> I wonder if a better solution would be allowing people to really own digital goods they buy the way you do physical copyrighted goods.
the situation with blurays and dvds is not much better. "own" is not quite the right word for what's going on here; it's more like a permanent transferable license. you can freely buy/sell them second-hand, but AFAIK it is technically still illegal to make backups, even for personal use (since it involves circumventing DRM).
as both a long-time torrenter and someone who works on proprietary software project, I'm somewhat conflicted on this topic. for the consumer, it's best to just get the product unencumbered by DRM and do what you want with it. on the flip side, I really need people to actually pay for the thing that I work on so I can get an income. not all pirated copies are "lost sales", but some are. I've certainly pirated stuff that I would have paid for and paid for stuff only because it wasn't cracked yet. not sure what the middle ground is here.
sadly, I'm not sure the average person even cares that much. I follow a couple specific TV shows where I'm invested in what happens next. with the current balkanization, it would probably cost me $50+ a month to have access to the handful of things I actually want to watch. but most people I know just want something to watch, often just to have it playing in the background. they don't particularly care what it is or if it was well-made.
I never really thought of this before, but now that I have I'm confused about backups. In particular, why do we back up some types things but not others?
I've never made backups of my books.
I've never made backups of my vinyl records or my cassette tapes.
I have made backups of all my CDs.
If the backup is to protect against loss of or damage to the media, I should be backing up books and records and tapes, and not backing up CDs. CDs live in a protective case, only coming out for short trips to a CD player, where they are played entirely enclosed, and playback does not cause any wear on the play surface.
Records and tapes are degrade slightly each time you play them. Books also suffer wear each time they are read, and are usually read in environments where they can suffer accidents.
One can buy a second copy and donate it to the Library or give it to a friend. Now it's offsite, like all backups should be, and one doesn't advance technology much to achieve this. Depending on how you attribute a "cost" to the time it would take to make a duplicate of a physical copy, it may even be less expensive.
Interesting. I do have digital backups of all (or, nearly all... some are hard to find) of my physical books. I didn't make them from my own copy of course, but I still consider my digital library to be a backup of my physical bookshelves. Maybe this isn't as common as I had imagined, but I thought it was a fairly reasonable thing to do.
to be honest, I think "backup" is somewhat euphemistic. the real reason we "backup" CDs is because it is much more convenient to play their content from a computer than from a CD player. it's also trivial to make a lossless copy of a CD, unlike vinyl.
sure, I'm not saying the idea of archiving is illegitimate! just that I don't think this is why most people rip CDs. they do it because they want to make playlists, play songs on their ipod, etc. I don't think it even occurs to most people that a CD degrades over time.
the situation with blurays and dvds is not much better. "own" is not quite the right word for what's going on here; it's more like a permanent transferable license. you can freely buy/sell them second-hand, but AFAIK it is technically still illegal to make backups, even for personal use (since it involves circumventing DRM).
as both a long-time torrenter and someone who works on proprietary software project, I'm somewhat conflicted on this topic. for the consumer, it's best to just get the product unencumbered by DRM and do what you want with it. on the flip side, I really need people to actually pay for the thing that I work on so I can get an income. not all pirated copies are "lost sales", but some are. I've certainly pirated stuff that I would have paid for and paid for stuff only because it wasn't cracked yet. not sure what the middle ground is here.
sadly, I'm not sure the average person even cares that much. I follow a couple specific TV shows where I'm invested in what happens next. with the current balkanization, it would probably cost me $50+ a month to have access to the handful of things I actually want to watch. but most people I know just want something to watch, often just to have it playing in the background. they don't particularly care what it is or if it was well-made.