this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is “losing a sale” and not getting the money, right?
Both require a license and that license is revocable in both cases. It’s pretty much impossible to enforce the legal use of physical media, so they don’t. Rather, they go after those making copies.
If you ever want to REALLY own your media, make sure it is physical.
“Reasons”
Because lawyers, accountants and MBAs making policy for things they don’t understand.
bourgeoisie lobby in the State
The theory probably revolves around there not being a transfer of the file as much as a copy paste of it.
Physical media can be copied but you need blank physical media to copy it to, in a purely digital eco system both the buyer and seller end up being able to have copies of the sold product, which effectively treats the seller as if they are a vendor of the product being sold.
Basically in a world built on copyright law, being able to buy and sell digital media the same as physical media looks a lot like someone scalping the original product to cut into the maker’s bottom line. Megacorps eating it is pretty dope but it significantly diminishes an individual developer’s ability to profit off their own work as well, especially when software development already encourages so much copy pasting to make software that should be working into software that is working.
This may be a dumb question, but why can’t crypto something or an NFT be imprinted on my copy of the album/picture/whatever so I could sell it and lose my access? It’s this a function of no standardized marketplace for digital goods and services?
Because crypto is a joke and NFTs are vaporware. The concept is honestly laughable. Perfect example for NFTs, my company wanted to advertise that our service could help with the production of NFTs and my boss had put together the ad for it. I advised against it considering the BS and controversy associated with it. It became doubly apparent when I looked at the ad and saw that he had included several of the (in)famous NFTs that had been sold. I point blankly asked him if he had gotten permission to use them. He said no. Then I pointed out that the fact he was able to put them in the ad without asking and paying for the right to to the person who had spent millions on the NFT was exactly my point. NFTs are a scam. Thankfully he saw the light and dropped the whole nonsense.
As for the blockchain in general, it is unsustainable. It requires enormous amounts of power and computing cycles to maintain which gives it a massive eco-footprint and sucks resources needed by actual industries and individuals to support. If you started attributing it to all digital purchases, including resales, it would expand exponentially. It is fine in concept, and if it could function in a passive state somehow it might see usefulness as a purchase and resale history for digital media, but it can’t. It requires many computers maintaining identical records in active communication with each other.
Very enlightening. Thanks! So there’s still some big hurdle of what would be standardized to make resale of digital goods make sense otherwise it’s impossible to police who does and doesn’t have legit copies or who made a copy of the file, etc.
Usually, when the question is “why is copyright restrictive in these evil and/or dumb ways” the safe bet is that the the answer is “Disney.”
There’s a few things about this
- Many times you don’t own the digital good, you subscribe to it. No I’m not joking, that’s why services can usually take it away at any time. You normally own “a licence to play it on a single PC” or similar.
- This isnt apples to oranges per se. Selling digital goods is fine, it’s copying it. Similar to how photocopying a book and selling it would not be okay.
- It’s important to note there is a narrative push by companies too. They spend lots of money putting videos on every DVD saying “downloading is stealing” because if society thinks piracy and stealing is the same, it helps them litigate and make more money.
- Your idea of a lost sale is a hard one, from a media company point of view, it’s about making money. So if you can make people believe “a download is a lost sale” or “sharing a digital file is a lot sale” etc, then you can use that to sue individuals, isps, sharing sites, search engines etc and make more and more money while also having more power over your product.
if you live in the EU you own your digital purchases.
It’s kind of not tested though.
If you’ve never been given the option to download it and save it and use it from there, how would you “own” it if the streaming service takes it offline?
If you can’t transfer ownership of something, or have it past the lifespan of the shop you bought it from, do you really own it? I would say not.
That’s not the ownership though, that’s a subscription to a service. Ownership is something like buying songs on iTunes not listening to them on Apple music.
You can buy individual movies on Amazon without a subscription. This doesn’t mean you own it. If they stop hosting it, it’s gone.
But that is where the difference is, that’s not streaming or at least not as the term is used. That was a purchase of a specific title.
streaming
noun
a method of transmitting or receiving data (especially video and audio material) over a computer network as a steady, continuous flow, allowing playback to start while the rest of the data is still being received.
Whether it’s subscribed, “purchased” or free, if you don’t have the full file to copy and do what you want with it, it’s streaming.
It is tested. In court. https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
That’s software, and frankly until you can transfer a played game to somebody else in Steam, it’s not something that is enforced.
They cannot “oppose it” according to that, but you cannot do it.
But buying a digital movie from Amazon or Sony? They can take that away. Haven’t heard a peep from the EU on it.
You do not. Or we have a different definition for owning.
There is no difference, they just want you to believe there is a difference.
Cos if you believe it then they can make more money.
The point: GREED that’s the difference.
Dude, of course there is a difference. If you sell a physical good you do not have that physical good anymore. If you sell a digital copy you can keep selling that digital copy because you do not necessarily give it away or delete it.
Saying that there is no difference at all between the two is silly.
To be clear, I am not saying this justifies anything regarding copyright, but it is a difference if you can sell something over and over again or just once.
If you sell a digital copy you can keep selling that digital copy because you do not necessarily give it away or delete it.
Steam and other DRM systems ensure that copies cannot be played. Yet you can’t sell your Steam games. It is my understanding that in the EU, you can sell your Steam games. So there is no legitimate reason you can’t sell digital goods.
There were lots of book copying back in the day, and disc copying too ofc.
Thats why copying of an immaterial gpod is not stealing because the other person still has the full ownership over their copy.
One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.
Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.
If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.
Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.
You cannot endlessly duplicate digital data without some loss.
This assumes a conversion on each copy. That’s not how digital copying works. We CAN share the same file indefinitely by copying the data without loss indefinitely. It’s when you transcode/reencode the data that you introduce loss.
it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.
There is one exception: reposted memes, they are losing pixels more and more. /s
Only because of incompetent people using lossy reproduction methods out of ignorance
And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.
And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.
This is why you use PNG or GIF formats. Lossless compression on the PNG side and a LUT on the GIF side. Nothing to get compressed since it is literally just a grid of numbers and a table with the hex codes.
I really wish the social media companies and phone manufacturers would switch to PNG. So much better than JPG.
Lemmy compresses uploads to jpg without asking too
I know, is sad. Would love to see them converting the JPG to PNG. I do see a lot of images coming off here as GIF though, which Facebook doesn’t let me send to people because fuck Facebook.
The storage demands between small compressed JPEG’s and decent quality PNG’s is massive. That’s a lot to ask of people who are self hosting this without any of us paying for it. Especially since 99% of the images loaded up here are one off jokes that are compressed versions from somewhere else already. Pretty clear example of “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” IMO
What about physical media containing digital data, e.g. a CD?
It’s technically illegal to make a copy of that data for yourself and then to sell the original (while keeping the copy). That obviously doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but…
It’s not that straightforward. Copyright is different in that infringement is only enforced by rightsholders through litigation. That means they hato find you, sue you, and make a convincing argument that your backup is harming their market viability.
On that last point, some personal backup is unlikely to be found to be infringing. It’s more problematic if it’s something shared or done in a significant scale.
Because companies have money, and money makes laws.
because making a legitimate copy of a book is a lot more work
Because they somehow don’t consider that someone could have copied the books or discs before reselling them, but it immediately comes to their mind with digital copies riddled with DRMs
Under US law (I see someone else posted about EU law):
Physical property has a long tradition of legal rights that are a part of ownership. There’s a thing called “right of first sale” that means you have the right to sell an object that you own. This legal framework falls under property law, even if the media on the disc is also governed by copyright law. In this case, property law is inviolate - it trumps copyright law.
Digital files are instead governed only by copyright law. Further, media companies could not modify copyright law fast enough to keep up with the digital revolution, so more than copyright, digital files are controlled by digital rights management (DRM) code, and contract law (the long TOS when you access a service or site).
The contract law in the TOS, and code in the DRM, do two things: they force a digital file owner to treat it as a “license,” and give media company the ability to severely restrict use after the purchase.
So basically, when you buy a disc, you are simply getting a lot more rights to use that content. You literally own the copy.
This is why media companies are doing everything that they can to switch customers over to streaming services and stop selling physical content. It’s also why it’s a literal lie when you are told you can “buy” digital copies that have DRM, because those companies will simultaneously charge you the higher “purchase” price and deny you ownership rights as if you bought a disc.
Pretty sure they tried to prevent the sharing and reselling of CDs at one point.
Look up the history of DIVX DVDs. Not to be confused with the DivX video codec.
It’s not? I see digital files being bought and sold all over the place. 3rd party key retailers and even the digital goods earned within games themselves. It’s only illegal for you to copy and sell copies of digital goods. If you have a way to sell the original thing and no longer have access to it, it’s perfectly legal. It’s just not many things let you do that.
