Whoever controls this “service” has control over which books i can read, therefore control about my ability to obtain knowledge. This is something i will not suffer to any degree more than absolutely necessary or unpreventable.

When i own a book, be it a ‘lowtech’ hardcopy or some electronic media unencumbered by access restrictions, it is much more difficult to take my access to this knowledge away. This security is something very dear to me, to the point that i would assert such a thing to be a conditco sine qua non to a free society.

But, then again maybe not everyone shares my passion about owning books. :)

When the power went out in Toronto last week for a large swathe of the city, there was nothing to do but lie on the couch with the dogs and read actual, hard-copy books. And try to make coffee with a bodum and some tea lights. (It was also the coldest day of the year.)

You can’t play CDs either when there’s no juice, but at least treeware is accessible as long as it’s light enough.

What happens when we no longer have books, newspapers, movies, etc to record information, and all have ‘easy, instant access’ to an online catalog of it? The concern here is…what happens when some future administration decides that, say, ‘red blood’ in entertainment is the source of youth violence, and it should be censored out of all media. No problem! You control all the media, you can just remove it. Suddenly, nobody sees red blood anymore!

Or, perhaps, you decide that speaking against the government is seditious and a form of terrorism…perhaps all books previously available that had such dangerous ideas should maybe not be available to the public any more?

Maybe the American flag becomes too dangerous a symbol of nationalism in this new ‘United Earth government’ and all media, movies, and music with images of it…are simply no longer available?

You don’t think first-world governments are not ALREADY banning symbols, images, and concepts even WITHOUT this level of control (in which case they have to make the effort to actually go out and FIND the offending media that must be destroyed)? Centralize this kind of control, and beware what happens next…

Ownership and access have their pros and cons. I don’t think either one should completely dominate.

I dig Netflix and Hulu, but sometimes I don’t WANT to see something new that I haven’t seen before. There is a lot to be said for ‘old comfortable’ movies and books you’ve had a while. The same physical book you held in your hands as an adolescent and read for the first time, and have re-read dozens of times since…a signed music CD from an artist who came through town when you were younger and is now long since dead…the first movies (specific editions, too) you bought after moving into your first house…

Yes, there is some ‘media’ here, that could be digitized and preserved…but the memory is tied equally as much to (or, in some cases, even moreso to) the *physical media involved*. It’s not JUST the content that matters.

And let’s not even TALK about the difference in buying someone a gift as a physical thing they can hold vs a digital download code!

a: having to say “Mother may I?” every time you want to read a book/listen to music/move to new hardware/look at a picture

b: having to trust, for your entire lifetime, that the hardware/software/data won’t ever be unavailable for extended periods and that some beancounter won’t decide that nobody REALLY wants to read your favorite story in “Obscure Book That Only Sold 5000 copies and hasn’t been looked at except by you in ten years.”

c: having everything you look at/listen to known by anonymous third parties who may at any time be “asked” to hand your records over to them as part of either civil or criminal court proceedings.

Dear Mr. Kelly:

Pirate science sneers at your subscription fee!

Sincerely,
The Pirate Bay

Hmmm…I really want to write similar letters that come from Creative Commons creators and open-source software writers commenting on what a bad idea paying money for something that you can’t download to store locally is, but I’m not sure how to word it.

you can’t possible get all media from one site, so how many monthly subscriptions can you afford to avoid “owning” stuff?

are you rich? i’m not. most people aren’t.

just sayin’

if the economy doesn’t shape up, entertainment-based $9.99/mo bills are gonna be the first to go.

What if someone takes away my access?”

If I get my internet access cut and I can’t get back on, I’ll be honest, access to my unlimited music and book collection will be roughly my last worry. If the service on the other hand goes down… I’ll just get a new one. One all you can eat service is roughly as good as another.

What if my access to the technology that allows the access goes away?

Then nuclear war has broken out? Yeah, I mean, I guess that would suck. I don’t think most people buy books and CDs as a defense against civilization collapsing though.

What if the DRM server goes down?

Get a new one. Yahoo’s unlimited music service went down and people shrugged and went to Rhapsody. You have unlimited music either way. It is like asking what happens if your Internet provider shuts down his routers… um, you get another one.

The hardback book in my backpack (Anathem, Neal Stephenson-highly recommended)is 935 pages that don’t crash and and is on an easy-to-read paper platform. And I can re-sell it when I am finished reading it.

I suppose it depends upon how much reselling matters to you. I look at my current music “collection” which is from an all you can eat music service. If you sum up the cost of all of the music that I have downloaded from Rhapsody’s all you can eat service, it is into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. I would never buy that much music normally, and if I did I would never be able to resell it for enough to recoup even a fraction of the cost. “All you can eat” is a lot cheaper than paying for ownership and reselling.

I am not saying that I will stop buying books. I too like books and read them slow enough that renting doesn’t make any sense. Music on the other and is a different story. Music is expensive, I get not thrill in collecting physical copies, I like experimenting, and I am going to have an expensive player irregardless if I own the physical copy or not.

For me, all you can eat music is the greatest thing since the MP3 player. If a friend of mine is raving about some band, I just download every single song they have ever made. If I don’t like it, I delete it without a second thought. If I decide that I want to hear some music from a genera that I know very little about, I just snag smorgasbord of it. Buying blues in a music store would be expensive torture. Snagging a few dozen artists that I might like online and then downloading every song from the ones I like is cheap and easy.

As others have said before me, if I lose access to my connection point to this on-demand content, what then? Will I have physical copies to fall back on? Will I be able to make my own physical copies? How much would such a system cost? With everything going on-demand, who controls the access to the content? The government? Some corporation? What if that corporation goes bankrupt or changes their policies about the on-demand content? What if they decide that something isn’t right for me to watch?

I’m all for an on-demand system as long as it’s *part of* the current system of media deployment, not a replacement.

They are surprisingly OK with taxing culture around here. See Cory’s earlier post about small scale taxation.

Yes, there are those for whom the value is in physical ownership, and there are certainly times where local copies — either physical or digital — are preferable, but the cultural tide has already turned.

I would also argue that we’ve lost sight of history here. The whole ownership model as a cultural norm is a pretty recent development. Ask your parents (or grandparents for you younger folk) about “ownership” of movies, music, books — you might be a bit surprised at how odd the idea of a personal collection really is.

Eh? You lost me somewhere. I’m certainly not rich (the value of family and friends excepted, of course), so I’m missing your point entirely.

How many things would you buy to avoid “renting” stuff? From a purely cost standpoint, based on my own consumption, $9.99/mo is significantly cheaper than buying media at $15-20 a pop.

I think the privacy implications here are pretty troubling.

Rindan makes some good points. And while I agree that having media stored centrally means it would be easier for malicious institutions to photoshop our collective memory, I also think that said institutions already have a great deal of control over the selection of who gets to do art and journalism, and which art and journalism gets to be distributed. That happens without regard to an access or ownership model of the product. So a democratic and transparent culture might be as or more important than how you get your stuff, if the integrity of collective memory is what worries you.

I think it’s also a good point that the great majority of the world doesn’t have the technology to make an access model work in any case. And I would add that, for all our happy mutant ideas about scrappy linux-based cell phone users bubbling up in the developing south, the reality is that for much of the human population there simply is no such thing as an available computer, nor is their a swift trend towards that fact changing. That doesn’t make KK right or wrong, but it puts the importance of the argument in some kind of perspective, I think.

I think what bothers me more than storing the media I consume on somebody else’s cloud is storing the things I *create* there. That’s what people do with flickr and facebook and blogger and the rest. I’m with Danny O’Brien (and Cory apparently) on that one. I’d rather keep my shared media on my own network-facing machine, and backed up physically too, in case the Cloud Owners change their minds about something, or in case the power goes all intermittent once The Change comes. (And y’all know it’s coming. Oh yes.)

millionpoems:

…and all should cry, Beware! Beware!
his flashing eyes! his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
and close your eyes with holy dread!
for he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise.

When convenience and practicality truly outweigh collector’s value and sentimentality in the way we experience media, I will fucking cry.

Indeed, there’s probably a better argument to be made for only storing private and collaborative data on servers (since it needs backing up, and it’s unlikely your neighbors will have a handy copy of your email archive for you to consult while you’re over at their house), encrypted, of course. You don’t care if you lose your thumbdrive with every movie ever made on it, because it’s easy to replace. Losing the videos of your kid’s first steps, OTOH, is something you’d regret forever.

This is almost how it works with high end production software today. You don’t so much “own” AutoCAD or 3dsMax, you rent it (after a fashion) by paying for yearly service updates. If you choose not to upgrade you own your last version but it’ll cost you to get back into the game later on.

When truly high speed internet becomes more wide spread a software company will just serve you access to say Adobe Photoshop. That would be better in many ways. It would cost less, be more stable and be faster with truly unlimited storage. Piracy would consist of hacks to gain unauthorized access.

Of course trust is the central problem. I wouldn’t trust the current clowns, not even Obama. That is why we need something better. We need a better way of keeping our collective eyes on those entrusted with power. I like total transparency. Every move they make, every breath they take, we’ll be watching them.