Why is it legal to buy and sell used books/discs but illegal to buy and sell used digital files?

_number8_@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 486 points –

this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is "losing a sale" and not getting the money, right?

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if you live in the EU you own your digital purchases.

It's kind of not tested though.

If you've never been given the option to download it and save it and use it from there, how would you "own" it if the streaming service takes it offline?

If you can't transfer ownership of something, or have it past the lifespan of the shop you bought it from, do you really own it? I would say not.

That's not the ownership though, that's a subscription to a service. Ownership is something like buying songs on iTunes not listening to them on Apple music.

You can buy individual movies on Amazon without a subscription. This doesn't mean you own it. If they stop hosting it, it's gone.

But that is where the difference is, that's not streaming or at least not as the term is used. That was a purchase of a specific title.

streaming

noun

a method of transmitting or receiving data (especially video and audio material) over a computer network as a steady, continuous flow, allowing playback to start while the rest of the data is still being received.

Whether it's subscribed, "purchased" or free, if you don't have the full file to copy and do what you want with it, it's streaming.

That's software, and frankly until you can transfer a played game to somebody else in Steam, it's not something that is enforced.

They cannot "oppose it" according to that, but you cannot do it.

But buying a digital movie from Amazon or Sony? They can take that away. Haven't heard a peep from the EU on it.

You do not. Or we have a different definition for owning.

I'm in the EU. How do I download movies I purchased on Amazon?