Comment by stego-tech
4 days ago
I love physical media as a ritual, but loathe it as a storage medium - it's fragile, it rots, and manufacturers can't be trusted to create long-lasting products anymore. Not to mention the fact that UHD drives used to rip modern content are almost entirely defunct, with the remaining few going for nearly half a grand in the current climate.
Personally, in light of AI getting a hand-wave on massive piracy for training data purposes, I think we're ripe to redo copyright entirely. Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date, allowing consumers to transcode content freely for personal use, and finally stripping copyright from abandoned (i.e., no longer sold) content such that "lost media" can be freely shared without legal consequence. There's so, so many reforms we need to make to reflect how content works in the modern era, in a way that rewards content creators but creates a more permissive environment for archiving, sharing, and modifications.
>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,
That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.
Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.
I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.
> Not to mention the fact that UHD drives used to rip modern content are almost entirely defunct, with the remaining few going for nearly half a grand in the current climate.
Protip: All BDXL drives have the necessary hardware to read UHD discs.
I’m aware and have one such drive, but every manufacturer of PC drives has exited the industry. There’s a rumor that Buffalo or some other manufacturer might step in to restart production, but what’s out there is it for the time being.
Besides, with the Sony announcements today, I doubt the long-term support of BDXL or UHD in general. I might need to grab a mini Kaleidescape system and see about exfiltrating their digital copies sans DRM at this rate, if I want to buy stuff to own.