| ▲ | braiamp 4 hours ago | |
This is a weird framing and only furthers that argument. No, if you give money for something, that something is yours. It will violating a bunch of fundamental contract law understanding if the ownership status of what you buy is ever questioned. Lets use a book, since it illustrate how ridiculous such assertions are. Ask yourself this question: why do you buy a book? For the paper, for the ink or for the information that it contains? Obviously the valuable thing for anyone is the information, the message, the communication of the author with you. Nobody really cares how the information reaches you, but that it reaches you. It is what motivates your purchase. When people buy digital content, they aren't buying the digital zeros and ones, they are buying the content. And yet the format you supposedly don't care about is exactly what determines whether you keep any rights afterward. Take the same text in a printed book versus an ebook. Same author, same copyrighted content, same money changing hands. Buy the printed copy and you can resell it, lend it, leave it to your kids, no permission asked, because first sale doctrine protects whoever owns a copy. Buy the ebook and the platform's license language quietly reclassifies you as a non-owner, so none of that applies. The format from which the content is transmitted and distributed is irrelevant to why you bought it, but apparently decisive for what you're legally allowed to do with it once you have. The individual would never have started the purchase process if it didn't expect to own a copy of said content. This is where every "but it's digital, so it is different" fails to address, and I believe deliberately and maliciously, it implies that value only resides in the material plane without considering the abstract. | ||