Ramblings of a Madman

“Piracy is not a matter of price; it is a matter of convenience.” – Gabe Newell

The utter annoyance and inconvenience of being forced to use give money to some streaming service or yet another storefront is one of the biggest gripes I read about when this discussion crops up. It’s inevitable. And it’s a discussion that I believe needs to be had.

Before I get into ownership, we first need to explore some other related concepts. Purchasing, renting, and leasing.

Purchasing. What is it?

First up: purchasing. This should be straightforward, yet it’s actually kind of, shall we say, sinister. When you purchase a physical product, you buy the product and can use it whenever and however you want. So it is easy to assume this is how it would work with digital products.

More often than not, this isn’t the case. I’m going to use Amazon quite a bit throughout, as it’s likely the most recognizable online storefront.

When you purchase a piece of digital media from Amazon, you aren’t purchasing the media itself. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Ebook, an audiobook, or a video. You are purchasing what amounts to a sub-license of the license that Amazon purchased from the copyright holder.

This means that you can only use that media in the region you purchased it in, you can only use it through Amazon applications, and your license can be revoked by Amazon at any time for any reason. This primarily occurs when you go to a region where Amazon doesn’t have the rights to that content or if Amazon loses the rights in the region in which you purchased it.

This situation is much more akin to leasing the product than buying it outright, yet it isn’t reflected by these companies. They put the parts about revoking access in the fine print somewhere, knowing that very few people actually read that stuff.

Leasing and Renting, or, How to Burn Money

The biggest difference in this leasing situation is that you don’t know when that access is up. They aren’t required to tell you when you are going to lose access. It just happens.

Normally, when you lease something, an appliance or a car being the most common, you sign a contract that provides use conditions, a time period, and buyout conditions. You get none of that with digital media. They only do that when you instead choose the “rent” option.

Renting is the most straightforward option here. You fork over a few bucks, have thirty days to start watching, and once you start, 48 hours to finish. Simple, but the cost of that builds up over time, and most people would rather pay for something once, especially if they know they’re going to use it over and over.

Now, lets come back around to ownership, or what it means to own something. In a sane world, this allows you unbridled access to the thing you’ve purchased, with little to no arbitrary use conditions attached.

You Will Own Nothing, and You Will be Happy

You rarely get that with purchased digital media. You’re locked into a specific software ecosystem, and can only use that media with that ecosystem. In the case of Amazon, that software being Prime Video, Kindle, and Audible.

You can “download” your media. That’s in quotes because while true, you can’t use it however you want. It just means that you can use it when you go offline; you still must use the respective piece of software.

This license/sub-license system is what I believe needs changing. And I believe that it would actually be a decent use of federal regulations.

These companies should be made to provide a DRM free piece of media in a common format. This would allow you to download it and use it however and whenever you want. You could setup a Plex server, you could simply just tuck it away in storage, knowing that the only thing that could prevent access is a hardware failure.

Whether it’s solely for the sake of convenience, or because they want to stick it to the man, many people are opting to dust off their pirate hats and hoist the black flag once more. And quite frankly, I don’t blame them.