Will Your Books and Music Die With You? 248
theodp writes "Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes, reports the WSJ, but when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us. 'I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,' says author Evan Carroll of the problems created for one's heirs with digital content, which doesn't convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. So what's the solution? Amazon and Apple were mum when contacted, but with the growth of digital assets, Dazza Greenwood of MIT's Media Lab said it's time to reform and update IP law so content can be transferred to another's account or divided between several people."
Re:Blind Trust? (Score:5, Informative)
There are really two problems working together:
1. Most DRM systems(and even some many non-DRMed consumer 'cloud sync' stuff) are built around the architectural assumption that a given device will have one 'account' authorized/set/whatever at a time, and each 'account' will have some set of things licensed to it. Even if you have my credentials, it is generally somewhere between 'awkward' and 'designed not to be possible' for you to actually use a union of your account and mine, or even transfer stuff from my account to yours. You can deathorize your account and authorize mine, and then be stuck with access just to my stuff, and even switch back and forth; but you generally can't transparently access the contents of both.
2. Because this stuff is mostly distributed on a 'licensed not sold, DRM-circumvention-forbidden, the EULA owns you now, suck it peasant' basis, you likely don't have much clout in terms of getting anything in #1 changed in your favor. At best, those UI/UX decisions are just a customer support problem, at worst, you might be explicitly prohibited from accessing somebody else's account, even if they wanted you to, and Dear Old Dad's estate can get its account banhammered for even trying to let the heirs in(if detected, obviously password sharing happens all the time).
Some sort of keeps-the-accountants-employed trust structure might have some advantages(incidentally, given the very low cost of setting up a US corporation in places like Delaware and Nevada, has anybody considered getting around the regional restrictions by purchasing through a US shell's credit card?); but it would be unlikely to save you from the fact that account aggregation is generally somewhere between unsupported and explicitly forbidden...
Mine wont. (Score:4, Informative)
As I violently violate the law and strip out the DRM from every purchase. it's mine, I dont care about their TOS, I'm going to get rid of their restrictions and make sure my purchases cant be stolen from me.
Re:You don't "own" anything any longer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:First (Score:5, Informative)
So what's the solution?
Simple: digital content should convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. Why should, e.g., books written on vellum have different rights than those written on paper?
Next problem,
I simply take the ownership rights of the books I buy. (And, yes, I do buy them, because authors have to eat too).
There are methods of DRM removal that can be used on your dbooks, and ebook library managers (such as Calibre [calibre-ebook.com]) that you can use to manage your collection on your local hard drive, and back up to CD-Rom. Combine these two tool sets and you have the ownership you want.
Similarly, for music, every digital music locker I am aware of allows download to your hard drive. Any drm protection on those files can also be stripped.
I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.