A few months back, I was reading a discussion board online about the ownership of movies, which today's class discussion reminded me of. (If I find it again, I'll add a link to it here!)
To the best of my memory, some people on the board were saying that in the future, big name companies would own all movies and consumers would simply pay to stream them each time they wanted to view a particular film. People on the site were discussing a trend about consumers being less interested in actually buying their own DVD/Blu-ray copies of a film for repeat viewings, and more interested in paying for a single streaming of a film. So in essence, people wouldn't "own" hard copies of movies anymore.
But then, some people were also raising the question: Do we even really own the DVDs/Blu-ray discs that we've paid for? There are governmental regulations regarding viewing, coping, and distibuting them, after all (not that they're strictly followed of course).
What do you think? Do we really own the movies that we pay to view in the comfort of our own homes? And would you rather buy hard copies of films or stream them? Might it depend on what film it was, and whether or not you already knew how much/how little you liked it?
Excellent post, Amber. In the world of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we no longer fully control copies of the digital media content that resides in our computers and on discs and other storage media. There are limits on what we can do with content we bought and paid for-- limits on who we can share it with, whether or not we can make clips or excerpts of it, whether not we can play it on DVD players purchased in a different "zone" of the world, etc. We'll be discussing this later in the class when we talk about what has happened with copyright these days.
ReplyDeleteMuch agreed - however, even in the digital download era, I still prefer having a "hard copy" of my media, although as mentioned above, tangible media like DVDs aren't technically ours to "own" after all. Still, once somone has say, a DVD, in their posession, they can do more or less whatever they chose with it so long as the government/company who owns the intellectual property rights does not catch them. Whereas with online files, they could be lost for good if your computer crashes (and haven't backed them up, or your back-up device fails as well). It just seems that, perhaps from a more old-fashioned standpoint, that digitally downloaded media is even less under our control than previous forms of media. I guess that's a price we have to pay for convenience and technological advancements.
ReplyDelete