- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Do you actually own anything digital?::From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no
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Well, I have 10 Tb of pirated digital content sitting safely at my own home, so I would say yes, yes I do own a lot of digital stuff.
Right there with you buddy, 13TB and growing. Self hosted media servers are the best.
They’re my bytes, and I’ll put them in whatever order I wish, thank you very much.
Torrent that Shit so that it can live forever
I do 😉
If it’s on my Jellyfin server, I own it as much it’s possible to own anything.
If they wanted me to pay for it, maybe they shouldn’t have dicked me around, watering down my subscribed services while simultaneously jacking up the price.
Mate lets start a new 123.movies from your servers we will be millionares
you don’t have to pay for it, but you’re also not entitled to it no matter how much they dick around with their service.
do you really feel like they’ve wronged you in some way and pirating gets you even?
Yes.
Wronged me? Yep. Absolutely.
yes
What do you mean by “entitled” here? Could you explain that word in that context to me?
He’s saying that you shouldn’t feel like you deserve the products you paid for… Not really sure what he’s advocating for though :')
nah I’m good
Yes, because I go out of my way to make damn sure of it.
How ? Please share so that people like me can learn. I’ve started watching Louis Rossman YouTube videos and that guy actually makes sense about how companies are treating their customers.
Not the OP, but I’m buying DRM free ebooks and software only, and for every album, movie or series I purchase, I’ll download a pirated copy that I add to my offline storage + backup.
If a book I want is not available without DRM, I’ll buy a hardcover and a pirated copy.
Also you can remove some types of DRM with DeDRM plugin for calibre.
For music, buy a record on Bandcamp to support the actual artists instead of the record label and they give you free FLAC or high quality MP3 downloads along with all physical media. Otherwise pirate the album for a digital copy and buy the physical in a store.
Pirate stuff. That’s the easiest way to make sure you own it
Even if you buy it(which I do support more and more), pirate it. We’re at a point where it’s just far easier to use the pirated versions of a lot of digital items and you also don’t have to worry about someone “taking it back” afterwards.
Hello, owner of lemmy.world!
i do if i stole it
Based af
ARRR!!!
If I can actually download it and it’s DRM-free, yes.
The only certain way to own digital products is apparently to pirate it illegally.
Gog provides DRM free installers when buying games at their store
And plenty of steam games are DRM-free too.
I really wish steam made it clear though. Should have to come with a tag stating DRM/no DRM. Shit, let us filter games by its DRM status.
Don’t all games on Steam get the basic DRM treatment?
Nah, it’s optional
However, because steam doesn’t tell you which games are DRM, and companies have been known to arbitrarily add DRM in updates, I generally treat steam games as being DRM games
Nah, you can buy it legally and break the drm illegally. That is what someone I know very well does with my, ahm, their ebooks.
Removing DRM from content you bought is actually legal
What’s illegal is doing so for the purposes of sharing whatever was DRM’d in the first place
Not that it stops me
It depends on the jurisdiction. Removal is illegal in some countries
Fyi, steam doesn’t add additional DRM to games. So long as the maker hasn’t added anything significant, you can often just copy the game folder out, and run it independently. There’s nothing (in theory) to stop you backing it up yourself.
Steam itself is drm though. If you have a pc that can’t connect to the internet or is no longer compatible with steam (like an XP pc for example), even if you have the game files, you can’t play then without first installing and updating steam.
I have an XP pc for period-era gaming and I can’t touch anything steam related for it so instead I have to either look for them on the internet archive or hope there is still a torrent for such an old game. Or failing both, actually find a physical copy. This still means I can’t really play Valve’s XP games though because of their requirement of Steam no matter how you bought the game.
Sort of, but only if you’re launching through Steam. You can launch DRM-free Steam games through the executable file without launching Steam if you already have the files downloaded.
Games on Steam don’t require Steamworks or any other DRM, if your game won’t launch without Steam running that’s a choice by the game developer and not a restriction imposed for Steam.
There is a whole list of drm-free games that will work without the launcher or with instructions on how to make them run without the launcher. If a game makes use of Steam’s APIs, it won’t run without proper authentication when opened with the launcher even if it is drm-free. You would need to launch it directly from the game’s files in that case.
I’ll look into it, saves me buying a game again on gog
There’re few games that work like that. Many use the steam basic drm, making the game not launching if a valid steam session is not running.
That’s why I have the generic steam crack. In case they pull the plug some day.
GOG, buy music in mp3/flac format, not sure about video. I guess you can pay for subscription and just pirate stuff you like to keep real ownership.
I like that on GOG you know you own it because they let you download the installer DRM free so you literally can keep a separate copy of all of your purchases. You will always have access to them regardless of what happens to GOG. Videos, music, games, everything they sell.
Yep, I always check GOG first when I want to buy a game on PC.
I think I own my fingers, so them.
Those who down voted you are either idiots, or hate clever wordplay
or they just hate OP for still having their fingers
I don’t get it
Digit is the medical term for a finger. Digital is the term for pertaining to or describing the fingers
Haha alright that’s pretty clever word play
Or they saw that I made the same joke five hours before this one? :p
If you’re on Lemmy, you almost certainly understand the problem and know how to acturally own digital stuff.
The problem is all the normies who can’t even see the problem. We need everyone to be protected by law and it all to be citizen oriented. As the moment, it’s all stacked in favour of exploitive multinational companies. Maybe ever was it so, but we need to fight that.
We treat it as a tech problem, something to work round, but it’s a political problem and we need to solve it politically.
This.
Also, we all here are aware of the problem, to the point where such posts are nothing but circlejerk.
The article might come as eye-opener to some, but certainly not here. Time for solutions. And they are political.
Drives me mad the main stream seam unaware/ignoring that it’s about anything free piracy. You hear next to nothing about the problem of DRM, digital ownership, digital freedom or even proper competition in proper markets. There is sometimes mentions of Right To Repair, but they never follow the thread. Or talk about how the internet runs on FOSS. A FOSS system like Debian is a wonder, that still, after 15y of use, floors me when I think about it. A utopian vision of humans can do.
I get you
Drives me even more insane when they actively complain about losing access to something, or not having it available offline, and do nothing about it
Like, here’s the super simple solution, just take it!
But they won’t sacrifice a tiny bit of their habit to break free. They’ll keep on whining about the world and not doing anything, even when they are directed to it with the most simple, grandma-style guidance.
They can’t really perceive what is being done to them. They can notice something, but can’t quite put it all together.
Voices like EFF, OpenRightsGroup, FSC, etc, need to be heard and made understandable by normal people, news and government.
This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become huge. Keep the idiots out.
Seriously, sometimes I wish we could get all the shitty execs and politicians alone in a room with all of us and just insult them for their shitty behavior, like the Chevy Chase comedy central roast.
I mean who wouldn’t want to see the expression on the head of Nestle’s face when he’s told his mother should have swallowed?
They know full well we hate them, that wouldn’t help, and would vent the anger we need to make an actual sensible change.
Aye, I be ownin’ it all, mateys!
Aye aye, only the finest and cleanest wares on my drives
The top Linux isos
I’ve got a digital watch
My digital watch, a Pebble, stopped working. The company who maintained it got bought by Garmin. Garmin broke my digital watch 🙃.
Mine is a Casio I’ve had for about 30 years, I’m pretty sure it’s mine by now
Nope, once you die, it belongs to someone else.
Does gadgetbridge not work?
I had trouble with some watchfaces. Couldn’t get my favs working consistently.
The only problem with your story is that Garmin didn’t buy any Pebble assets.
It was Fitbit.
Thanks for the correction.
Like Doctorow said, if you cant own it you can’t steal it.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law, so I 90% own a whole lot of stuff I pirated while I don’t own most things Ive paid money for… Great system guys
No.
It all depends on the licence. Even if you buy something on physical media you may not technically own it. If something has a FOSS licence MIT, BSD, GPL, etc Then yes you do own your copy and no one can change that.
I may only have a license to view the contents of a dvd, but at least I’ll always be able to view it as long as it’s in my possession and I have a dvd player.
Content you can only access remotely via someone else systems (or requiring remote authorization via there systems) can be taken away at anytime regardless of the terms of your license, even supposedly “indefinite/permanent/lifetime” licences.
Both of these items use the same term ‘purchase’. This term used to refer to the first situation only, but now it covers both.
If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing.
We get it, every comment on every Lemmy post. We get it.
- FOSS licenses are distribution licenses, not EULAs. You have the right to own and use software you acquire even without agreeing to them; they only “kick in” when you decide to do something that would otherwise violate copyright law.
I liked the explicit way version 2 of the GPL explained it:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Version 3 says the same, but less clearly (note that “affirms” is entirely different from “grants”):
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.
- EULAs presume to “grant” you something you already have due to the First Sale Doctrine (namely, the right to use your property) and are therefore complete bunk as they lack “consideration.” If you believe EULAs are somehow valid just because the copyright cartel’s shysters say so, you need to learn to quit taking advice from the enemy!
We still own all our CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays, so them as long as the players still exist.
Only if the DRM is broken. DRM can make the player stop working sooner. It’s literally about making the media less playable.
