Don't let the corporations tell you otherwise - eviltoast
  • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Yes, that is the small text they use to justify it, but that’s not how they advertise it. When Amazon Prime wants me to pay for a movie it doesn’t say “License it now!” It says “Buy it now!”

    If you go digging into the EULA you’ll see it being called a license, but no effort is made to actually make that clear to the customer.

    Furthermore, being technically legal doesn’t make it acceptable. If someone opened a bookstore, and put some treatment on all their books that caused them to suddenly disintegrate after a year, it doesn’t matter if they have on all their receipts that “books are not guaranteed to last longer than a year” or that they “aren’t doing anything illegal”. It’s still a bullshit business practice that shouldn’t be tolerated.

    • illi@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      When it says “buy it” you asuume the it refers to the content - they’d probably argue it refers to the license.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s worth stating this has basically always been true for books. You can buy paper. Buying bound paper with words on it is not quite the same. You can’t produce a movie from that idea, and state “I invented this idea from a bundle of bound pages I bought, that already had some words on them.”

        You never owned the original reproduction rights to the book’s content. That never mattered much until copying and pasting became so easy.

        • illi@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Huh. Never quite looked at it that way, but you are right. I can see how physical book is a form of a license to read a literary work. It is however naturally impossible to revoke. It would be the same if digital content had no DRM - which is generally not the case.

          So I guess DRM and you not being able to download and use content outside the company’s ecosystem is the real issue here.

    • TAYRN@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Yes, scams exist. I never claimed that things like your hypothetical situation would be moral, or should be tolerated.

    • jimbo@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Were you under the impression that Amazon was going to assign you the copyright to the song or movie that you purchased? No? Then you understood that you were buying a license and you’re just playing pretend about the confusion.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s got nothing to do with copyright. It’s about ownership of a copy. You buy a CD, you own it. You “buy” digital media, it can get taken away from you. That should not be permissable. Yes, I know it’s legal, but it shouldn’t be, and in a just society, it wouldn’t be.