How are owning digital media and physical media different? I know we don’t technically “own” our digital games, or maybe that was a big misunderstanding on my part. Thanks!
In: Technology
you can’t sell digital purchases on most platforms.
but lets make it simple.
buy game for ps4 and it’s a disc and you can sell to me
buy game for ps4 digitally and you cannot sell to me.
Sony bans you for anything and you essentially lose access to that game you spent money on.
if you get banned with a physical game, you can just make a new account or sell the game. it’s still yours.
the big point of contention is once you buy some thing digitally you can lose access to it on the companies whim with no recovery. potentially thousands of dollars can be lost if you are banned for any reason or if the company decides to shut down servers etc.
It depends on the specific case of digital media, but it’s increasingly common now where you don’t “own” your digital purchases because they exist on a company’s servers and can be changed or removed at will regardless of whether you’ve paid for it or not.
Think about streaming services like Netflix, how they’re constantly adding and removing different movies. It’s the same idea. Even if you a buy a digital movie on Amazon or whatever, there’s nothing to stop them from removing the movie and revoking your access to it later, whether because of licensing or any other reason. (This is assuming you didn’t or aren’t able to download it)
Compare this to a physical DVD you buy, where it’s literally in your possession and no one can take it away from you.
More from a layperson’s perspective, it is probably enforcement/monitoring/control.
Even if you own physical media, it doesn’t mean that you have unlimited rights to “use” it as you will. The rights that you purchase along with the media does not include broadcast rights etc.
It is probably basically the same for digital media – especially now that most distributors make it fairly easy to play on multiple devices. (in the old days this was much harder – sometimes you’d be locked into one machine) But, of course, since things are now cloud based or require an online connection, it is probably a bit easier for the distributors to monitor and perhaps even enforce breaches in the rights.
The issue with digital media is that the value is not in the media, it is in the content.
If you buy a car – the car is worth $35k. If you wanted to create a copy of that car and give it to someone else, it would likely cost you $350k to do that because you don’t have an efficient factory.
Contrast that with a movie. If you buy a movie, the DVD is worth a nickel. The movie on the DVD is worth $200,000,000. If you want to copy that movie and give it to someone else, it will cost to you a nickel.
For this reason, the content provider does not care what you do with the DVD, but he wants to make sure you are clear on what you can do with the content. He sold you one copy, for your individual use. If you copy it, you cannot give it to anyone else – you can use it as backup only.
The other way to explain it is that he didn’t sell you the movie – he sold you a plastic disc, and a license to watch the movie in your home without charging admittance. That’s it. You have no other rights to that movie. If you don’t like that rule, don’t buy the license.
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