Years ago, I had a massive CD and DVD collection. I have since digitised them and either sold the original discs at car boot sales, given them away to charity shops or thrown them in the bin if they were degraded. What I didn’t realise when CDs and DVDs were all the rage was that the physical discs degrade after x number of years and become unplayable.
Once I clocked on to this fact, it was too late for some discs, so they were binned. But what I did with the rest was apparently illegal…I made copies of my surviving discs.
99% of the CDs I owned were DRM-free so they were incredibly easy to copy, or, as I like to call it: “backup”. Some of the so-called “enhanced” CDs were encrypted but I was eventually able to find a workaround to extract the music which I had paid for.
The DVDs were, of course, all encrypted but that was not a major problem because “DVD John” was already on the scene.
That’s how we rolled, back in the day…wild times!
Today, CDs and DVDs have mostly gone. Oh, you can still buy them but who does? All the audiophiles are buying vinyl now because it just sounds soooo much better. Everything is otherwise digital; streamable, available in an instant to enjoy for a brief moment before moving on to the next.
On streaming platforms, you can watch your favourite movies over and over again but then, if you cancel your subscription, you can’t watch them any more. On the other side, once the platform’s rights to those movies expire, they disappear and maybe end up on another platform. And so, you subscribe to the new one.
If you were smart enough, you would have purchased your favourite movies. But they are likely so chock-full of DRM that they can only play with the software controlled by the place your bought them from. Again, if you cancel your subscription, you lose your movies.
The copyright masters will tell you that you do not actually “own” the movie; you have purchased the right to view it.
I understand. But what I don’t understand is this: if I own a vinyl record and die, should that vinyl record be destroyed? Or can it be left to those who will inherit from me? The physical vinyl record is my property; the music it contains is not. But all the same, the physical object I am able to hold in my hand is mine. Chicken/egg. This question is the same that Bruce Willis once asked, except his collection was on iTunes. Although not “physical media”, it could have been, if he stored his collection on his own hard drive.
How did we get into this preposterous situation where we “rent” things; everything? From music to movies to software? Was it not a lifetime licence — as in, not “my lifetime” but the lifetime of the copyright — I purchased? Or, put another way, did I not purchase the right to listen to an album until either (1) the copyright expired or, (2) until the physical media where the album is stored no longer works?
I guess not. I’m also going to hazard another guess that, with regards to copyright law, the term “own forever” is rather ambiguous. Whatever.
Having digitised all my physical media, I’m going to will the hard drives to my inheritors. They’ll probably bin them.