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Why is it legal to buy and sell used books/discs but illegal to buy and sell used digital files? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by _number8_@lemmy.world to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is "losing a sale" and not getting the money, right?

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[-] Samsy@lemmy.ml 17 points 9 months ago

it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn't true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

There is one exception: reposted memes, they are losing pixels more and more. /s

[-] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Only because of incompetent people using lossy reproduction methods out of ignorance

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn't help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

[-] Adalast@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

This is why you use PNG or GIF formats. Lossless compression on the PNG side and a LUT on the GIF side. Nothing to get compressed since it is literally just a grid of numbers and a table with the hex codes.

I really wish the social media companies and phone manufacturers would switch to PNG. So much better than JPG.

[-] Aopen@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago

Lemmy compresses uploads to jpg without asking too

[-] Adalast@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

I know, is sad. Would love to see them converting the JPG to PNG. I do see a lot of images coming off here as GIF though, which Facebook doesn't let me send to people because fuck Facebook.

[-] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

The storage demands between small compressed JPEG’s and decent quality PNG’s is massive. That’s a lot to ask of people who are self hosting this without any of us paying for it. Especially since 99% of the images loaded up here are one off jokes that are compressed versions from somewhere else already. Pretty clear example of “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” IMO

[-] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

If only google hadn’t decided to shit all over JXL. We could have lossless images with an excellent compression algorithm (at least better than the .zip style deflate png uses) at this very moment.