Okay... innerspaceboy is proper angry. This is a rare circumstance. I'm going to have a little rant, and then I'm going to go lie down. Tonight I am PISSED.

The more I come to understand, the more astonished I am at the amount of power our society is willing to relinquish.

While I may be a media connoisseur of sorts, I have absolutely zero concept of what the world does for digital media legally. Today I read that the two giants of the digital book market, both Kindle and Nook, openly use DRM on their content.

I learned that most Kindle books are locked from sharing (you know, like REAL books?), are forever locked on your device, (you can't even move them to another shelf), and can be remotely deleted by Amazon (like they did with 1984.)

And staggeringly, Amazon still managed to sell roughly 20 million Kindles by 2013 for $3.9 billion in revenue and its user's stupidly shell out as much as $530 million a year for their crippled media.

The same applies for audio and video streaming services with DRM. Today I read that Apple actually had the audacity to charge users a fee to upgrade from their boat-anchored media to their newer, DRM-free content. And any user submissive enough to use the iTunes market is just tossing the keys to Apple, who can add to and delete from "your" library at will.

Seriously, a culture that willingly accepts this sort of technology is effectively handing over all control of their content and setting themselves up for one hell of a fall.

It's absolutely appalling.

/rant

http://i.imgur.com/yWX9obnl.jpg

tl,dr

tl;drm

Ridiculous. Wasn't aware of this. Could you expand on what you mean by Apple remotely deleting things from your library? Does this apply to your personal library or do you mean they pull off albums from their store, rendering them incapable to download? Either way, it's appaling that thàt sort of thing would be legal.

Just look at the U2 fiasco. "Your" music is on their cloud, and they can give and take from it as they like. That's the hidden cost of streaming and music services like iTunes. You don't own anything. You're just renting content on their terms.

There are enough dystopian novels (and historical accounts of the real thing) to teach us that this is a terrible idea.

Amazon did the same thing when they deleted George Orwell's books from millions of customers' devices.

I don't trust any corporation with my literature, music, or cinema. And paying for crippled restricted content is insanity.

Wait, so let's talk relative; if I have files on my copy of the iTunes program, regardless if they were purchased on the iTunes store or if I'm using the program solely to keep track of and upload digital music to my mp3 player. Will they be able to delete files as they see fit or only iTunes purchased content?

If I understand correctly, that has been an ongoing problem with the iTunes Match service since 2011 and still persists as of July of last year.

In some cases, The iTunes software deleted users' local DRM-free copies of content and replaced the files with Apple's own protected media.

Alright then. Luckily, I never subscribed to that service because I never trusted it, and now it's clear I was in the right. We need a Teddy Roosevelt of the internet age to externinate DRM services like this.

I know why 1984 is gone....Because 2+2 =5.....

Does anyone else find the deleting of Orwell's works, to be ironically Orwellian in nature?