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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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Cum tacent, clamant. When they are silent, they shout. -Cicero
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:53AM
(Looks at literally hundreds of CD and DVDs, many of which he's owned since his university days - 20+ years ago - that are all perfectly intact, scratchless, read-perfectly, haven't degraded and aren't even subject to any extreme measures... I keep them in their cases and the case on a shelf - commercial, homemade, data, video, music...)
What the hell are you doing to them?
Don't get me wrong, I have cloud accounts for anything for the last 5+ years or so, just for convenience, but unreadable CDs and DVDs? Nope. My father-in-law still has his entire CD/DVD collection (thousands!) of everything he's ever watched or liked (back to 70's comedies and things that were originally on tape) in a big case that has been transported to the dozen countries he lives in - he literally bins the cases, puts them in a sleeve, and shoves them all in a huge case all jammed up against each other. That case has been on world voyages, through storms, the deserts of the Middle East, etc.
And quite a few of both of the above are CD-R's and DVD-R's that I've made for him.
Example: When I was in uni 20+ years ago, I downloaded some software and "ebooks" (just LaTeX files and Doc files and the like back then, not ePub or PDF!) and all kinds of things for my course. I burned them onto the cheapest of cheap CD-Rs (at 1x speed!). I always made two copies of everything and put them in a sleeved folder. I made dozens of them, each with two copies.
To this day, I can pull those CD-Rs and they verify against each other, against their CRC (yes, I recorded it!) in a master document.
The very best, though, is that I always burned-and-verified at the same time (it would take hours just to burn-and-verify two discs!). One disc - I can literally remember the exact one - burned one good copy and the second failed the verify. I checked it. I had time on my hands, so I actually run a compare and found the file on the disc that had the corrupted area. When I did a file compare, it was literally one byte different (and being a ZIP file it then threw a wobbler because it failed its own CRC check) to its partner and the original source.
I then found that I could literally copy that ZIP file, hex-edit the one-byte change, and it would become a valid ZIP file again, extract perfectly, and the contents were all intact. No word of a lie, I stuck a post-it note on that CD-R with the filename and which byte needed to be changed. 20+ years later... you can read that CD, pull that ZIP file off, change that one byte, and it will extract and work and exactly match it's mirrored partner disk! You can read ALL the CD's (and a couple of DVD-Rs I think). Every one. Every byte. Every checksum matches.
That case has been in my loft, on my shelves, through 4 house moves, etc. and all the disks - the cheapest, junkiest, CD-Rs - read perfectly, both copies, all the time.
I don't know what you're doing to your CDs, but I suspect that it's your handling of them.
Literally, in my lifetime, I have "owned" one "unplayable" DVD (not counting region restrictions, etc.) - it was a copy of Finding Nemo I bought cheap at a bootsale for my daughter, and it was scratched to shit from the second we bought it. That's it. One. I get that kids could trash them, they aren't invincible, but the only damaged one I have is nothing to do with me!
Cloud is better for daily use, I agree, but the other day, I literally looked around my workplace for a USB DVD drive that I could connect to my phone (it's cheaper to use an adaptor and a USB than it is to find a USB-C DVD drive), so I could watch physical DVDs in bed / on holiday / etc. I've just bought two HUGE box sets, about 50 DVDs and I'm working my way through them, and getting the ISO off them, storing it, sending it to my phone, playing it with VLC on my phone, etc. - especially with region protection etc. - is a pain in the butt.
However, I've had cloud cut out on me more (the service, not my connection) several times. There's a reason I have Google Play Movies and Amazon Prime, etc.