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I don't think there's been a government more willing to wheel out the 'Think of the Children' defense (or other similar meaningless done-to-death arguments such as stopping terrorists etc.) than the UK government, and a populous more willing to lap it up at every turn. (Remember Cameron's anti-porn and anti-encryption crusade? Remember Theresa May banging on about the very same things?) Some stances are just perpetually expected to be brought at some point, at least in my eyes, and it can be quite tiring to fight the same battles and arguments again and again, which I suppose is the whole point of beating said stances over the electorate, until they relent.

Given the current precarious position of PM Johnson though, I do not see this actually doing anything just yet other than being a flagrant distraction/appeasement/corruption/all of he above.


'we will love it' is the expectation that companies hope for, but I cannot imagine permanently renting such essential products (for a significant proportion of people) like cars.

Fingers crossed, but realistically one can only expect the worst.


I'm not so sure. People rent music now.


Its nice of Apple to put this so succinctly:

'Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely'

The world has definitely shifted from buying individual movies, songs/albums, video games and owning them in a more direct sense of having an actual physical object i.e. a disc. There are definitely still some limitations to this, its still a limited license, but compared to purchasing DRM-filled digital access, we've definitely gone even further into more restrictive access.

That is why I think that supporting DRM-free stores (e.g. GOG, Bandcamp) is important as well as buying physical media still (I still personally buy music CDs and Vinyl from time-to-time, however try to buy a game physically and all you will get is a plastic disc with a Steam code on it), and sometimes there is no way legitimate way to purchase some media, with piracy being essentially the only option.

Unfortunately Steam has become quite ubiqitous and like most have fallen into the licensing game rabbithole (One the games I bought many years ago required installing Steam to 'function'), but with video games there's not much else to pick from, apart from whatever GOG has or some other companies crappier version of Steam (e.g. Origin, Epic Games Store). I'd like this to change but I don't think it will anytime soon.

I would be fine purchasing digital copies of content knowing the limited-time aspect, given the pricing would be (significantly) cheaper. But it isn't, and that's a problem.


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