That post about the Office 2019 license expiring on Mac (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/70667106) made me think how many of us might not understand how people outside the pirate bubble deal with situations like that. My understanding is that the post’s author completely misses the point regarding what’s happening here. Those who bought an Office license back in 2019 are very much likely to have upgraded their packages already, so they won’t even know about this expiration date. The very few who are still using their old Office version will react at that as if it were a notification, buy a new one and won’t bother about it at all.

My point is that their relationship with paying for software is very different from how a pirate sees it; paying for a new version of an application every couple of years is not a problem for them. It’s like gamers who buy Call of Duty or EA Sports titles every year. It doesn’t make them idiots, it’s just a different way of dealing with money and that service. They like the new shiny stuff and they can pay for it, so I totally understand their choice of buying it.

This reminds me of that Stop Killing Games initiative and some thought I had about it, and also many posts I see of people complaining about the end of physical media. All publishers publish their content following the trends and the technology available at that specific time, always trying to maximize their profits. It was always like that and always will be. If they used in the past physical media it was only because online storefronts did not exist, or we wouldn’t even have had discs or tapes or cartridges to miss.

To understand my point you have to think back about the origin of movie theaters. Movies were released exclusively on theaters and that’s the only place people could watch them. Once they went out of theaters, that was it. The movie was gone and people couldn’t watch it anymore. Nobody complained about it, that’s how things worked. Now imagine movies were invented now, how would studios release them? Actually, you don’t need to imagine it. YouTube and TikTok are here to show how people deal with video on 2026. They consume it online and never bother about owning it or keeping it.

Another example is live sports. You never see people complaining they can’t buy sports seasons on Bluray or download them. We have a culture of watching sports events almost exclusively live (with very few exceptions). If you don’t watch it live, you missed it. People are used about this and don’t complain.

So although I understand those defending the right to keep their media, the publishers have the right to release it however they want. We only see it as a problem because we were used with the way things were, if that way hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t even think about it.

  • alexcleac@szmer.infoEnglish
    6·
    22 hours ago

    So although I understand those defending the right to keep their media, the publishers have the right to release it however they want.

    I’ve been thinking about this exact thing for quite a while, and I think there is a gem hidden in this paragraph: the publishers have right to sell their product how they see it fit. At the same time, I as a consumer have a right to consume the product the way I like.

    The availability of options 20-25 years ago made media truly free, where everyone could watch things however they liked: either it is a home projector, or have movie nights with friends on home TV, or is it watching on the go on crappy MP4 screen. Nowadays, though, it is moving back towards “we control how you watch it — period”. And that is infuriating: to get some freedom, and then get stripped of it just because there was a minor group called “pirate”, who started stealing it (taking into account that in most cases, those pirates had limited availability of the products: either financial, or governmental, ahoy from post-ussr country). I think, those corps are playing a blame game of moving responsibility for the harm to the consumers (similarly as it goes with plastics recycling). They basically are blaming people for making them to enforce those rules, while most of those malicious customers turned out more frequent buyers than regular paying customers, and provide invaluable intelligence on popularity of things[1], and made their products widely available at places they were not.

    The problem is not about having bluray, it is about not having it available in any they cannot take away, because of “reasons”. That is exactly what happened to Office 2019, and that product was not released that long ago: 2019 is only 7 years ago. At the same time, people nowadays resurrect old games and software to make it work on modern hardware, take a look at GOG Preservation Program[2] as an example. They even had a conflict with Blizzard for selling WarCraft 1 and WarCraft 2 in original state and form, while Blizz decided to get more money on cheap remake[3].

    I see that the Office 2019 story reminded us that the rights of buyer of digital media are inherently assymetrical to what publisher have. 'Cause when I buy a car, I can do with it whatever I want: I can tweak it, I can get it into various shops for service, etc. What happens with the software/media is “well, you paid us, but you still have to do things the way we want you to do them”: feels like a crappy leasing to me, for paying a full price.

    That brings me to my personal rule: if I can buy it, I better buy it. If I cannot buy it without strings attached, then the piracy is somewhat justified. Exceptions can be small authors, but then I just try to find a way to finance them: either via patreon, or whatever else. People deserve to be paid for work, though people also deserve to be treated as entities of agency, not blind obedience.

    1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmOPM1cSrY4, disclaimer: I couldn’t verify sources, take that into account too 2: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program 3: https://www.gog.com/en/news/warcraft_12_will_be_delisted_from_gogwhat_does_this_mean_in_regard_to_the_gog_preservation_program