https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1478&context=wmlr

Case precedent and law proves you incorrect. Fixed copies of digital assets have repeatedly been proven to be capable of being “owned”. There is no requirement that an item be a physical, tangible good in order to be owned. I don’t know where you’re getting your information (because you refuse to cite it), but it’s incorrect.

You’re confusing ownership of media with ownership of copyright. I’m not suggesting that I can buy an mp3 and reshare it (or the same for an ebook), that’s a violation of copyright. I’ve never suggested that buying them lets me remove DRM, re-share, etc. It’s a strawman argument that you and conciselyverbose seem very attached to, but not an argument I’m making.

Ownership is not strictly limited to physical items, and I’m very curious why people think it is. There’s significant outstanding case law precedent that proves that ownership can apply to digital files as well.

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but you saying it over and over and offering no proof or corroborating evidence for your claims isn’t furthering the discussion. I’ve provided two examples of cases where purchasing a file constitutes ownership and not a license, one where purchasing an MP3 constitutes full ownership of the MP3 via the terms of service, and one where purchasing an eBook constitutes full ownership of the ebook. According to you this is impossible, but I’ve provided two clear examples where it is, in fact, possible.

I am interested in hearing why you believe what you believe and what evidence you can present that supports your beliefs, but if all you can do is restate that you say it’s x/y/z without any legal standing it and without anything that explains how the terms of service I provided are incorrect or unenforcable (e.g., can you provide me any previous situation in case law where terms of service expressly disclose an mp3 or ebook purchase as a merchandise transaction, but then treat as a revocable license?), I’m not sure where we can go from here. I appreciate your willingness to have the discussion but I’m not here to take someone’s word without any corroborating evidence.

I think that a lot of people think what you think, and I think a lot of people think that because the majority of places online only allow purchases as licenses, but just because 85% or 90% of places you go online sell you a license to an mp3 or an ebook doesn’t mean that other places don’t exist where you can buy the mp3 or ebook outright. Further, I’ve done a lot of digging and I cannot find any case law that supports your claim that it’s not possible to “own” a file. Authors own manuscripts they write on their computer and can seek civil or criminal penalties when those files are stolen, musicians own the raw files they make of their music and can do the same, etc.

That’s not accurate. Go buy an MP3 from Bandcamp, you own the mp3 (it’s a merchandise transaction, not a license, it’s very explicit in the terms of service) – you don’t own a license to the mp3, you own the actual mp3 (same as you would own a CD). The same is true of several other mp3 stores and a handful of ebook providers, as well as when you buy ebooks directly from the author (quick example: https://melissafmiller.com/how-and-why-to-buy-ebooks-direct-from-me-and-other-authors/).

Owning the CD doesn’t allow you to make derivative works as owning the CD doesn’t make you the copyright holder, just like owning the mp3 doesn’t actually mean you’re the copyright holder, and I’m not making any argument otherwise (referring to your “legally permitted to do whatever you want” comment) – but you absolutely can buy mp3s and ebooks and not license them.

DRM is an entirely separate issue and not relevant here as none of what I’m referring to relates to non-DRM protected licensed content.

I can own an ebook or an MP3, while some services license them many of them actually just sell you the media outright. Why are movies any different?

Otherwise, I agree, if we’re (for some legitimate reason) forced into licensing instead of purchasing, the license needs to be perpetual and irrevocable.

Instead of working to create a cost effective, quick method for users to buy (AND OWN, NOT LICENSE) digital movies, the MPAA is instead going to try and censor the internet. Brilliant move, idiots.

Doesn’t matter. The entire corrupt justice system continually gives this bozo every single possible way to weasel out of shit that no other person on the planet would ever be granted. Nothing is going to stick, all of the media attention about these cases is only hardening his support on the right. Our justice system is bought and paid for and he is one of the biggest contributors, absolutely none of the court cases are going to stick no matter how many things he may have done that are illegal. Anyone who thinks otherwise has had too much of the kool-aid at this point. Justice is dead and the highest court of the land is in his pocket. This is all for show at this point and it’s only serving him and his base.

Vote like democracy and your country depends on it, because at this point it absolutely does.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”

Can’t say I disagree. When you fight a cheater by playing 100% by the rules in a world where cheating isn’t punished, you lose every time. This pretty much sums up the last 40 years of the Democratic party.

Unfortunately, they could have a 0% approval rating and we’d still never get the 2/3rds majority in congress to do fuckall about it. This supreme court will continue to pander to corporate and donor interests and act wholly without ethics because our system was built on the concept that people in those roles would act with integrity and utterly falls apart when people on the supreme court flagrantly disregard their responsibility to citizens and act in their own interests.

Worse is a subjective term. Alcohol causes more deaths per year (140,000+) than all other drug overdose deaths combined (~103,000). Alcohol also has significant long term health impact for even light users. I think what’s truly the worst is how normalized alcohol use and abuse is in American society.

Very much this. A great many of us in our early 40s had access to pornography from BBSes or early internet and it didn’t seem to fuck us up. Why are we trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist?

Legal sexual gratification between two consenting adults (even if some may find the way they achieve gratification taboo), so long as it’s not illegal, should not be shamed or denied.

Not only that, but their PR person gaslighting people with the article claiming that the game wasn’t bad, it was just “cool to hate” has left a really bad taste in my mouth. The game could be absolutely amazing now and the expansion pack could be the game that we were always promised, but the experience and the follow-up has been so bad that I’m similarly waiting until post launch (heck, perhaps even until GOTY with included DLC) for any future CDPR games.

I’ve been playing GW2 since beta – heck, I’ve been playing Guild Wars since the original game’s beta, I am a sucker for a good MMO that isn’t pay-per-month. I still remember the end of the original Guild Wars beta when meteors started falling down killing everyone in Ascalon. My wife isn’t quite as interested in MMO-esque experiences, she more likes the couch co-op style (we played D3 until Paragon 950+ on PS4 Pro and play D4 on PS5), so I haven’t been able to get her playing it yet – but I’ll keep trying!

Same experience here – I started a seasonal character and gave up at level 12 because while the malignant hearts were a neat concept, everything else was ridiculously trite and stupid.

D4 is an exercise in how a lot of effort and a lot of thought can go into something and result in a game that’s inferior in the important ways (is the game actually fun to play, is progression fun and rewarding) while also being technically superior to its predecessors – the game looks amazing, the engine is fantastic.

I’m playing it with my wife and it’s just not very fun yet. It reminds me of grinding levels in classic WoW, but without the benefit of getting new skills and feeling more powerful with the levels. I’m hoping that after some patches, seasons, and expansion packs that it gets to be a little more fun, but right now they’ve made leveling so slow and so inconsequential that the game is just a repetitive slog. You’re not getting any new skills past level 50 but it takes absolutely eons longer to go from level 50 to 100 than it did to go from 1-50, all areas in the entire game except for nightmare dungeons are level scaled so you aren’t actually getting any more powerful with each level, you’re just watching numbers go up while killing exactly the same things in exactly the same way you have been for the last 50 levels.

Appreciably, Diablo 3 was kind of crap at launch as well and it wasn’t until they removed the RMAH, added a new class, added adventure mode and bounties, and added a lot of seasonal content that it fleshed out to being as fun as it is now. I’m hopeful that D4 eventually gets there but man it’s just not the fun I was hoping for presently.

I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it – I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don’t want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was “as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud”. Uh huh.

I’ve set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I’m really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I’m sure they’ve thought of it and I’m going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.

Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I’ve just given up – everything says it should work and I’ve tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex’s ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!

You are correct about it being shot on a cell phone – at present the top comment on the video is from @RickAstleyYT and says:

My wife Lene and I shot this video on a phone in Denmark, in a forest beside a beautiful beach. The song in essence is about how there is so much technology out there pulling and pushing us in our daily lives, that we need to remain human in this fast moving world. The idea of making a video simply, somewhere beautiful and real like this resonates with me, and I hope it does with you too! Rick x

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn’t find this acceptable as I had written proof I’d taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said “yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad” and “but it’s out of warranty”. When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I’d been an Apple customer for decades and I’d had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I’d never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they’re high quality and don’t have these types of problems), she cut me off and said “Apple doesn’t have a customer loyalty program, sir.” and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I’ve been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.