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Old 10-22-2012, 04:03 PM   #48
BoldlyDubious
what if...?
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Even if Amazon will give back to the unfortunate (or willingly malicious: this is really not relevant here) Norwegian user the full price of her books, the fact remains that content distribution business models like Amazon's Kindle grant all the rights to the seller and none to the purchaser. So much so, that the "purchaser" does not actually own anything.

This is bad for many reasons. To name one that people usually don't think about: if things go on like this, most of our children will NOT be able to build on their parents' collection of media. Such collections, actually being services tied to physical persons, will die with them. Libraries (and music collections) will have to be rebuilt from scratch at each new generation. However, young people will simply not have the money to re-purchase all the culture that their parents needed a lifetime to accumulate: so they will not even try. It's easy to understand how over the long run this can be very bad for the literacy, and general cultural level, of populations.

Maybe this problem (and others, such as entire libraries vanishing when the companies that they were "bought" from cease operation) should be deemed as enough damaging to society to interest governments? We should start now to think about ways to make culture less volatile and less subject to the whims (read: whatever generates profit) of media providers.
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