Do You Buy Physical Media or Have You Gone Digital?

Do you buy physical media or have you gone digital? In our house we have slowly built a library of Mickey Mouse purchases on iTunes for the little one. Will they be around when he grows up?

What Happens to Your Movies If Amazon Goes Out of Business?

When you purchase a movie from Amazon Instant Video, you’re not buying it, exactly. It’s more like renting indefinitely. This distinction matters if your notion of “buying” is that you pay for something once and then you get to keep that thing for as long as you want. Increasingly, in the world of digital goods, a purchasing transaction isn’t that simple.

There are two key differences between buying media in a physical format versus a digital one. First, there’s the technical aspect: Maintaining long-term access to a file requires a hard copy of it—that means, for example, downloading a film, not just streaming from a third party’s server. The second distinction is a bit more complicated, and it has to do with how the law has shaped digital rights in the past 15 years. It helps to think about the experience of a person giving up CDs and using iTunes for music purchases instead.

“In the good old days, you purchased a CD, which meant that you owned the medium outright and had an authorized copy that you could do anything you liked with, subject to copyright,” said Dan Hunter, the dean of Swinburne Law School. “For example, you could give it away to a friend, or resell it, or whatever. These days we live in a world where we generally license copyright content, like games and music. This means you’re given a limited right to do things with the content—generally this is limited to playing it on a small number of devices—and you definitely can’t resell the content or even give it away. You haven’t really bought the song, you’ve bought a contract to play the thing for a while.”

Physical medium is definitely so much better, I mean, it’s real, right?

Except I don’t think you are going to have an easy time finding a punch card computer, 8 track or Betamax player. From Amazon, sure, but how long until nobody makes them? When’s the last time you saw a cassette tape deck or VCR unless you were visiting your parents?

So you can probably get your hands on a player, but then what are you going to plug it into? The old cables won’t work on a modern TV.

And then there’s the fact that most physical media has a shelf life and will only last so long even when handled with care. It will simply degrade over time until it is even unplayable in that device that nobody makes anymore.

I’m slightly exaggerating here just to make a point. It’s very important to make good decisions when purchasing digital content — I will only buy content from iTunes because if anybody is likely to stick around for the long haul, it’s Apple. But physical media doesn’t mean permanent.

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