Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet.
The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”
The situation brings to mind an interview I did over a decade ago, with the executive of a now-defunct streaming platform. He told me candidly that the goal of all this was to make digital media a “utility” like gas or electricity—a faucet that dispenses the world’s art as “content,” with tech companies in complete control of what goes in the tank and what comes out of it.
Hearing this was a real tin foil hat moment for me. For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.
Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.
Lemmy - RazBot
8 readers0 users here now
This instance is hosted in the UK.
Rules:
- no porn
- be nice
Offered Lemmy Frontends:
- lemmy.razbot.xyz - default lemmy ui
- mlmym.razbot.xyz - an old-reddit like web ui
Status Information:
The status page is status.razbot.xyz.
All lemmy related services run on the "Raz Dedicated Server" and the "Lemmy Instance" is lemmy.razbot.xyz, which runs on the dedi, but the uptime monitor checks that the actual page is loading correctly.
Donations
If you want to donate, I have a paypal link here.
founded 2 years ago
ADMINS
426
427
428
42
'Jetsons' robot finally arrives: Sweater-wearing Neo Gamma android helps with household chores
(www.livescience.com)
430
431
433
265
25 arrested in global hit against AI-generated child sexual abuse material
(www.europol.europa.eu)
434
435
436
440
441
443
does this count as programmar?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22519883
i hope the meme makes sense
444
445
446
448
449
450