Article: Do you really own your digital media?

In the good old days we listened to music in cassette players and read books in paperbacks and we paid for those content and claimed ownership of it. We owned those books and cassettes that could be loaned, gifted or shared with others without any problems. This sense of ownership extended even to the age of CD or DVD, because they were just different formats of the same content.
The formats of all the media discussed above was widely accepted for each of those media types, be it books or music or movies. The consistent media format meant that all the vendors who make electronic devices for the music and movie types had to adhere to the same standard, allowing me to switch between vendors and not having to worry about all the media that I already own.

Things were all promising in the MP3 age, when we could just rip the CDs that we own to MP3 format or encode our tapes to MP3 or movie format and load them on devices. This gave rise to the piracy, in which once the media gets gets created anyone can get access to it, there by eating away on the actual revenue that needs to be given the copyright owners.

The different industry groups of all these media types try to address the problem with Digital Rights Management (DRM) which in simple terms is a way to control access for the media that can be used by Hardware Manufacturer or Publisher or copyright holders. For example, when the music or video is purchased from iTunes, then it will play in all iDevices and iTunes, but will not play on another device. This DRM process allows the user to access the media on their device and allow to authenticate few devices depending on the media, but enables constraints on sharing the media.

While we purchased the ownership of the old media, the new DRM based media acts more like a license. When we pay for the media, we don't own, but get the license to use the digital media on some devices. This works the same as buying the license of a software like Windows and able to operate only on one device. In the conventional media, we can loan, sell or transfer our ownership from one user to another. Hence the concept of used sales. The DRM based media does not support that concept, though Amazon and Barnes and Noble have extended loaning of the eBooks in their respective devices, the process is lot more restrictive and limited to only their devices.

I understood this process in the hard way, when I tried to access a movie and a book that I "purchased" from  iTunes and Barnes and Noble. In the first case, I had a digital copy of a movie that I had downloaded and watched on my laptop almost 2 years back in my old laptop. I am done with that media and would like transfer my ownership and there is no way (not that I know of) to do it. The second case was with eBooks, when I started trying out Kindle through the apps and jumped on board with the physical device of Nook. Since these are competing platforms, the media from one device is not compatible with other, even though they are of the same type.

In the case of eBooks, most devices (except Kindle) support Adobe DRM allowing the transfer of books through a software called Digital Editions from Adobe. Though not seamless, it at-least allows me to buy books from Google and other sources and then load it to by Nook. The solution is far from perfect and lacks the ease of the legacy media.

The issue is more severe when it comes to streaming services and cloud services of Digital content. In those cases, when we pay for the services to own or stream the content, we don't own it but again license it. Which means that if I have downloaded the digital version of the game that connects to the server each time for licensing validity, if the hosting service is taken down for any number of reasons, then we lose all the rights to the media that we paid for.

In this growing age of Digital Content, it is essential that the industry establishes a standard that is accepted and adopted universally by all parties involved. If that is not the case and we are officially told that it is just the subscription fee that we are paying, then the charge needs to be far more nominal than the amount we are paying right now.

Author: Vinod