[nayuki]

> Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours

Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.

What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.

The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.

[knodi123]

This is technically true, but not helpful. These online services have buttons that say "rent" and "buy", they don't say "rent for a little while" and "rent for a longer but unknown amount of time". Of course they can go out of business, but the impression they intentionally give to the customer is that if you click "buy", you get access to the movie for as long as the site exists.

[zarzavat]

If you're the ethical type you can "buy" it on one of these services and then pirate it in order to keep it in perpetuity. If you're the less ethical type you can skip the "buying" step.

[like_any_other]

Is it really ethical to keep giving them money? Eventually you have to face the fact that you're feeding a monster that lobbies for anti-consumer laws and makes anti-consumer technology. They're actively working to make our world worse. Helping them in that endeavor is not ethical.

[microgpt]

Why is it ethical to give $29.98 to a forcefully inserted middleman and $0.01 to a creator? If you're ethical, pirate and then donate.

[port11]

Okay, but who do you donate to in the case of a movie or show? Because for authors and musicians I agree with your take. I wish more musicians were on Bandcamp, and more authors sold e-books directly from their website.

[tmtvl]

Even with musicians it can be tricky. Imagine an album with various classical pieces performed by different orchestras. Not only are there the conductors and the musicians of the orchestras, but the album also wouldn't have existed without the sound engineers and recording crews and the composers...

Even authors are dependent on their editors, so the idea of 'giving money to the people who create the things we like' is more complex than it may seem at first glance.

[anonymars]

Yeah, but do all those people get residuals? When you buy a real copy, who gets money from that?

[wolvoleo]

Well, if I had been the ethical type (I'm not), having my paid content deleted would convert me into a non-ethical type really really quickly. Just saying.

I don't care if some lawyer suit says it's ok because I really bought a license and not the content. Screw that. I bought a movie. If that's allowed by the law, the law deserves no respect.

[zenoprax]

I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?

Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical

A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.

[fluoridation]

>What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?

The image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape.

>A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.

Correct, a digital physical thing stores digital virtual things, and an analog physical thing stores analog virtual things.

[zenoprax]

> image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape

If I am following along...

analog virtual: representation of apple on photographic film digital physical: disc with film.mkv

Given the two remaining combinations:

analog physical: unexposed photographic film? digital virtual: binary-encoded data (film.mkv)?

Anything beyond this and it becomes a philosophical or metaphysical discussion though.

[falcor84]

Another example of Analog Virtual is Hokusai's The Great Wave (and similar prints). I recently watched David Bull's videos about his recreation of it [0] and it was fascinating to hear him tell about how even the "original" prints were made from slightly different woodblocks made in the same workshop.

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUd...

[fluoridation]

>digital virtual: binary-encoded data

Arguably the raw binary data still has a physical aspect, because it hasn't been interpreted yet (other than a reordering by the file system). The virtual thing is what the data ultimately represents.

Another subtlety is that a drawing on a page would be an analog representation of the thing, but if the drawing has the shape 右 and the page is placed between two doors, there would be a virtual idea encoded digitally as well.

[lyu07282]

> Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves.

It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.

It already drove the needle way past acceptable copy protection, do not buy Blu-Rays!

[Telaneo]

> It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.

Buy this definitions, DVDs are also problematic, given they're also encrypted.

Blu-rays are universally cracked by this point, so I fail to see the problem. MakeMKV is not going away to the point you won't be able to rip your blu-ray.

UHD blu-rays are a different story, since they added more encryption.

[lyu07282]

no the difference is CSS (the encryption of DVDs) has been broken, but AACS of Blu-ray has never been broken itself. Cracking it relies on player keys being leaked and those are getting rotated in newer disks, that's what I was hinting at. They also do some ridiculous stuff with obfuscated virtual machines in BD+ and audio watermarking that may mute your ripped disk on newer TVs (I'm not joking[1]). So again: don't buy blu-ray either!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

[rpdillon]

Yep, this is the reason I was an avid DVD collector, but when the Blu-ray switch happened, I never rebuilt my collection.

[Telaneo]

Looks like I was wrong. Fair enough.

[LocalH]

Digital in this context is merely shorthand for "digitally distributed", as opposed to "physically distributed"