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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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It's way past time for a crackdown in regard to digital ownership. We're living in a digital age now, where digital entertainment products have clearly outpaced physical products. We need to force companies away from the "rental store" mentality they're insisting on. If we're paying the same price for a digital copy of a product as it would be for a physical copy, then we deserve the same protections across the board.
If I buy a movie, music, a book, or a game, I should have the right to save a local copy of it to use, in perpetuity, in any manner I please, not just for as long as the company decides I should be able to or for as long as the company exists.
Not only that, but the ability to transfer or even sell your license. If I can gift or sell a book or DVD, I should be able to do the same with a game or digital movie.
Something like smart contracts on ethereum using NFTs is actually a perfect use for this and where the future is heading.
You get a fraud proof authorization token that cant be duplicated that let's you access the content. It can be sold or transferred without needing the company to still exist and can still unlock the content even years after they're bankrupt.
The only thing left is how do you host the content so it survives beyond the company going out of business. The company themselves could host it initially, but eventually it'd need to end up on a public torrent site or some other distributed sharing network otherwise it could vanish. But that's also a digital media problem in general.
Edit: also like any DRM people that want to break it can go as far as altering source code to remove the checks, they do that today, this wouldn't change it. But this is a path for people trying to do the right thing on all sides. They haven't stopped selling digital content because people can bypass things.
Where the future is heading is bullshit stupid technology some idiots think they can make money from driving a climate crisis that kills us all. And then we won't have to put up with bullsht stupid technology pushed by idiots. Good riddance.
In that case, may as well just pirate everything!
Generative AI is already doing that. Tech is an extension of human activity, and as humans are observably machines for making their human world worse for each other, trust tech involves some level of harmful ignorance.
Sure. Digital "ownership" is like trying to put a round peg in a square hole, it's applying rules and concepts to a fundamentally different thing. As long as it comes along with a tip culture for creators or some kind of guaranteed income.
We can own digital things as long as they let us properly download them. If you pay for a mp3 and have the actual mp3 file that you can do whatever you want with it, I'd say you own that.
They don't let us download everything though because digital things can just be copied and freely distributed, so there's often DRM.
Imagine if steam sold games and you got a full no drm copy of the game that didn't require any hacks to make playable, no concern about viruses from shady distributions etc. People buy steam games because it's easy, they have great sales making games cheaper, its safe, and they have all the other things like steam friends, chat etc.
But if steam just gave everyone a digital copy with no DRM that you could verify was safe and steam compatible, their sales would drop and more people would pirate.
So its a balance between DRM which steam is, and actual ownership.
By having something digital that represents digital ownership that cant be duplicated, you can solve the problem.
Steam could just publicly host the game for download but it only runs if you own the license. The license can't be take away from you and is freely transferable.
For games, the problem is still online games. I'm not sure that's ownable unless they also let you host your own servers and its bundled in the game. But for offline games it's possible.
I'll simplify: I don't want that future. Steam is currently acceptable because they provide a low-impact market, I think their 30% cut is reasonable, and offline mode is adequate. If that changes I'm done. GOG also exists and is a preferable model, but the experience isn't as polished.
I don't care if sales drop a bit, the early success of stuff like netflix and spotify and steam proves that most people will happily pay a reasonable price for access rather than pirate. It's only a "problem" for the capitalists and fuck em.
You can have everything steam has and still have a tokenized license that gives you ownership.
Steam is the worst acceptable format, is what I'm saying. Licenses and DRM are a thing we should move past not embrace.
They do seem to be the best of the implementations, but I really don't see how we can just move past it. You can't stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it's simply not possible. Making digital items that couldn't be duplicated was exactly what Bitcoin originally solved. It wasn't possible until 2009.
At least with tokenization you own access to that game now if it was done right, and steam knows you didn't pirate it and they got paid for it. Just because it's tokenized doesn't mean they did it right though. You could still do it and make it as terrible as existing DRM.
Edit: And what steam does is provide an easy to access and SAFE game. We could make safe games as well by providing cryptographic proofs for the game. They just can't make something like that freely available without being paid somehow. And then of course someone could alter the game to remove the DRM and host it again, but now you're into the is it safe area again, because it won't be cryptographically signed as valid.
"You can’t stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it’s simply not possible."
Yes, good, stop trying. Accept that some people are going to pirate. Fighting this just makes the user experience worse for everyone else.
It's not that simple though.
Steam doesn't suffer a piracy problem because what they offer and the cost they offer it at outweighs the DRM, and there are certain things you can't do on the pirated copy because of the DRM (online play / friends / social stuff)
If suddenly valve decided not to do any DRM and the games could be freely copied, played online and use their friend services, of course they'd have a piracy problem. Of course I'd share a copy to all my friends, who would all do the same. (edit: and at that point it's not even piracy anymore, it's just sharing with friends because you aren't circumventing anything)
Valve has found a sweet spot in this regard, but the DRM is important to their success, but we don't have ownership. We can also solve the ownership problem ~~now~~ in the future or at small/medium scale now..
Taping off the radio didn't kill the music industry, neither did Napster. Adobe did perfectly fine while small artists were using pirated copies of Photoshop. Sharing DRM-free software isn't going to bring about the apocalypse. It's already been happening for decades.
Providing a convenient storefront and launcher is enough for most customers if they think the price is fair. Gating multi-player, or achievements, or even hats behind some kind of proof of payment is going to catch a lot of people who might otherwise get a free copy.
Could you imagine those ledgers trying to process when everyone in existence tries to insert hundreds to thousands of unique licenses. Then having to continuously access records on every media use after that.
How many unique copies of media are there out there. Hundreds of billions, trillions. I don't think we have anything adequately designed at this point that could handle that kind of load.
Thats not how it'd work. The blockchain will generate the NFT but the NFT can authorize itself. You can do offline signatures that will prove you own the token and thus own the media. It doesn't need to check in with anything online to pass a validity check once it's issued.
The token is unique, the media is just out there exactly like it this today. How many billions of copies of songs have been download from iTunes?
Edit: And layer 2s will be able to handle 100,000 TPS or more in the future for the initial issuance. I didn't say today, I said where the future is heading. That's 3,153,600,000,000 transactions a year, and it's going to be more than that.
What future? NFT are still around?
NFT are more than just digital art. It's a token that represents a specific thing and have been around since the very early days if Bitcoin. I believe it was colored coins that were first implementation, but maybe something came before even that.
They could be a stock certificate for a company, a license to a game, a concert ticket, a house key.
Absolutely. Trump sells them lol
I wish this were true, but unless companies were forced to stop licensing then they'll never do that. And even then, if the company decided to not sell smth anymore or stop supporting it or they went out of business you still wouldn't be able to get things legally a lot of the time.
I don't think that's an issue unless it's an online service that they host the servers on, but for something like a book, even if they decided to stop selling it (aka minting new NFT tokens to access it) all the existing tokens would still work and trading would work.
We can't really do anything about online services though unless a law requires a company to allow self hosting if they close down, which would be a great law to have.
Edit: just to clarify further, the token is the ownership at this point. Having the protected content anywhere on the internet and downloading it without a token isn't theft, it's just there and legal, inaccessible without the token. It could just be on a public torrent for download from day 1 for anyone to download with or without a token. Also the content could even link to the smart contract to purchase a token to unlock it. So a movie player would see a unauthorized movie with a buy now button. It could even be a token that unlocks it for a 24h rental. Unless the media owner kills the contract intentionally, it'll be purchasable as long as the blockchain it's on exists.
I think we'll see someone experiment with this eventually even without a law. There's a lot of upset out there about not being able to resell digital content and it suddenly being taken away.