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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the gone-with-the-wind dept.

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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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:47PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:47PM (#1015166)

    What kind of moron would buy any digital goods from anywhere unless you can ensure the ability to back up and use such goods without restriction in this day and age?

    There. FTFY.

    Not letting MS off the hook here, but they aren't exactly the only ones encumbering the things they rent sell. In fact, they're not anywhere near the biggest offenders in that space.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:10AM

    by driverless (4770) on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:10AM (#1015227)

    Yeah, it's everybody, not just MS. For example we (bunch of friends) used to get together and watch some paid-for SF series on Netflix a while back until they suddenly removed it and we'd have to sign up to and pay some other streaming service to watch the content we'd already paid for on Netflix. Apple-loving friend had similar problems, paid-for things would just disappear from time to time. Everything that you pay for online is rented, not owned.

    This is why I buy everything as molecules, not bits, I can watch it, read it, lend it, feed it to the cat, whatever. I own it, I don't rent it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:29PM (#1015358)

    There's a ton of bad actors out there, Apple and Amazon are by far the worst offenders, they both actively used DRM in order to push people to use their products. In both cases, there was a prolonged period where they used exclusive titles and DRM that wasn't available on competing devices to force people to buy their products. Amazon still does it where it's trivial to load ebooks from other vendors onto their Kindles, but there remains no legal way of loading the books onto other ereaders. Apple, at least discontinued the DRM eventually, but not before single handedly destroying the market for MP3 players. Prior to those antitrust violating policies there were a decent number of options available for MP3 players, some of which were far better than anything that Apple ever produced.

    Barnes & Noble by comparison is slightly less terrible, but they've actively gone out and discontinued older DRM schemes and apps making it impossible to backup books from there, even though it used to be something that end users could do. To make matters worse, a lot of people were using 3rd party software to manage their libraries because the stock library software wouldn't do it. You'd have to arrange things on the device itself.

    And don't get me started on Bluray discs which are physical discs that may or may not actually read in a given player because of the asinine encryption.