Things look bad and the digital ownership situation seems a mess!
The whole 'not owning our digital purchases and being at the whim of platform providers' seems goddamned hopeless!
We're all as potless, begging these companies to reassess.
The gaming communities spine feels freakin' boneless!
We've lost the game, we think the system's wrecked,
Well let me just say that's- correct!
We're all losers, baby! No matter what we spin it we've totally and utterly lost the battle for the ownership of the things that we buy now that the digital landscape has taken over reality and made the necessity for the physical all but redundant. The worst thing that ever happened to the upper class was the right of us lessers ever owning anything, which is why those have consistently been the rights attacked generation after generation since the birth of society. Rights to land were taken away, rights to congregate in large crowds, the right to be loud outside of the House of Commons (if you're down here in Blightly with myself) and now the right to own a damned file. Not even a digital copy of a movie or game can belong to the people who spend their money on it because ownership is a concept created by the oppressive to stamp down on us.
I'm in a mood. Can you tell?
Recently there's been some uproar in the space of entertainment regarding the prevalence of streaming services and the horrific imbalance of control it's permitting studios to have over modern movies and TV shows. Back in the day it was totally up to the purview of distributors to get out shows and movies- which often meant that the less popular just got scrapped completely turning most of cinema's origins into lost media. That was supposed to become a thing of the past as we moved into the age of easy to replicate digital files- but the reign of service providers is trying to resuscitate that rank imbalance for some hellish incomprehensible purpose. And nowhere has that been made more horrifically obvious then with Warner Bros. recent antics.
We've heard of two high-coverage cases of movies that were funded by Warner Bros to completion and then canned in some strange attempt to- perhaps construe losses on their tax returns? Who's to say what their end goal is- the results, however, is that the Batgirl film and 'Coyote vs ACME' have been killed in a completed state, wasting the time and talents of everyone involved with both products for no reason whatsoever. And these are just the instances that we're heard about because the creators kicked up a fuss. How many similar projects were snuffed out upon being birthed but managed to be kept hush-hush because the team were afraid of being backlisted by the big producer holding the pillow? And would you believe me if I told you that this same thing was happening to movies and shows that have already been released?
When providers pull shows and nobody picks them up, thanks to the streaming exclusivity and lack of physical release- some just disappear entirely! The Netflix Marvel shows were unwatchable for two years and on the gaming side there are entire Stadia exclusive games that simply cannot exist elsewhere because they were designed specifically to take advantage of streamed tech, and no other streaming platform currently allows streamed game exclusivity. (Although most have managed to get ports which scale down the reliance on streaming) We still can't get our hands on the Nuts and Bolts style spin off to Hello Neighbour which is real and perhaps the only positive casualty of this no-ownership world within which we reside.
Of course we can rely on the likes of piracy when the world of licences fail us, because no pirate site is going to abide by some greedy studios calculated move to drive up scarcity in order to conjure an illusion of value. But we can't place piracy as the solution to all of our problems. I don't want to commit piracy as a solution to owning my software, I want to support the creators so that they can make more cool stuff! Right now I have only ever committed piracy on a single franchise I refuse to pay money for, and that's only to check if their latest updates have made the game worth getting. When I find out inevitably that they haven't after an hour of playing, I uninstall it again. (Good luck figuring out which game I'm talking about.)
This is no idle threat to consumers either. With Crunchy Roll's recent consumption of Funimation, everybody who had redeemed a show on the service through a DVD code, or who had even brought one through some special instances, hold no recourse for retaining that digital data when accounts are moved to Crunchy Roll's servers. The same happened with Sony's breakup with the Discovery Channel and 'owned' shows through their servers. And yes, Sony may have walked that back publicly, but certain territories got no such provisions- Germans just lost their shows. Ownership is becoming a commodity that the commercial world cannot afford.
And the solution? Unfortunately I think it's going to have to be a government decision. We need a big power, preferably from within the EU, to take a revised look at digital rights and amend them- because there isn't a company on the planet with a Shareholder board lenient enough to allow that kind of revision. And what do I propose? I think we need a subsidy backed digital library of content through which legal ownership can be verified and copies can be downloaded if their rights aren't currently in service by a private service provider- so that the greed of corporations is ripped right out of the equation. Digital art is given the safety net it deserves, and audiences don't feel the need to stock up on Hard drives for fear of their favourite platform shutting down everytime they blink. Yeah, it's not fullproof, but honestly what else is going to change our trajectory in this downwards spiral of not owning anything? There's only so far we can keep physical media struggling along before it needs to be put out of it's misery.
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