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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: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:53PM (1 child)

    Is there a website with these DRM discontinuation/disablement events on a timeline somewhere? This is the kind of thing that you want to be able to point people to when they say, "I'll just get the [DRM] version on [FAANG-scale company evil enough to flat-out ignore your complaints]"

    Except this kind of stuff isn't anything new or even unusual. How does the line go from the 1997(!) movie "Men in Black"? "I guess I'm going to have to buy the White Album again."

    That was a reference to the "minidiscs" that folks were trying to push on us back then. And we had the same issues with CDs, videocassettes and DVDs as well.

    There is no reason (other than enriching those who control/rent media) to force people to repeatedly buy the same content. In fact, the First Sale Doctrine [wikipedia.org] was supposed to address that. But somehow "on a computer" invalidates this.

    If you can't control your property, it isn't *your* property. Full Stop.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:34PM (#1015360)

    Except you didn't have to do that except in unusual instances. Vinyl is still being produced with new albums and the players to play them were never discontinued. If you've got huge sums of cash, you can even get ones that will read the discs without even touching them. Yes, 8-tracks were discontinued pretty thoroughly, it's been decades since they were available for anything other than studio use, but cassettes appear to still be alive and kicking. Of course, you also have the failed or truly obsolete ones, wax tubes, laser disc, video on vinyl, Betamax, HD-DVD, but those shouldn't really count as most of them never sold well enough to get off the ground. I think the wax tubes are the only ones that ever had much penetration and even then it was followed up by a much more practical medium relatively soon after invention.

    So, yeah, it did happen, but the likelihood of needing to buy a new copy based on obsolescence was more or less zero as in most of those cases, you could either retain the hardware to play the media you had, or you could transfer it to a newer technology.