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Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

I agree, in principle, but "ownership" is almost too nebulous. To get down to brass tacks, to look for unambiguous features that cannot be weasel-worded away, we're really looking at remote revokability or, the Bizarro cousin to that, the ability of any other party to suspend or cease playable activation via DRM.

Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.

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We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline. If I go and buy a set of LEGOs, i get that set of legos, i can lend them to someone, can resell them, can use them after 10 years, etc. Having a "buy" button for a movie should mean the same (as it does when you "buy" a dvd). LEGO can't come to your house and demand the bricks you bought and paid for back, why should sony?

If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.

>We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline.

Due to the ease of reproduction, you really can't. That's why we really shouldn't rely too heavily on that analouge for comparisons. You can't clone 1000 more insteances of your lego set, you can't upload your lego set to the internet to be cloned further. Even if we get to that point in 3d printing, "pirating" a lego set properly requires resources to your 3d printer to produce those legos. Materials you may not have on hand, or that cost just a much as buying the lego set yourself.

>If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy".

You could make that distinction, but the colloquial mind treats "perpetual rental until we are forced to remove content from servers" as "buy". both types of purchase go down once that part of PSN servers decide to shut down like they want to do soon-ish for PS3/Vita (they wanted to do it last year, but consumer backlash delayed it).

You can put rent (infinity sign). Short and effective.

And I heard about the issue with reproduction before, in fact this is such a big issue that many of the richest company in the world are software

The end user expects some connection between “buying a Lego” and buying digital content. We use metaphors such as “a cart” or “add to your library” that make a user think this is just like buying from a store bringing something home — it is in my library. If we aren’t going to keep these metaphors true, we should stop using them. It’s not in “my library”, it’s more like an amusement park I have perpetual access to until it one day closes.

Ownership isn’t fuzzy though, it has a clear definition. The problem is that clear definition makes pirates angry because they want it to mean something other than what it does, so they try to make the situation cloudy.

If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.

Playstation users did „purchase“ that content. Is that enough for a claim or not?

Purchasing a license is not the same as purchasing the thing, and everyone knows that. It’s not 1997 anymore.

Whether they have an enforceable claim to access the content depends on the terms of their license, and while I haven’t read it I think we all know they won’t.

Purchasing a rent license! Yay for newspeak. Rent is rent, purchase is purchase.

Hey, we ended contract with the store were you bought your DVDs. Please return them.

Please, please let me know before you fly next. I cannot wait to hear you explain to the gate agent that you purchased a ticket so legally the plane is now yours.

The better example would be when I'm kicked out from am over-sold flight.

The difference would be that airlines usually make up for it. Meanwhile in this case „purchased“ stuff is gone for good. No refunds or transfer of purchases to Warner's platform.

This is a really great example of trying to use outrage to distract from the fact that you’re not addressing the point you’re allegedly replying to.

You got stuck because you didn’t understand the implications of the original hot take you had. It’s ok, it happens.

I’m still addressing the same point. You purchase something and then it’s taken away from you without any sort of compensation.

You are willfully ignoring the part you don’t like and hoping it will go away.

Is the point you're getting at that no one owns anything digitally?

No, my point is about whether ownership has a clear definition or not. It does. This is separate from whether or not we like the way the system works for licensing content, and it’s important that people not muddy the waters here.

I think Playstation is doing the muddying.

Did people "buy" something? Was that the word used? If so, shouldn't they have an expectation of "ownership"? If so, then Playstation has destroyed or stolen someone's property.

That's why I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of "What does to mean to own something?" because it appears that there are various groups, not just pirates, who would like to impose their own definitions, just as the RIAA attempted to state that copying was equal to theft, despite copying not depriving anyone else of the use and enjoyment of the original property.

> I think Playstation is doing the muddying

You are certainly welcome to your opinion. This is how the industry has worked for decades at this point though, so it’s hard to argue that the people doing the standard thing with the standard words are the ones creating confusion.

Yes, they bought a license. They own a license, which means they own the ability to exercise the rights included with that license under the terms and exclusions included in the license. Sony lawyers know what they’re about, you’re welcome to go read the license to find out exactly how they worded their claims about giving you access to material owned by Discovery.

In a way, I'm glad you disagree with me, it proves my original point that "buy" and "owns" have become terms where differing parties can't seem to agree on what they imply, and so we need to be more specific about it.

You could say that about literally anything by just refusing to accept the actual definition, though. One person not accepting that the word means what it means doesn’t mean that the word is unspecific.

It's much muddier when you consider the rights that the possessor of a DVD retains.

If the copyright owners tried to do the same stuff to physical media that they do with digital media, courts would rule against them.

The ownership is still clear in both cases, but the scope of what that ownership means is different.

That’s not muddy at all. You presented cases where one owns something and cases where one owns a license to use a thing and seem surprised that they’re different.

You think it’s muddy because you want owning a license to mean owning the thing. It doesn’t, it never has, and the license terms are clear (if of course a bit verbose).

No, ownership doesn't have a clear definition. You can own all sorts of interests in real property or personal property which fall short of the whole.

All of which, as I said, provide an enforceable claim against those things.

Claim of what though? If my claim is for real property, but with a reversion, and the reversion is triggered, I have no claim left...

Reversions are a common clause in leases, which nobody would call ownership. It’s certainly the case that the word could be viewed to have a confusing meaning if it’s misused in situations where it obviously doesn’t apply.

You can own a partial stake in something, either real or not, and have an enforceable claim which is to less than total control or subject to conditions. You can also have a purchase a contract which provides access or use in some way but isn’t ownership. The latter is very common digitally and is the subject of this thread.

"If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it."

Let me repeat myself for clarity. You can own a property with a reversion. You can own a leashold with a reversion. They are both enforceable claims. You can exclude people for the term of your lease. How is that not an enforceable claim? You said an enforceable claim means ownership. I think you were mistaken in saying because it's not true.

Now you are caveating it to portions of a whole. But a leasehold is for the entirety, just for a term.

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