This is why I buy my music through Bandcamp.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 1:54 PM on December 15 [8 favorites]

This is good info. I'm that friend/family member who likes to tell people whenever the topic comes up that they're only "renting" any digital content they thought they bought (and yes, I fully recognize how insufferable that is). My wife has a much more healthy approach. She's not one for re-reading books, so she treats book "purchases" as an entertainment fee, much like buying a ticket to a movie. She'll keep them as long as she has space on her device, but doesn't much care if they disappear. For anything she thinks she'll want to re-read, she'll buy a hard-copy. For music, however, which she'll listen to multiple times and wants to own, she'll only purchase from venues that let her download the MP3s.

Neither of us "buys" TV/movies, mostly for this reason, though occasionally we will formally rent from one of the streaming services.
posted by Pedantzilla at 2:16 PM on December 15

*climbs atop soapbox, clears throat*

The All Digital Everything Future harms so many public library users specifically. A LOT of the people who visit my rural Oregon library system use our DVD catalog as if it was [Popular Streaming Service]. They have either spotty internet or none at all, so grabbing a stack of movies and TV seasons sets them up for the weekend.

I hate how many times I've had to tell a patron "sorry, I can't even interlibrary loan this for you because it does not exist on DVD." (I have SO MANY Indigenous patrons who would love it if our library was able to loan out Hulu's Reservation Dogs, for instance.)

Netflix, Amazon, Disney... all the streaming services with exclusive content that they refuse to put on physical media because it's much more profitable to them to parcel content out to you a month at a time in a format you can't share with anyone else.

A pox on all their houses!
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 2:28 PM on December 15 [23 favorites]

Our phones are definitely listening to us. I've had experiences where I'll be talking to my girlfriend about some weird, super specific little thing - like maybe we were joking about a manatee Christmas ornament - and then she'll sit down to read stuff on her phone and show me that she just got an ad for a manatee Christmas ornament. If that happened once or twice I could write it off as a freaky coincidence, but that shit happens a lot. You've probably got stories like that too. I read these articles saying it's an urban legend, and... no. The tech exists to listen to us, feed us targeted ads, keep tabs on dissidents, etc. Of course the fuckers will use it.

/tinfoil hat rant.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:33 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

You have a massive collection of e-books, music, video games, software, and movies that you bought as a digital download downloaded from somewhere, and you probably think you own them, like you own a physical book or a DVD.

and you'd be absolutely correct.
posted by alchemist at 2:37 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

even physical copies of software may have the same licenses that restrict such ownership. hoarding media does not solve this "problem"
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:44 PM on December 15

Just the one swan, actually: This is why I buy my music through Bandcamp.

Nth-ing Bandcamp. I'm usually an advocate also of Qobuz.com but I discovered that a few of my purchases from their download store are no longer available to re-download.

Physical media is so much easier to track when you use your post-sale rights. Data is harder to track, but the EFF would be entirely against a cryptographic enclave (with full DRM and network-attested integrity) and ledger where you have the data until you sell onwards, and then the digital locks stop you from accessing that specific copy once the rights have sold onward. Copyright infringement (not piracy) is looming in the background of this note and the fix, as said by gaben of Steam, is convenience not bigger locks.
posted by k3ninho at 2:48 PM on December 15

Here's the latest scam that Audible is pulling: the books you buy there are supposed to be "yours forever." But I started noticing that some books I know I'd listened to previously weren't in my app. However, I listen to books on Libby and Libro as well and can never remember where I did so. My brain starts thinking, "Oh, that musta been Libby," and then I consider purchasing from Audible.

But... then I log into Audible.com and click My Library and search for it there. And, it is there on the computer. When I reopen the app to confirm, it's still only offering me the ability to Purchase.

So, I contact Audible support and they confirm I did buy it, so they refund me the credit so I can buy it again. When I ask why, they tell me the publisher must have reupped the files due to complaints about a glitch or a mistake in the table of contents or something and therefore my app isn't recognizing it as the same file I already paid for. "Then why does my computer recognize it?" I ask, and am told that's a very good question but am given no answer.

The whole thing is ridiculous, right? But wait! I have not yet gotten to the ridiculous part, dear reader.

I guess a lot of people were having this problem and Audible was tired of giving them the credit back, so what they've now done is made it so that you cannot contact customer support unless you have an active membership! And by active, I mean active. Even if you have credits to spend (which you've paid for), but you've paused your membership to catch up on your listening, you cannot contact support!

So, just unpause and then contact them, right? Yup... but guess what? You cannot repause your membership after contacting support because you can only pause your membership once every six months so then you're stuck needing to spend credits that aren't going to roll over before you can repause.

If you recontact support and scream at them because of this, they will repause for you, but only after denying a few times that they're capable of that. Absolute horseshit.

I've been a member there since before Amazon bought them and have over 1100 books through them but now I just use Libro or Libby. I have one credit that will never expire (given to me for a book I'd previously purchased that disappeared), which I will never use, just so I'm able to unpause and contact customer service about other titles of mine they may disappear.

Amazon is evil.
posted by dobbs at 2:49 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]

Do I really own the digital media I bought?

I own all mine. And my copies of all the digital media other people were kind enough to share with me. They're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything. There isn't a single DRM-encumbered one in the bunch because fuck that noise.

If the company you bought it from shuts down, changes its terms, or just flat out loses the rights to what you’ve “bought,” that content can be clawed back from your devices.

Solution there is to use devices that suck less.

That said, it's quite sad that in 2024 that probably involves rolling your own.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

I resigned myself to this a long while ago, partly because I don't even own all the thousands of physical books I owned, not any more. Nor do I own the physical CDs, tapes, or albums I had once. My life has been a succession of purges, and while I am a voracious reader and still buy books (bought four at the bookstore just today), I only save a few and treat the rest as fodder for the Little Free Library or the nice people who come pick up my thrift donations.

I'm not saying this is virtuous or anything. It's just that I figured out bit by bit that I can't carry it all with me, even assuming the world wasn't run by evil corporate monsters, and that detaching myself from most of my music, books, and movies cushions the anxiety of possible loss.

I think the final blow was when my husband the computer consultant was moving my files from an old computer to a new one and forgot to bring over all my PhD dissertation fieldwork and analysis files before he wiped the old computer. I cried for three days, even though I had defended long before, and then I decided I wasn't going to let it matter.
posted by Peach at 3:17 PM on December 15 [5 favorites]

I go back and forth on this. I tend to think it might be better to dump streaming services and just buy stuff. I did that for a while and have a big back catalog--with major holes that I'm now unwilling to pay to fill. The streaming services make it too easy.

I feel like one of the things I owe my children is to crack all the digital media I've bought over the years.

While it's true that I have a massive trove of VERY SPECIFIC PDFs, they may be more interested in the other stuff that'll go into and out of streaming catalogs but will be very cheap to store as that gets easier and easier.

I know how to do this with Kindle books, though I've never really bothered. I'm less certain that this is possible with movies, or music that I've now handed over to Apple perhaps one too many times.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:19 PM on December 15

Unlicensed media is better than licensed media. Scene MKV files will be replayable on open source systems forever.
posted by Nelson at 3:27 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

hey're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything

The last time this came up here (can't find a link now) it finally got me started on going back to physical media and setting up kodi on an rpi5. Amazon Prime Video shoving ads into everything recently felt more like vindication than yet another turn of the screw.

DVDs and BDs can live on a spindle and not take up much space. Makemkv and Libredrive firmware on an appropriate BD disk drive gets you everything from DVDs up through 4k UHD blu rays. And done. You now have your own netflix.

One of the upsides to this is that when Christmas rolls around some of the typical Christmas movies (like Die Hard) will not be available on most streaming services (but *of course* will be available for a digital rental). Now you don't have to worry about individual titles disappearing and reappearing when you want to watch something.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:27 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

hey're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything

While I concur that this is an excellent way to keep your media (I raise you 'op shop hard copy' in addition to personal servers, because I have had one too many hard drive crashes in my life to risk digital only), it's also a massive, massive amount of skill and experience to achieve. My siblings do not have the same skill set and rely on digital for a lot of their media. The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up, and they too deserve to hang onto their media.
posted by Jilder at 3:42 PM on December 15

When I was a kid, I knew a couple of families who had multiple types of computers for multiple purposes, and it seemed inevitable that’s something I would have as an adult. As a teenager, I happily ripped CDs and waited 30 minutes for an mp3 to download over a dialup connection on a noisy phone line.

Now, I have an aging laptop, phone, Kindle, and Xbox One, and the idea of devoting the time and space to setting up a home media server and loading content onto it feels deeply depressing, especially when I think about backups and other periodic maintenance and equipment failures. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had a spouse and kids, but for me on my own, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
posted by smelendez at 3:45 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up

Friend of mine had her mind absolutely blown when I showed up at her place with a 64GB USB stick full of mp3s and gave her a copy.

Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
posted by flabdablet at 3:49 PM on December 15

If you do want to set up a home media system, a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough. It can download and serve video, music, even transcode 1080p in realtime (and maybe 4k). The software part still requires some hackery, it's definitely an enthusiast project.
posted by Nelson at 3:49 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

I've started buying DVDs and blue rays of my really beloved niche films for this very reason
posted by treepour at 3:52 PM on December 15

flabdablet: "Music? Without an Internet connection?"

We also used to buy (buy!) songs in sets of 10 or so, rather than a la carte. We called these sets "albums." Sometimes albums had a unifying theme running through them, and the songs were ordered intentionally to create a certain artistic effect. An elegant delivery mechanism from a more civilized time.
posted by adamrice at 4:04 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

The only problem with Bandcamp is that I can't get all the music I want from there. So I buy from Apple, which has no DRM on their music, and download and store it outside of Apple Music.

As for ebooks...let's just say I no longer worry about losing the ability to read any of them whenever I want. I still have paper copies of the truly life-changing ones.
posted by lhauser at 4:13 PM on December 15

a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough

CoreELEC on any of the tiny single board computers it supports works great too. I run it on an Odroid N2 (since superseded by the N2+). Half the price of the Beelink and eats about 5 watts running flat out, less than 1W idling.

My CoreELEC board doesn't have storage attached, though - that's on another N2+ out in the back shed with a bunch of USB3 hard drives hanging off it to make up a RAID5 array. They eat a bit more power but still rather less than a typical Intel based mini PC. But if your media collection is modest enough to fit on say a 10TB USB3 backup drive, that can just be plugged straight into the N2+ running CoreELEC.
posted by flabdablet at 4:14 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Just the one swan, actually

Whoa. I'm forty more!
posted by 41swans at 4:30 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough

Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server. My wife is pissed off at Bezos and wants to get off Prime, and more generally is interested in reducing our reliance on streaming services. I have a perhaps-naive fantasy of driving my TV with a NUC-like box with a (probably external) optical drive for ripping media and a nice big drive for file storage. But... I'm busy with work and family, so I imagine it's going to be hard for me to find time to go off beaten paths.

While (as a programmer) I have used a computer or two in my day, I'm really not familiar with the real-world state of the relevant hardware, software, or whatever DRMy obstacles media companies have put in the way of my actually-and-unironically-completely-legal fantasy.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 4:43 PM on December 15

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