Slashdot Mirror
The End of Content Ownership
adeelarshad82 writes "In recent weeks companies like Amazon, Sony, Google, Verizon, 24symbols and others have started to roll out 'cloud-based' content streaming and on-demand services (or plans) for movies, music and even books. Video on demand is nothing new, nor is streaming. The difference now, though, is that companies like Amazon want you to stream your own content. This article sheds some light on how the cloud, along with subscription and on-demand services, will transform our perception of content access and ownership."
At a time when ISPs are moving to cap bandwidth usage, and these companies are moving to streaming-only ideas, am I the only one cringing?
Don't get me wrong, I love my streaming media, but ISPs seem to really hate it.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
A fine idea, but then reality sinks in when people start losing data and lawsuits are filed and the whole thing gets shelved for the next round in one or two decades.
Having licensed content available in the cloud is nice, but there is one issue, a major one:
Owning stuff in this manner is an investment can be easily turned off from a remote source, and there is absolutely zero one can do about it. With books, someone would have to enter my residence unauthorized with a fairly large truck and haul stuff out. Similar with DVDs. All a cloud provider can do is just click a button or enter a SQL statement, and the many thousands of dollars in a game/book/movie/music library are now rendered inaccessible. Lawsuit? Good luck. There have many people who threatened Valve with litigation because VAC banned them, but there has yet to be a single case that goes to court. EULAs are proven and are completely supported by precedents, so a cloud provider essentially states that "we are not responsible if you lose access to a product or your library", and someone with a large library does not have a leg to stand on.
Even if a lawsuit was successful, a bankruptcy of the cloud provider can render all the licensed content gone.
This is why people should have local, un-DRM-ed copies of their media they have purchased. It would take a lot more than just a delete to remove access from a library of physical media.
The problem is that content stored on someone else's server, or authorized from it, seems to go away within five years. Often less. That's happened with Circuit City's DIVX (1998-1999), Microsoft's PlaysForSure (2004-2008), WalMart Music (2007-2008), and seems to be about to happen to Microsoft's Zune. Yes, there's usually some way to pry the content loose, but it's usually difficult, unsupported, and won't be done by most consumers.
Of course, you can't sell used "cloud" content, and you can't play it on an unapproved device. You're caught between the service going bust and your devices becoming obsolete.
Bad idea.
When IP can be reproduced and distributed at zero cost, ownership and property rights have little to no meaning. People who use the term "imaginary property" have been saying this for at least 10 years, especially on Slashdot.
Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them. "Imaginary property" advocates have been saying for years that IP rights holders are free to exercise their exclusive rights to that IP by not selling it to anyone, thus maintaining their exclusive copy of the IP. (Implied there is that no one will get to actually experience the IP, making it useless as a source of income). Well, this is them doing half of that. Because copyright (i.e. exclusive distribution rights) is impossible to enforce, they are simply going to stop distributing the IP in "here's a copy of it, please don't copy it again and give it away" form, which basically stopped working over 10 years ago. They are instead providing access to their IP behind these cloud-based services which, in addition to providing the content itself, provide added value in ways such as organizing the content and allowing access from many devices/places/times. For most people, the content plus the additional value offered by these services is enough to get them to subscribe (i.e. pay). This allows the IP creators to continue making money from their IP. By the way, this goes for software too: think Steam.
This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs. Most of them use free-as-in-freedom arguments like "I own this, I should be able to do what I want with it", or arguments such as "I hate the RIAA/MPAA so I'm screwing them." Personally, I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next guy, but what I hate even more is justifying pirated content by saying "well I'm just screwing the RIAA/MPAA". Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.
separating content from the application is the best design as you can improve the application. Look at all the different programs and innovations that happened with the mp3 file format. Now when you get vendor lock-in formats or only streaming you don't get any of this innovation.
Somewhere around 2015 to 2020, at our current rate of advances over the last 40 years, we can expect to have storage devices that hold Peta-Bytes of storage. (http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/20/petabyte-disks-coming-in-5-years/) That's a 1000 TB drives for the same cost as your TB drive today.
Yes, streaming from the cloud is critical to this transformation. You have to be able to share information.
But who says we will not be able to back up the cloud? That we will have to rely on the cloud to exchange truly *huge* amounts of data?
By 2020, $100 should buy you a drive that would hold as much as **14 years** of HD Video. That's very likely to be more content that I will ever own, even should I manage to collect all my home videos and all the home videos of all my relatives and their friends.
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jaDcJXMqSL0/SvtiByNVLFI/AAAAAAAAALQ/oEUZfyV3IY8/s1600-h/FutureStorage.JPG)
The attempts by the telecommunications companies to restrict the internet to low quality videos of kittens, and by the MPAA and RIAA to eliminate content from the internet are doomed. It cannot happen. Even if the internet is destroyed by these forces, kids will pass around hard drives (or whatever tech replaces hard drives) that contain all useful content (indexed and searchable at high quality) by physically handing them off between each other if they have to.
You guys don't read the small print, do you? Once you upload, it's no longer your content unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars sitting around to convince a judge otherwise.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The problem with everything being in the cloud is that the government can make the cloud go away. Didn't slashdot just have a discussion on how the internet helped with the changes in Egypt? Once everything is in the cloud, what is to stop some government from cutting off its people from the cloud?
This proposal is a lot more than being able to stream Avatar to any device you want. It is really about who controls your access to information (your own or licensed).
I don't WANT to own every book, CD, or DVD in the world, but I'd sure like to be able to access them all (well maybe not ALL, but I'll pick and choose LATER). I would consider the cloud to be a library (perhaps a library for hire, at least for some of the titles). I do own my favorite books, CD's and DVD's and you can try to pry them from my cold dead hands (and NOT till then!), and I also borrow books, CD's and DVD's from the public library. I can see extending this to some provider in the cloud as well. But I'll still want physical copies of some things......
I bought Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl, I want a refund for the CD. And I want the scratched ones streamed too. I bought the music, right?
All your database are belong to U.S.
Here, paying labor should be a total non-issue.
The computer will do the work for you. You only have to tell it. If you can't BUY a product that will.
The "terrible burden" of backups. You would think it was 1985 and a bunch of Apple II users with a stack of floppy drives whining here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My biggest problem with cloud streaming is I don't want a corporate entity knowing everything I own/listen to/watch, etc. Because by default the government will know. And the way things are heading in this country, I wouldn't be surprised if we have another Red Scare of sorts to be used against citizens deemed Un-American by some faction looking to score points. Or heaven forbid, I upload something that I can't later prove I purchased (like I lost the DVD, CD, etc.). Could you imagine how much easier a witchhunt from the MPAA or RIAA will be if all our content is online at a public server?