In this everything is digital world we live in, a lot of the entertainment content we buy is digital. Some of us have a large selection of music that we have purchased over the years. And nowadays a lot of people even buy their movies digitally. It is no surprise, digital content offers a myriad of benefits over traditional CDs and DVDs. For example, you can carry your entire music library on your phone instead of having to lug around a couple of CDs. And you can watch the movies you buy anywhere you go. These are all really great upsides of digital content; however, there is one potential problem.
Think of the company you get most of your digital content from. For most of us that would probably Apple or Amazon. Now consider what would happen if Apple or Amazon shut down? While that is unlikely to happen anytime soon it is a possibility in the future. In an article written by Adrienne Lafrance, for The Atlantic, outlines potential problems that owning digital content can have. She states in her article that when you purchase something digitally, “you’re not buying it, exactly. It’s more like renting it indefinitely” (Lafrance, 2015).
There are some indicators that we do not have as much rights with digital content as we do with physical content. In Lafrance’s article, it is stated that with physical content, we have the option of repurposing content whether that means we give it away or sell it. However, with digital content, there is no way to give it to someone else or sell it (also copyright laws often forbid this). So, in a sense that movie or album you “bought” is not really yours (Lafrance, 2015).
I find the concept of not owning digital content to be somewhat scary. I know it’s a longshot that amazon or apple will go out of business in my lifetime. But, I still don’t like to think that all the money I’ve spent has been on something that I don’t actually own. If Amazon were to go out of business, there is a good chance we would all lose all our content everything from movies to books (Lafrance, 2015). Most of us probably “own” digital content but, have you ever thought about what would happen if the company you bought it from shut down? Or a more interesting question, perhaps what happens to it when you die?
References
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/when-amazon-dies/409387/
This could be even connected to the Internet of Things as one of the challenges of this technology. When someone downloads an application on their phones, for example, the digital content and data takes up space on that device from that download. As this person continuously downloads more and more content on their device and connects to an internet network with others in their area, who are downloading this content as well, the connectivity between devices and internet networks will suffer in terms of its run time speed. I am sure that most of us are familiar with this type of concept with the new student ticket system for the football games and how unpopular it is with the speed of our tickets on the cell phones nonetheless being able to get service and connect to internet when going through the student ticket lines. With the endless amount of digital content from the millions of people on Earth and even people that have passed away, one thing to really consider is how all this digital content will affect the run speed and further access to this data information in the future.
Challenges of the Internet of Things
https://www.bbntimes.com/en/technology/challenges-of-the-internet-of-things
This is a question that worth us to ponder, and we will going to face this question in the future. People owning more and more digital contents on the internet, and it will be a significant amount of prices in total. In another way, their account can be the only way to cherish people who are gone. In the article written by Nikki Williams provides a few examples of digital assets. One of the examples is the widow asking Apple’s password for the account of her dead husband, but Apple required her to have a court order for that; finally, she found BBC and got the apologies and passwords from Apple. From this case, we can see most companies are highly regarded on personal account privacy, even their family members could get the account, but it takes a long while of instructions for them to get the account. However, there is some reason behind Apple’s action, before you buy something on iTunes or Apple store, there will be a list of “terms of use” includes “iTunes is the provider of the Service, which permits you to purchase or rent a license for digital content (“iTunes Products”) for end-user use only under the terms and conditions set forth in this Agreement”. Some of the other platforms seem relatively tight on the digital assets policy, Twitter could delete dead people’s information by providing certifications, but it still restricts on providing deceased’s account. In these days, those policies for digital assets are not perfect, we still need time to figure out the best solution.
https://www.digitalethics.org/essays/death-and-internet-what-happens-your-digital-assets-when-you-die
This is a very interesting question, legally speaking, and something I had not thought about before. Sandy Burger ventures into that very question in the AARP.com article “What Happens to Your E-Books When You Die?” by first explaining the distinction between digital and physical property: physical items “become part of your estate. . . that can be owned, sold and passed on” while buying something digitally “simply gives you a license to use the books or music.” Essentially, you cannot leave your digital library of music and movies to whomever you’ve left behind on Earth.
The issue of digital ownership seems akin to the privacy rights issues we’ve discussed in class, where if the consumer does not pay close attention to the rules on each service, purchase, or site we use, we could be seriously misunderstanding what we own, what a corporation owns, and what our rights are. This is a lot of responsibility on consumers who all have varying levels of education on the subject of their own rights, and the more digital the world around us becomes, the harder it could be to navigate these issues.
Burger did offer one solution to the issue of passing on digital ownership: “If you want to preserve your music, copy the files to a hard drive or thumb drive — any place your heirs will be able to easily access.” She also notes that this tip is specifically for music, as these files are less likely than movies or e-books to have a legal restriction that “prevents copies from being made.” I’m sure this issue will come up more and more as more technologically savvy generations begin to age and write their wills–and hopefully this is accompanied by easier solutions for the consumer.
Source: https://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-09-2012/what-happens-to-your-ebooks-when-you-die.html