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“I had a dream once the RIAA kicked my door down and arrested me for singing too loudly in the shower.”
Does anyone else here remember EA’s “Spore” DRM controversy at launch, that only authorized a licensed user something like 3 installations per purchase? It was an attempt they made trying to kill the secondary market for video games and went about as well as one would expect. I don’t think they’ve tried to make that move sense.
It’s also why I’ve always preferred physical media. I don’t use Audible, I don’t have Spotify and TBF I don’t even like Steam all that much, but it’s the closest I’ll come to walking over to that side of the aisle. I wonder what kind of territory we’re going to wade into when synthetic biology and widespread nanotech really take off and you’ve got corporations scrambling to patent peoples genes. Plenty of room for dystopian futures to take root.
Its why I continue to maintain a physical, offline music collection even though it feels increasingly pointless. I've still got a bunch of my old CDs in a box in my closet as a last resort.
I pay 8 bucks and I can stream 95% of the music I want anywhere I am, which is a fair deal. The problem is they've trained me to expect betrayal and removal of songs I enjoy for reasons beyond their control, so archives/backups feel like a necessary step. Music files are small, storage is cheap.
I AM certainly willing to pay to see live performances, the value add there is clear, but digitization of everything has made me very unwilling to hand over money for an ephemeral digital file that I'm technically not allowed to copy.
There was a similar controversy years ago, around the time when cloud storage first took off. People were very skeptical of putting all their files onto someone else’s servers, hoping that it would still be there, hoping it would still be secure. A handful of people thought it was idiotic and said you’d never get them onboard with it and that you should stick to local storage. The counter-response was, “What if there’s a fire in your house? What if you get robbed?” These are all risk factors, and I’m not against cloud storage at all, but I prefer the vectors I have direct access and control over rather than the ones I don’t. It’s also why I don’t use ebook readers for general purpose consumption. If I’m at work and I have some downtime, sure. But generally I don’t like the thought of losing my place because my alarm clock drained the battery which caused my book to die.
Amazingly, Dropbox has never betrayed me over the course of 15 years. But the only reason I tolerated it in the first place is because it syncs with a local folder on my own computer so it was added convenience with no additional risk.
Then Microsoft tries to force that same crap on me and I get mad because they're trying to dictate what I keep on my computer.
Depends on what you consider a betrayal, I guess. A year or two ago, they added a new setting that (if memory serves) allowed them to train models on your data, and turned it on by default. I considered that a massive betrayal and moved to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance after that. I might move to Proton Drive once they have a Linux client.
I do recall that but... I'm not TOO mad about letting my data get hoovered up to help summon the Silicon demon.
I actually WANT the machine God to have a piece of my personal data in there. I tailor my behavior online to make it easy for the thing to figure out my preferences.
For me, it was the underhanded way they did it. If they introduced a setting and it's off by default, fine whatever. If they turned it on by default but gave copious notice, that's not great but I might have been ok with it. It was the fact that the setting was both on by default and they snuck it in (I found out from a hacker news comment thread) which I found so unacceptable.
It seems to be standard corporate operating procedure. Do the thing, if there's enough blowback then walk it back/undo it, but depend on the apathy/laziness of the consumer to let you get away with 4/5 of what you want to do.
Sure. But that doesn't make it ok, of course, and I refused to allow them to continue to get my business after that kind of betrayal.
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