PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks
www.theverge.com
Time to buy physical games again?

I’d like to get the community’s feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we’re really doing is purchasing a “license” to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.

Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?

P.S. I know there’s pirating and all, but that’s not the focus of my question.

    • mammut@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Everybody is shitting on this idea, but there was actually a GitHub repo a long time ago that proposed something like this.

      IIRC, the idea was that your licenses would be associated with your private key. There would be independent resellers who could sell keys (in conjunction with publishers), and there would be distributors who actually distribute the data that your license then allows you to use.

      It seemed like a cool idea, because it basically would make it so that there is a standard for licenses, making launcher exclusivity impossible.