this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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It's not nebulous. You cannot own digital entertainment unless it is on physical media. You are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want, as long as they have it available, and don't change their terms of service. They say in their terms of service that they can change it whenever they want. There's nothing we can do about it except not buy it in the first place. Their asses are covered quite well with that 60 page document they make you accept. They had a team of high powered lawyers write that thing, knowing that most people will never read it. They conditioned people to accepting the ToS without reading it by pushing ToS acceptance on meaningless things in the early days of software. Everyone became accustomed to just clicking okay, but now it actually does matter, and we still just click okay.
When you buy digital media, whether physical or digital, you are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want. You do not own the media. You don't own the rights to that game just because you have a physical copy of it, you don't have access to the source code, and it is still riddled with DRM. The same applies to movies and music as well.
At the end of the day, whether a piece of media is stored on a Blu-ray/DVD or an HDD/SSD makes little difference. If all ownership means to you is being able to access the media you've purchased a license to consume regardless of its online status, then archive it. Your SSD or HDD is as much a physical media as a Blu-ray disk.
There's a huge difference though with physical media. Yeah, you don't own the movie, but you own the DVD that it's stored on. They're not going to come into your house and take the DVD back. Once you have it, it's yours forever. When you "buy" something hosted on a corporate server, you can lose it if they don't want to host it anymore, as evidenced by this Sony thing, or if they go out of business.
Even when you own the medium that's true, it's just much harder to enforce. As media has gotten more and more capable of being widely shared, the licenses have clamped down harder and harder. From books, to home videos, to video games.