some time to do, but the process is more or less automatic if you've got decent software. You can also choose which filesystem you use, I personally like ZFS for backups as it at least has the ability to verify that any file writes were completed. Good luck using any similar filesystem with tape.
For some things, I also prefer to use WORM technology of some sort, yes, you have to rewrite the entire thing if something happens, but you're safe from the most common source of data destruction, fat fingers.
That being said, I prefer to have my backups handled offsite and replicated across multiple geographic regions. It's just super nice to have a backup copy on site where it can be quickly restored in the most common cases of user error.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:01PM (2 children)
Quite right.
Rick Wakeman sold me a copy of his latest album recently in flac format. I could have bought a record or a CD, but as it's 2020 now I don't see the need.
As he didn't include any DRM nonsense I can copy it wherever I like.
Thanks Rick.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:13PM (1 child)
But what about his other music? I have quite a bit of it from one of his previous gigs [wikipedia.org]
Here's good example [youtube.com].
Fortunately for me, I purchased the album in question [wikipedia.org] and not only have the disc, but also had the technical knowledge to rip it as well.
This should *never* be an issue. When you *buy* something, it should be your property.
That doesn't change because the delivery mechanism isn't a physical one. What's more, most of the research has shown that making media available without DRM generally *increases* sales.
Even more, any vendor who can arbitrarily reverse the sale should be liable for breach of contract if they do so without the consent of all parties. That would put a stop to that shit pretty quick methinks.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:08PM
I have no doubt that is true. I would not have bought Rick's latest if he had included any DRM nastiness.
(Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:42AM
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
If you don't have a local non-proprietary copy, own is not the word you are looking for.