Now that we’ve moved to California I need to update the documents to fit our laws as well the current understanding of the law is. Point being I’m seeing a lawyer soon for this specific case alone and the wording MUST be tested in court for us to even know where to start. For anyone studying law, IP law will make some money for now and quite a while still.
P.S. if anyone can recommend a Bay Area estate attorney with this experience please let me and others know!
Many terms of service agreements terminate with the "owner" and are very explicit that accounts are "nontransferable", and both are problems that are going to be big fights.
A big part of my concern here is that copyright terms are so long today that any subscription/rental-focused world is a multi-generational digital feudalism. With a larger and "closer" to the current generation public domain it might be much easier to trust competition among subscription companies. You allude to this indirectly in trying to open the market, but there will always be "exclusive" distribution rights so long as copyright casts such a long shadow from the big castles on all the lowly consumer sharecroppers.
While I doubt we'd see much legislative interest in shortening copyright terms and enlarging the public domain, fighting for digital asset rights from digital retailers that use words like "own" and "purchase", given long histories of consumer protection laws and consumer protection court cases, seems a lot more plausible, and a lot more worth fighting. I worry that a lot of people won't care to fight so long as the castles make subscription services seem like good sharecropping just long enough for most people to give up, and then it will be too late and there won't be a big enough public domain to protect us.
This is very easy to do for music, books and movies/shows. It's a bit more difficult to do this on mobile platforms when it comes to apps and games (a lot more so on iOS where jailbreaks are sometimes few and far between).
The FSF's "Defective by Design" campaign is a bit helpful, but most of the world has moved on to being tied up with subscriptions and DRM everywhere, and doesn't seem to care as much to demand change.
companies came and went, my torrents are still with me.
sharing is caring.
I never really stopped either, but as I got older and had more money, I find that I watch/listen to a fraction of the shows/bands I used to, so I'm happy to support them by purchasing digital assets (DRM-free MP3s) and physical (vinyl, DVD).
The DVDs will be ripped to my HDD; they are mine after all.
I'm totally on board with purchases being tied to a single company being an issue, but for a lot of people the value of digital books and music is the online availability. You're going to need some sort of auth for that to work.
This is why I prefer to purchase digital books as PDF files. I keep them on Dropbox and my local drive and they are great to handle and read.
Ideally, software would make sure that you can use the same account across countries as long as you can attach the appropriate payment methods. They don't do this even for content that's not controlled by giant corporations that are stuck in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
See also, "The Right to Read":
(IANAL) That part is the same even if you buy a music CD or a Blu-Ray disc. You're only granted a license to play it for your personal use (and you're not even allowed to play at a public event or broadcast it). But, you're legally allowed to make backups for yourself and (in certain instances) encode them for use with a different mechanism. That's one of the things that iTunes (taking a popular example) helped revolutionize, with CD ripping and place-shifting the content for convenience. DRM, along with making the breaking of DRM illegal (is it still illegal for all kinds of content? I haven't kept up) is what messed this whole thing up.
In my case, I lost access to one of my Google accounts, for no apparent reason, and I have been unable to regain access. The movies I have are actually attached to my other account, but the message seems clear--they can go away at any time with no recourse.
In principle this is true for Amazon, Apple, and other Play competitors. In practice, I haven't heard of such cases, and because their economic model is different, this seems a lot less likely, to me.
More broadly, Google has a track record of discontinuing services, which also makes me nervous.
