I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
I don’t own the copyright, but I can use it offline with any software I want on any device whenever I want. I can lend the physical disk to a friend and if I don’t like it or get bored with it, I can sell it. That’s what you can do with music CDs and you used to be able to do with PC games before they contained Steam’s DRM.
Saying I don’t own my copy of Pokemon Gold or my vinyl record collection is like saying I don’t own the books in my bookshelf.
I guess there is indeed a limit to my freedom to how I use them - I cannot write the words down one by one and start reselling my copy. But that’s a pretty messed up concept of ownership where I probably don’t even own the shirt on my back.
Tell that to all the VCR tapes in people’s basements. Finding a working VCR player is nigh impossible these days, and it won’t be too long until optical media is the same. Last car I bought didn’t have a CD player. DVD drives are disappearing from computers. Game consoles a generation or two from now will be download only.
Content owners can’t wait until the only option we have is to stream.
Instead of just stating this as the inevitable future, why not join us in realizing that this is a problem and push to do something about it? We all realize that physical media and ownership of content is going away, but we can push back by not buying into subscription models and buying what physical or at least one-time-purchase digital content we can while it is still around.
Your new car may not have a CD player, but external disc drives are still readily available. Buy up a CD collection (of lossless, DRM-free music I might add) and rip them all to FLAC files and keep them on today’s dirt cheap giant hard drives. Now you can play them on your phone, car, laptop, Steam Deck, retro iPod, smart fridge, etc.
Same goes for DVDs and Blu-Rays. You have the option to convert them into whatever format is needed for the device you want to play them on because YOU OWN THE MEDIA and can do what you want with it.
Be the change you want to see. Cancel Netflix and Spotify. Buy CDs and DVDs/BDs. Build a local collection and have DRM-free content on all your devices that will be available to you for the rest of your life rather than for the rest of the month.
I agree, but movie DVDs and Blu-Rays contain DRM. It’s probably easy to break it (which is illegal btw) and get regular files out of it, but the practice of adding DRM is unethical and we shouldn’t reward companies that do it with our money. It’s also possible to record your screen when watching a movie on Netflix (at least when using GNU/Linux), so you would get a copy of that movie, but we need to have higher standards.
I think if anything contains DRM, you should either not use it or pirate it instead.
You don’t have to use physical media. You can buy digital DRM-free music and games online and store them on your hard drive like many people do. I was only using music CDs as an example, since they don’t contain DRM.