The problem with the “SVOD age” is that we’re losing the concept of owning (vs renting) a copy of a media text. Once that right goes, the maintenance of culture is surrendered to the whims of content owners, distributors, and aggregators. https://twitter.com/nscreenmedia/status/1338469284197117952

You don’t “own” that Kindle ebook, Netflix TV episode, or Spotify track the same way you would if you owned physical copies of them. The law, so far, treats these as qualitatively different concepts.

Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify can remove titles from their libraries, and your access, whenever they want to. But they can’t take away your physical copies.

Titles once available in print, or VHS, or DVD/BD, or even online, disappear from access all the time. Without the right to make and own copies of them, they could vanish completely from the culture.

And it’s all too easy to imagine a ban on making copies applying to things like social media posts, where we lose the legal right and technical ability to screenshot tweets, for example.

Copyright is a good thing, and it should be supported. But it shouldn’t be applied as a blanket ban on the ability to make personal copies, or transfer ownership of a personal copy.

Yes, much of the world is moving to a place where media is much more a service than a good. But that shouldn’t mean that we sacrifice our rights to actually own copies of media texts if we want to.

Here’s just one example of the sort of cultural history that would be lost if we didn’t have physical copies. https://twitter.com/dusttodigital/status/1338200217569595394