If it isn't on your shelves (or server) it isn't your library, it's someone else's access.

🏴‍☠️

If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.

Fair winds and following seas to you fellow sailors, arrrrr

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it
- Paul Muad'Dib

Living in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don't even bother as long as you aren't distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.

Streaming for things you consume. Offline media for things you like.

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to "buy" or "own" anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you're buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that's what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

Should companies work on improving access to services and making sure paying consumers get a better experience?

Nah, let's spend more money paying lawyers to go after a few people, that'll show em.

I think it’s wild how people post “omg I just got this entire series for $299! It was on sale so I had to!” Like in 5 years, you may not even have it! Company goes under. Gets bought out. Or my personal favourite, it becomes unavailable because the owner pulled it over a legal dispute. Like so many songs off Spotify. These companies never get involved like well we got our cash too bad so sad.

🏴‍☠️

You will own nothing and be happy.

Buy physical media

The other concern is censorship. Essentially a movie that you bought is on a server and then someone's decided that words, content, or scenes are no longer appropriate. The video, song, etc, is different from the original and without any notification. The old scenes get sent to the memory hole. Oh dear Winston, I fear we will meet soon!

my arrs love me, and i love my arrs

That’s why I’ll keep buying physical for the games or movies I love.

The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.

I’d have nothing against digital games or movies if you didn’t see such behaviors.

I've been a user of GOG for a while principally because of the no-drm ability to download a copy of what you bought. When the library starts getting past a certain size though you start to wonder about those things like what if the producer has a falling out and wants to yank it from the platform, does it vanish from my library then too? Are there contracts that say 'forever' when they offer it? Would love to find some 'download all' option to take a full copy offline of the bought items at once but it'd probably overrun the monthly ISP limits even if they had one.

Seen too many things on Netflix or Spotify that I liked vanish because 'fuck off, we can' and although I never anticipated it being 'bought' in those cases it does give a lot of justification to find alternate means to reestablish that access.

Yeah, if it's in "The Cloud" it's NOT yours and it can disappear or be modified without your knowledge or consent at any time.

Buy some external storage and keep copies of everything you care about.

Is there a good way to pay for a download of movies or TV, or should I go back to buying physical and ripping?

Yeah, got rid of all my CDs a few years ago and now I'm buying them back a bit at the time because of all the stuff that is going out of print and you can no longer stream.

Should have just stored everything.

Yeah that's why I buy DVDs if it's something that I actually want to keep. I don't mind streaming as long as you understand that you own nothing.