Will Your Books and Music Die With You?

theodp writes "Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes, reports the WSJ, but when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us. 'I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,' says author Evan Carroll of the problems created for one's heirs with digital content, which doesn't convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. So what's the solution? Amazon and Apple were mum when contacted, but with the growth of digital assets, Dazza Greenwood of MIT's Media Lab said it's time to reform and update IP law so content can be transferred to another's account or divided between several people."

Comments

First

[Anonymous Coward]

Will anyone want your collection of Justin Bieber and Rihanna when you die?

Re:First

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I want to be buried with my Slayer and Black Sabbath albums. It will be good on scaring off the undead and it will guarantee that I won't be stuck playing a harp in the afterlife.

Re:First

[icebike]

So what's the solution?

Simple: digital content should convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. Why should, e.g., books written on vellum have different rights than those written on paper?

Next problem,

I simply take the ownership rights of the books I buy. (And, yes, I do buy them, because authors have to eat too).

There are methods of DRM removal that can be used on your dbooks, and ebook library managers (such as Calibre) that you can use to manage your collection on your local hard drive, and back up to CD-Rom. Combine these two tool sets and you have the ownership you want.

Similarly, for music, every digital music locker I am aware of allows download to your hard drive. Any drm protection on those files can also be stripped.

I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.

Re:First

[russotto]

No, but I want to be buried with my Slayer and Black Sabbath albums. It will be good on scaring off the undead and it will guarantee that I won't be stuck playing a harp in the afterlife.

The place you're going is more into accordions than harps.

Re:First

[Pseudonym]

And Nixon will keep wiping the tapes.

Too personal to be widely desirable

[petes_PoV]

Since everyone has their own collection of (digital) words and music, it's unlikely that you will suddenly develop a taste for someone-else's just because they've died and left you theirs. You may have a brief look through it, to see if it contains anything you've missed from your own collection, or you may hang on to it as a way to handle your grief.

However you may also decide to delete the whole lot, unseen, just in case it contains the sort of "material" you'd prefer not to remember your departed loved one by.

Re:Too personal to be widely desirable

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother died unexpectedly at age 28 and I, 1.5 years younger, boxed up his CDs while we were cleaning out his apartment. I've since merged them with my collection. I find it rewarding and challenging, and sometimes a little nostalgic, to listen and interpret them as my own. On my college breaks I found it intriguing to examine my father's old vinyl record collection too.

The idea of things being "too personal" isn't specific to music or books. Whoever has the job of sorting through the detritus of life will have to work discreetly and sort certain items into the trash or recycling box, while others get highlighted and passed around for closure or utility (often a little of both). Funny things, like cooking with one of his favorite old pans, have turned out to mean more to me than I expected.

I'm still babying the last car he bought... 1999 garage queen with just 50k miles at present. Our oldest brother took his nicely equipped bikes, and rode them for many years. These higher value items carry a different kind of burden for the survivors, as they sometimes feel more like "legacy." It can be very upsetting if you feel your loss being compounded by the legacy being taken away as well. With more an more financial and emotional resources being poured into digital legacy, I can only imagine this will become a bigger issue in the future.

Re:Too personal to be widely desirable

[iluvcapra]

Who needs libraries when you can pay Time Warner $50 a month to read public domain books FOR FREE! :)

Re:Too personal to be widely desirable

[dgatwood]

The usual way this happens is that they let the family go through the library and pick anything they want, then they sell what's left in a lot at auction to a used bookstore owner. This doesn't work for digital books, which makes digital books no more valuable than borrowing the book from a library or watching a streaming video from Netflix. Without permanence and individual transferability, there is no real value to "owning" a copy of the content, because no one will ever want the entire collection enough to pay any significant amount of money for it. Individuals won't because they won't like everything (and thus will consider parts of the collection as having zero value), and dealers won't because they won't be able to parcel it out and no individual will be willing to pay them much for it (because they won't like everything and...).

For this reason, I try fairly hard not to accumulate digital books, music, movies, or non-transferrable digital software downloads. If there are alternatives, I tend to choose them even if they are more expensive, because those alternatives have actual value beyond the value of their temporary utility.

Re:Too personal to be widely desirable

[icebike]

Put another way how many cherished commercial books and albums have you personally inherited? Maybe it's a bad question since people who have, will be more likely to answer. But for me the answer is 0. I can't even get my dad to take an interest in getting his old slides scanned so we can see our childhood photos.

I inherited not more than 5 books from my parents. They were big time library patrons, without enough money after putting 5 kids thru college, to amass their own collection. Turns out a couple of these books have collector value, being first editions which were handed down to my parents from my grand parents. (early Audubon stuff). So, no, most of us don't have huge libraries of stuff handed down.

But that is water under the bridge at this point, and the discussion is about what we can hand down today. I've got an entire wall covered by bookshelves that someone will pick over when I shuffle off. I've got at least as many digital books that they may look at when they find my several nook e-readers laying around.

Hard to say if they might want any of that, but it should be my decision to give, and their decision to receive.

Now as to those slides, its your job to scan them.
He has his memories. He probably never needs to even look at the slides.
You've probably got the skills to scan them, sift them, and save them. He probably doesn't want to waste his remaining hours
moving images from one media to another when he knows you will inherit the entire collection anyway.

Blind Trust?

[ChromaticDragon]

Is this a case where corporate personhood is a good thing?

Does this mean what you should do is fire up a trust and have the trust purchase all the media? Then the trust lives on (and is ownership transfers or was likely already shared with your intended recipient(s)).

Or is that going to get you in trouble with your trust "sharing" its media with you?

Re:Blind Trust?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are really two problems working together:

1. Most DRM systems(and even some many non-DRMed consumer 'cloud sync' stuff) are built around the architectural assumption that a given device will have one 'account' authorized/set/whatever at a time, and each 'account' will have some set of things licensed to it. Even if you have my credentials, it is generally somewhere between 'awkward' and 'designed not to be possible' for you to actually use a union of your account and mine, or even transfer stuff from my account to yours. You can deathorize your account and authorize mine, and then be stuck with access just to my stuff, and even switch back and forth; but you generally can't transparently access the contents of both.

2. Because this stuff is mostly distributed on a 'licensed not sold, DRM-circumvention-forbidden, the EULA owns you now, suck it peasant' basis, you likely don't have much clout in terms of getting anything in #1 changed in your favor. At best, those UI/UX decisions are just a customer support problem, at worst, you might be explicitly prohibited from accessing somebody else's account, even if they wanted you to, and Dear Old Dad's estate can get its account banhammered for even trying to let the heirs in(if detected, obviously password sharing happens all the time).

Some sort of keeps-the-accountants-employed trust structure might have some advantages(incidentally, given the very low cost of setting up a US corporation in places like Delaware and Nevada, has anybody considered getting around the regional restrictions by purchasing through a US shell's credit card?); but it would be unlikely to save you from the fact that account aggregation is generally somewhere between unsupported and explicitly forbidden...

Yes, this is a valid problem

[ThorGod]

...and just one of the many reasons I have hundreds of CDs lying around. I've bought some music and videos from iTunes. I prefer buying CDs because they're physical and tangible. Google or Apple can't decide to "close the service" and take all of my CDs away.

For that matter, there are still recordings only to be found on vinyl. There's either too weak of a modern interest in certain albums or "not enough profit" for record companies in re-releasing them. Either way, I don't see physical media going away anytime soon.

Re:Yes, this is a valid problem

[Knuckles]

And then there's the frequent problem of "where the hell are the master tapes?"

Re:Yes, this is a valid problem

[berj]

...and just one of the many reasons I have hundreds of CDs lying around. I've bought some music and videos from iTunes. I prefer buying CDs because they're physical and tangible. Google or Apple can't decide to "close the service" and take all of my CDs away.

Apple can't do anything to your purchased music once it's on your hard drive. There's no DRM whatsoever on the music files. Do with them as you please. Movies can be re-encoded (probably lose quality but for me that's not a huge deal) or have their DRM stripped. Books can have their DRM stripped. I'm pretty sure that it's still legal in the US to strip DRM for your personal stuff and it definitely is in Canada (the efforts of our current government to ban it notwithstanding).

You never bought them in the first place

[pointyhat]

They are just licenses these days. They are not tangible so it's hard to apply property rights to them.

It's a great business model though - you have to buy it again rather than passing it on through death or disinterest.

This sort of shit disgusts me, so I still buy real books and CDs. If new content is not being produced in this way, there is still plenty to read and listen to.

Updated regulation is needed

[erroneus]

They need to make DRM illegal. Sorry, but once you release something, copyright has always been based on honor. By creating mechanisms to lock down content, it is taking it out of the peoples' hands.

By pointing out that things are "lost" and then correcting the truth to reveal that nothing was "lost" because the notion of ownership was an illusion in the first place proves what has been stolen from under our noses.

Now you have a "license" for particular works on your ipod, but not your car stereo or anywhere else. If you want the same content there, you have to pay again and again. And if for some reason you violate the license terms, you might just lose it all. The point is to note who is in control. Those who are in control are the owners. Since you don't have control over your iPhone or other devices which are locked down, you don't own it either.

These are all truths that people have a hard time accepting.

Re:You don't "own" anything any longer

[thegreatemu]

copyright law?

Re:Not all of us.

[HornWumpus]

Already have. For definitions of accumulate=pirate.

As to what will happen to it after I die? Doesn't matter. Anybody that I know who wants a copy can have one while I'm alive. It takes three days just to copy the music (granting that's going from average SATA drive RAID to a USB2 external).

Mine wont.

[Lumpy]

As I violently violate the law and strip out the DRM from every purchase. it's mine, I dont care about their TOS, I'm going to get rid of their restrictions and make sure my purchases cant be stolen from me.

Re:Not all of us.

[jamstar7]

But what about your porn????

Re:piracy is superior once again

[russotto]

You possess a copy, you don't own it.

I own the damned copy. Ownership of a copy is recognized in copyright law, and a separate thing from ownership of the copyright or a license to any of the rights which make up copyright. A lot of publishers attempt to claim you don't even own the copy, some convincingly (e.g. a rental DVD), some rather less so (e.g. a product with an EULA printed within the packaging of a product you bought from a middleman.)

Re:You don't "own" anything any longer

[SuricouRaven]

Because you are licensed to play that music. The license is non-transferable. It dies when you do. For your family to listen to the collection after you die is legally no different than if they'd grabbed it all off of a p2p network.

Buy hard copies.

[suprcvic]

This is why I buy hard copies of any book I really like. Partly to show off that I've read it but also to pass along to my children or others who may be interested.

Re:I'll be surprised if 2 people 'get' the joke(s)

[Mister Whirly]

UID 4190? He must have joined Slashdot when it was still a magazine.

He probably knew Mozart personally with a UID that low.

in 50 years, you'll own nothing

[jsepeta]

we'll no longer have books available to the general population. libraries will have been closed by the "let's eliminate taxes" nutjobs. cassettes, cd's, records will be artifacts from an ancient era. the content creators will own the rights, and you're lucky to have any music to listen to while you read people magazine on your idevice. the future is going to suck.

Re:Not all of us.

[HornWumpus]

Like I say, collections develop inertia all there own.

Do I really need a music collection that would take decades to play?