I am trying to physically backup all of my media and couldn’t find any of the videos I BOUGHT from Google Play. Best I can tell is this is done on purpose to force me to use Google Play. That got me wondering. Do I own the videos or just access to them? If Google suddenly went under, do they owe me my movies? What’s the deal, friends?
In: Economics
Google licenses the videos from the copyright owners and you license them from Google. You don’t own them in the same way that you don’t own the music on a CD. You own the disc and the plastic but not the content.
In all likelihood, you dont own the videos, you’re purchasing the right to view them. Much like how you don’t own what you “purchased” from iTunes.
You don’t have “ownership” of any copyrighted work, unless you wrote the book to filmed the movie. If you go and “buy” a paperback at the bookstore, you don’t “own the book”; rather you “own the paper with the book printed on it”. This allows you to sell or give away your paper, but not distribute additional copies of the book made by copying your paper.
This was all clear, and pretty clearly defined in law, as long as books were on paper and videos were on tapes. Digital made this analogy quite tortured. You still have the same rights, but the people who do really “own the book/movie” need some way to keep you from copying the bytes on your computer. It’s pretty hard to duplicate a paperback, and duplication at scale takes up a lot of space. Your computer is chock-o-block of capabilities to copy bytes, and duplication at scale is super easy.
With streaming, you’re only buying the right to “use” the bytes, not necessarily possess them. It’s one approach, but it causes huge liabilities on the streaming provider, should they ever want to shut down the service in the future. They could have legal liabilities, few of which have been litigated. It’s a bit of the Wild West, where there are opinions as to what the law means with pretty little proof.
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