from Hacker News

“If you leave, we'll smash all your digital purchases into oblivion.”

by rahuldottech on 2/25/20, 9:39 PM with 44 comments

  • by WorldMaker on 2/26/20, 1:00 AM

    I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)

  • by wtmt on 2/26/20, 1:41 PM

    I'm not going to debate ethics or local legalities here, but I believe that pirating (where feasible) is perfectly fine as an alternative to preserving what these sellers impose restrictions on. Where it does get tricky is, in addition to pirating, whether to pay for the DRMd walled garden items and voting with one's wallet that what they're doing is fine, so that the artists/developers behind the content get something. I don't have a black and white answer to this. Sometimes it seems like supporting these evil corporations is evil.

    This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).

    The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.

  • by znpy on 2/26/20, 12:53 AM

    i kept torrenting, no matter what the new platform of the year was.

    companies came and went, my torrents are still with me.

    sharing is caring.

  • by ALittleLight on 2/25/20, 11:47 PM

    I don't get it. You delete or close the account you use to access the digital content, what is the expectation here? That you can keep accessing it without an account? How would they know what you own?

  • by robomartin on 2/26/20, 6:02 AM

    I have this problem right now, sort of. I purchased dozens of Kindle books through my personal Amazon account over the years. Now I prefer to do so through my business account. Yet, I want all of them available through the same device. Well, that’s a pain in the behind. I have to call Amazon support for help and have been procrastinating because I know it will be a one hour ordeal.

    This is why I prefer to purchase digital books as PDF files. I keep them on Dropbox and my local drive and they are great to handle and read.

  • by harry8 on 2/26/20, 3:07 AM

    Apple did this to my wife when she moved countries. Property is theft, apparently so some are justified in stealing it without compensation. How it is legal in any civilized country or not against WTO rules i can't understand. Maybe it is illegal. Maybe it is contrary to WTO rules?

  • by drummer on 2/26/20, 1:40 AM

    Anyone remember Microsoft's Zune?

  • by downerending on 2/25/20, 10:16 PM

    Yeah, super-irritating. I bought about a dozen movies through Google Play before I realized that their platform was going to fail.

  • by dredmorbius on 2/26/20, 10:06 AM