The article about the “subscription” HP ink made me realise something.
Subscriptions aren’t a new idea at all. You could subscribe to paper magazines. And you got to keep them.
I’m just clearing up my old house and it’s filled with tons of old tech magazines. Lots of useful knowledge here. Wanna know how Windows and Mac compared in 1993? It’s in here. All the forgotten technologies? Old games, old phones, whatever? You’ll find it.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
But still, the very definition of subscription has shifted. Now, the common meaning is “you only get to use these things as long as you’re paying”. Nobody even thinks it could mean anything else.
Besides, it doesn’t only apply to services that offer entire libraries. Online magazines still exist in a similar form as the paper ones. But you only get to access them while your “subscription” is active. Even the stuff you had while you were paying.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them. The online and streaming stuff of today and tomorrow? In 30 years it’ll be gone, forgotten and inaccessible.
I hope that if/when that happens, I will have the strength to live with the boredom and just not be subscribed to those services or have those products :c
On the other hand, it’s always possible that pirates will find a way. For example, there’s an open source project that lets you download encrypted Wii U files (games) directly from official Nintendo servers. Of course, it may not be a permanent solution if those servers go down or those files are removed from the servers. Also for example, the Internet Archive has archives of at least some games that were only available for purchase and download as far as I know from Xbox Live Arcade. I, uh, know someone who downloaded Fable Heroes (Xbox 360) from the Internet Archive and now plays it through the Xenia emulator.
I recently heard of a movie called Crater that Disney made as an exclusive for Disney+. It was well received by critics and many viewers reviewed it well too, however apparently it didn’t perform well enough by Disney’s standards and they completely removed it from their platform after only 48 days. It is no longer possible to watch Crater legally as far as I know. Maybe the best we can do is hope that archival and piracy projects continue to find ways to work, and contribute to those efforts when and where we can. Because as long as people continue to pay for these services and these companies are still making profit even while (imo) disrespecting their customers and their right to own things they buy, it will continue to get worse and not better.
– I moved across the US last year, coast to coast, and I couldn’t take my collections of movies, games, and books with me. I couldn’t afford the space on the plane. I miss having physical copies of things!