<story><title>Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible &quot;forever&quot;</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/culture/2024/02/funimation-dvds-included-forever-available-digital-copies-forever-ends-april-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Sure, but that&amp;#x27;s a lot of effort. And if you want to copy your streams illegally or pirate duplicates you can do that too, which also involves effort.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it&amp;#x27;s degraded, they&amp;#x27;re upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; of it, but probably most of it. So there&amp;#x27;s already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you&amp;#x27;re doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.</text></item><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>No. If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it. If it starts falling apart, you can repair it. If a cd gets a scratch you can repair it. You can store it in a climate controlled environment. All of these things are in your hands. Some people will burn their books or toss them. Some will preserve them for centuries.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>On the one hand, I don&amp;#x27;t expect anything to exist &amp;quot;forever&amp;quot;. Companies don&amp;#x27;t stay in business forever. A forever contract doesn&amp;#x27;t even make sense.&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, there need to be protections here. Just because a company merges or gets bought, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they should be able to end their guarantees.&lt;p&gt;What about if, to be legally allowed to license streaming content, companies were required by law to:&lt;p&gt;1) Specify a minimum duration available as part of the buy button and all other text using the term &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;license&amp;quot;? E.g. &amp;quot;Buy for 5 years&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;License now (min. 10 years guaranteed)&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;2) Require some kind of insurance&amp;#x2F;escrow&amp;#x2F;backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded)&lt;p&gt;In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I&amp;#x27;ve even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jtbayly</author><text>Having AC and bookshelves is not fancy or hard. Books with decent paper can and do last centuries. Books with really crappy paper last decades and are generally still usable if you’re careful. DVDs last a stinking long time, too.&lt;p&gt;All you’re saying is that physical things aren’t eternal. Yes everybody knows that. Digital things aren’t generally eternal either. I accept that. But look at the timeframes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible &quot;forever&quot;</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/culture/2024/02/funimation-dvds-included-forever-available-digital-copies-forever-ends-april-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Sure, but that&amp;#x27;s a lot of effort. And if you want to copy your streams illegally or pirate duplicates you can do that too, which also involves effort.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it&amp;#x27;s degraded, they&amp;#x27;re upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; of it, but probably most of it. So there&amp;#x27;s already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you&amp;#x27;re doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.</text></item><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>No. If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it. If it starts falling apart, you can repair it. If a cd gets a scratch you can repair it. You can store it in a climate controlled environment. All of these things are in your hands. Some people will burn their books or toss them. Some will preserve them for centuries.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>On the one hand, I don&amp;#x27;t expect anything to exist &amp;quot;forever&amp;quot;. Companies don&amp;#x27;t stay in business forever. A forever contract doesn&amp;#x27;t even make sense.&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, there need to be protections here. Just because a company merges or gets bought, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they should be able to end their guarantees.&lt;p&gt;What about if, to be legally allowed to license streaming content, companies were required by law to:&lt;p&gt;1) Specify a minimum duration available as part of the buy button and all other text using the term &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;license&amp;quot;? E.g. &amp;quot;Buy for 5 years&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;License now (min. 10 years guaranteed)&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;2) Require some kind of insurance&amp;#x2F;escrow&amp;#x2F;backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded)&lt;p&gt;In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I&amp;#x27;ve even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>advael</author><text>Making copies isn&amp;#x27;t fancy. It&amp;#x27;s just illegal because IP brokers have too much power and made it so. It&amp;#x27;s a commonsense measure that you could do with most forms of purchased media, increasingly trivially until said IP brokers succeeded in roping the government into threatening people who did so, and so now less people do so. To promise that a digital copy would be accessible forever and then rescind that access without offering a download is straightforwardly fraud</text></comment>