I'm kind of tired of physical media being presented as a more ideal alternative to digital distribution or live service, because it completely misses the root of the problem. The problem is NOT digital vs. physical, it's the lack of rights you have to use the product and the practices associated with that. The fact that the game, movie, book, or whatever is being distributed digitally would not be an issue if your right to use it wasn't so restricted.
Take for example a service like Itch or GOG that offers "DRM free" downloads for games you've purchased. I would argue that setup is better than physical copies in just about every respect. Not only can you download the game you've purchased and back it up however you want, the service essentially provides you with an "offsite backup" of what you've purchased that requires no effort on your part. On top of that, making more backups of said games takes even less effort than if you had to rip a physical disk.
It bothers me that folks keep presenting physical media as an ideal for preservation, when the physical media being implied (usually optical disks) were never a good way to preserve those works to begin with. I feel like this shows an unfortunate tendency to approach the problem via nostalgia rather than via an understanding of what the problem actually is.
we do agree with this
although we sympathize with the framing it in terms of medium, because physical copies are the only easy-to-explain way to get anything CLOSE to the consumer rights everyone used to have around purchases of software, books, movies... everything. the real conflict is about those rights though, for sure.
Agreed.
The physical-vs.-digital frame is “easy” because you can point to the physical copy and say “see? There it is. You have it, and absent literal theft, no-one can take it away from you.”
Except that isn't really true, is it? Not always, anyway. Hasn't been for a long time.
- CDs often came with CD keys that sometimes had to be authenticated by a server, which applied one of a variety of mechanisms to enforce “one customer, one copy”—the most extreme, of course, being the CD key being a single-use token that was invalid once claimed (much the same way movie online-copy keys work). That server is probably long gone now, of course.
- Console games might have a per-disc key on the disc that associates it with your account. (ISTR some PlayStation 3 or 4 games working this way.) Give or sell the disc to someone else, and it's a coaster.
- And all optical discs—including pressed discs!—are susceptible to disc rot. Even if there's no DRM involved, if that physical copy is your only copy, you might find it physically rotted away (in the form of a hole in the metal platter) someday.
The real issue is: Do you own it? Do you own it in the sense that from the time you have acquired it (ideally by paying for it from an authorized seller) until the end of the universe, it is yours and you can use it?
That is true of many, maybe most physical media (for however long the physical object lasts). It's also true of DRM-free sellers like GOG and Itch.io and and Humble (not including Humble's Steam-only listings). Once you possess the game, it is yours, and absent literal theft, no-one can take it from you.
(Note that possession is a key part of this; if you have stuff on GOG/Humble/Itch that you haven't downloaded, you should probably get on that. Off-site backup is a good framing: You should possess it locally, and if/when you don't, you can and should fix that by restoring it—downloading it—from your “backup”. Otherwise, it's not a backup, it's your only copy and could go away at any time!)
