At CinemaCon this year, the Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said the organization is going to work with Congress to establish and enforce a site-blocking legislation in the United States.
If I have the files on my own hard drive with no DRM or control on when or how I can play the game, how can you say I don’t own it? What would be the difference between “licensing” and “owning”?
Having something and owning something are very different things, otherwise car rentals would be a lot more expensive :)
In my opinion, you don’t own something if you’re not allowed to sell it, lend it out to friends, or give it away for free. With almost all digital files, doing most of those things will constitute piracy. All the second hand ebook stores I know of have been killed in court because digital ownership
DRM free files are probably the closest thing to ownership over files (except maybe for NFT grifts), but true ownership of virtual items is almost never sold. Virtual items don’t really exist, all they are is the material they describe, which consists almost entirely of IP.
This is also why piracy isn’t prosecuted as theft (though the media cartel likes to pretend it is), because piracy is IP infringement above anything else.
I can see where you’re coming from - if I sell or give away my copy of the game (like literally I delete my copy and send another copy to someone else), I suppose that isn’t really seen like that from a law perspective? I guess because there’s almost no way to verify that I deleted my copy. I still feel like we should be able to own stuff like that.
The annoying thing is that legally, at least where I live, selling this stuff is permitted, but any serious attempt to do so gets shut down by lawsuits because you can obviously upload endless copies of second hand media to sell.
Licenses can be sold, though, and EULA terms forbidding that are worthless, but good luck selling games from your GoG/iTunes inventory. One-on-one you can honour the deal, and physical disks with DRM also work to properly sell media, but DRM free files are impossible to sell on any serious scale.
This isn’t even a copyright problem necessarily, it’s the result of information, like the composition of electrons in flash storage that can be copied exactly in seconds, having value. I want my games/music/videos DRM free, mostly because I want to play them on Linux to be honest, but I also can’t think of any way a company can stay afloat selling DRM-free media if people with bad intentions are given the freedom I want.
Of course, this is a piracy community, so business viability is not much of a priority to most here, but we need some of these companies to survive, or there won’t be anything to pirate.
If I have the files on my own hard drive with no DRM or control on when or how I can play the game, how can you say I don’t own it? What would be the difference between “licensing” and “owning”?
Having something and owning something are very different things, otherwise car rentals would be a lot more expensive :)
In my opinion, you don’t own something if you’re not allowed to sell it, lend it out to friends, or give it away for free. With almost all digital files, doing most of those things will constitute piracy. All the second hand ebook stores I know of have been killed in court because digital ownership
DRM free files are probably the closest thing to ownership over files (except maybe for NFT grifts), but true ownership of virtual items is almost never sold. Virtual items don’t really exist, all they are is the material they describe, which consists almost entirely of IP.
This is also why piracy isn’t prosecuted as theft (though the media cartel likes to pretend it is), because piracy is IP infringement above anything else.
I can see where you’re coming from - if I sell or give away my copy of the game (like literally I delete my copy and send another copy to someone else), I suppose that isn’t really seen like that from a law perspective? I guess because there’s almost no way to verify that I deleted my copy. I still feel like we should be able to own stuff like that.
The annoying thing is that legally, at least where I live, selling this stuff is permitted, but any serious attempt to do so gets shut down by lawsuits because you can obviously upload endless copies of second hand media to sell.
Licenses can be sold, though, and EULA terms forbidding that are worthless, but good luck selling games from your GoG/iTunes inventory. One-on-one you can honour the deal, and physical disks with DRM also work to properly sell media, but DRM free files are impossible to sell on any serious scale.
This isn’t even a copyright problem necessarily, it’s the result of information, like the composition of electrons in flash storage that can be copied exactly in seconds, having value. I want my games/music/videos DRM free, mostly because I want to play them on Linux to be honest, but I also can’t think of any way a company can stay afloat selling DRM-free media if people with bad intentions are given the freedom I want.
Of course, this is a piracy community, so business viability is not much of a priority to most here, but we need some of these companies to survive, or there won’t be anything to pirate.
Capitalist nonsense. Basically, having those files is a legal liability. So why not just steal?