Media Ownership

Or lack thereof

I. The New Normal

A collection of physical media, an increasingly rare artefact…

We live in strange times. We don’t buy most of our entertainment products physically anymore, we “subscribe” to services that digitally provide them to us. We don’t make a one-time payment to own any of the songs, videos, TV shows, and movies we consume now; we make recurring payments to the streaming gods to avail them each month, as if they’re basic utilities. (Please don’t turn off my Spotify, you guys.)

At no other point in human history has the exchange of artistic goods worked this way. This “subscription model” of making recurring payments for access to digital media is a uniquely novel phenomenon.

This model has created a paradigm shift in how content is consumed, and predictably so. It’s admittedly incredible for the consumer. But it also has major drawbacks that nobody talks about.

One of these drawbacks is that it makes content ephemeral and fickle. You never know what’ll last. I’m sure you’ve noticed this: you go to Netflix and learn that your favourite movie is suddenly not available on it. (Where did it go? No clue!) You open Spotify and realize you can’t play half of your Bollywood playlist - those songs were apparently removed because of a licensing dispute. You visit HBO Max but can’t even find certain HBO-original shows on it. The irony. And so on with every service.

Look how they massacred my playlist :(

Not even an exaggeration (source)

A tale as old as time (source)

Another drawback: censorship. Back in 2020, Netflix removed the Community episode “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” from their catalog, because it featured a character doing blackface. Ignore that “Dungeons” (i.e. season 2 episode 14) is one of the show’s best installments and that the reason it was taken down was idiotic. What makes this removal noteworthy is that Netflix then renamed episode 15 to 14, 16 to 15, and so on, effectively erasing episode 14 from its history.

It do be like that sometimes

Since Netflix kept no indicator of this removal, millions of the show’s fans have now watched the series with no idea that they skipped the real episode 14, which happens to be one of the show’s best! That’s some Orwellian stuff right there. And this has happened repeatedly since. It’s not just that digital media can be censored, but that too without your awareness.

Netflix removed "Dungeons", the original episode 14 which you don't see here, and replaced it with “Early 21st Century Romanticism”, which originally aired as episode 15. Unlike Spotify, Netflix didn't show a blank spot to denote a removed title.

Community is no longer on Netflix - another instance of shows jumping from one platform to another! - but this instance of blatant censorship was so egregious I never forgot it.

Another one, huh (source)

And it’s not just TV shows. eBooks get the same censorship treatment. Last year, Puffin Books decided to update all of author Roald Dahl’s official eBooks to remove insensitive language from them:

“Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.”

That’s just disgusting. I’d rather have a book I love get outright banned than be pathetically altered like this. And on the topic of books, on a more personal front I’ve noticed that Amazon often updates the covers of certain eBooks on my Kindle that I’ve already purchased. This is not okay!

I distinctly remember that both these novels on my Kindle had different covers when I bought them. The covers were updated years later without my permission - this would never happen with real books!

To make things worse, Amazon has apparently even deleted purchased eBooks (!) from certain customers’ Kindles overnight. From an article cleverly titled, “Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others”:

“This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author [Orwell, of course] had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for— thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

Wise words (source)

It gets worse for Amazon. Apparently, buying a movie on their platform is completely meaningless as well. Excerpts from an excellent article, "​The Deception of “Buying” Digital Movies":

“You are not buying the content in the common definition that people would expect, were you own a copy of that media.

You are not provided any ownership of the content you have bought. Only that the content you “bought” will be “generally” available. Amazon is allowed to “sell” you a movie where they don’t have perpetual and irrevocable license to the movie they are selling. Leading to movies purchased being taken away from customers when the copyright pulls the rights from Amazon. The same situation applies to other internet storefronts that claim to sell digital movies and TV shows, such as iTunes.

If you buy a DVD or a Blue-Ray at a retail store, you are able to play that disk for as long as that disk physically works (often over 20 years). There are very few if any countries that would allow a shop to send around bailiffs to seize DVDs already bought years past, because the distributor no-longer has the rights to distribute the content.”

Amazon is living proof that digital media is clearly mutable, and they use that mutability to its full advantage.

Any TV shows you “buy” Amazon are never really yours to own (source)

While it may seem a bit silly to care about TV shows missing episodes and eBooks getting deleted, it’s worth paying attention to, because stories like these are indicators of a fundamental shift in the definition of ownership itself that nobody signed up for.

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II. Three Models

Before elaborating further, we need to think about how media consumption fundamentally works.

Consuming any art is essentially the process buying a file and then performing a read operation on that file. The output of this file-read exists in the form of text, video, and/or sound, and you process it by reading, watching, and/or listening to it. This entire mechanism can be modeled in three ways.

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Model A - Physical Media

The oldest form of physical media - books

[You] → [File]

In this model, you make a one-time purchase to buy a file that physically exists in the world, and access it directly. For example:

• admiring a painting in an art gallery,

• listening to an album on vinyl, or

• reading a newspaper, comic book, textbook, or a novel.

In each of these cases, you need neither a device nor the internet to access the files you're reading. Although there can be technology involved (such as a vinyl player), there's no screen you have to interact with, nor do you need any kind of password to authenticate yourself.

Barring someone literally breaking into your house, your files can’t be stolen, but even in that scenario they can’t be altered or censored without your knowledge, only sabotaged.

Model A is the oldest model historically and predates most current technology and electronics.

—

Model B - Offline Digital Media

A collection of Blu-Ray DVDs

[You] → [Electronic Device] → [File]

In this model, you make a one-time purchase to buy or download a file that’s digital, and access it through the device on which it is stored. For example:

• listening to a downloaded mp4 song on your phone,

• reading a novel on your Kindle,

• playing a Steam game on your PC,

• listening to a music CD in your car, or

• playing a movie on your home DVD player.

In each of these cases, you do need a device to access the files you're reading, but not an internet connection, except maybe when purchasing them. They exist on some kind of local storage, such as a hard disk, SSD, SD card, or DVD. All you need is your device password for authentication, if at all.

Barring someone literally breaking into your house or hacking into your devices, your files can’t be stolen, and even in that scenario they can’t be altered or censored without your knowledge, only corrupted or deleted. (The Kindle is a slight exception here.)

This was a fairly common model for the decades after the advent of computing and before the era of streaming. Which brings us to model C.

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Model C - Online Digital Media

The usual suspects

[You] → [Electronic Device] → [Streaming Service] → [File]

In this model, you make recurring (not one-time) payments to gain access to a service that hosts digital files online, and then access their files through the internet. For example:

• streaming songs on Spotify,

• viewing your vacation pictures on Google Photos,

• streaming a movie on Netflix,

• watching a TV show on Amazon Prime, or

• watching a YouTube video.

In each of these cases, you need both a device and an internet connection to access the files you're reading. Because they exist on some company's servers, you need your device password and your streaming service password to authenticate yourself at least once.

Even if someone does break into your house or hacks into your devices, they can’t really “steal” your files, because there’s nothing to steal in the first place! These files don’t exist on your devices at all, which is exactly why you never have full control of what happens to them either. These files can be "stolen" (i.e. wiped out), altered, or censored by the company that hosts them, even against your wishes. And this happens often.

Of course, model C strongly overlaps with the monthly subscription model that’s now ubiquitous for all kinds of purchases the world over. It is now the default model to sell software as well, but this essay is more about art and media, so we’ll keep SaaS aside for now.

An ugly but relevant meme

It’s hard to understate how revolutionary model C has been, though. Imagine telling someone from 1972 that one day they could listen to any song in the world, from a pocket sized device, any time they wanted. Imagine telling someone in 1985 that there exists a website (“What’s a website?”) with any video you’d ever want to watch in your life, available at a moment’s notice. You get the idea. All of these products we use every day are extraordinary feats of engineering.

But of course, all the personal examples I gave at the start here stem from model C services as well, which goes to show that this model has a lot of problems of its own that we don’t seem to acknowledge or realize.

People are catching on (source)

Because the streaming company in model C is the intermediary between you and the file you wish to access, they have a lot of power. You have no say as to what files the company chooses to host, for how long, and in what format. (Notice that Netflix doesn’t have a “request movie” feature.) And because you can only access the file through the company’s user interface, you’re even more restricted to what you can and cannot do with it.

Model C sometimes leaks into the physical world too. Just recently BMW tried to introduce heated car seats based on monthly subscriptions to quite a backlash. I won’t be surprised if every industry outside of tech has already adopted the “recurring subscriptions” aspect of this model in some way or the other.

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III. The Litmus Test for Model C

All the issues about model C I mentioned above arise from a fundamental lack of ownership over the media we consume from streaming. Essentially, in today’s day and age, you’re renting most of the stuff you pay for, and not buying it. While this might make sense for certain things like newspaper subscriptions or web based software products, art has never worked that way.

This core difference regarding ownership between model C and models A & B can be stated as such:

If a file you’re reading does not exist physically, or is not stored on your device’s local storage, you do not “own” that file.

Or, to put it much more simply:

You own something only if you can access it without the internet.

This is the simplest litmus test for media ownership. Because, if you need the internet to read a file, it by definition exists on a someone else’s computer, and can thus be mutated by whoever’s computer that is.

Of course, it’s easy enough to grasp that the shows you watch on Hulu or the songs you stream on Tidal aren’t yours. But what this also means is that you don’t own all of your half-finished Google Docs on your personal Google Drive, or your favourite vacation albums shared on Google Photos, or the billion Notes you’ve written to yourself that are now on iCloud. These files belong, first and foremost, to Google and Apple. If you lose your Gmail or iCloud account tomorrow, you lose access to these files, period.

Amen

This litmus test applies not just for Big Tech but for any service that hosts any kinds of files you wish to access: mp3s, mp4s, PDFs, EPUBs, mkvs, JPEGs, PNGs, DOCs, and so on.

If it ain’t stored locally, it ain’t yours vocally. Or something like that.

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IV. Downstream Effects

So, to summarize the problem, any content served to you via model C:

1. must be paid for, monthly or annually, till the end of time,

2. can be censored,

3. can be taken down, deleted, removed, or “stolen” because:

   1. the company might stop hosting it, because of:

      1. contractual reasons,

      2. societal pressure;

   2. your account may get locked out,

   3. the company itself might stop existing.

Of course, these are all edge cases. Nobody expects YouTube to remove their favourite creators’ videos. Nobody expects Amazon to lock out their Kindle account. Everybody simply assumes that Spotify will be around forever, and that their playlists are permanent, just like they assumed that their songs on MySpace would be around forever. And nobody ever expects Google Cloud to accidentally delete all their company’s data, worth $135B. Things like that only ever happen to other people… until they happen to us.

But while these drawbacks of Model C services are very real, I do think they’re downstream of the fact that all media is now digital, and that on a long enough timeline, digital media is inherently more difficult to preserve than physical media.

This ephemerality is doubly true for the internet as a whole. A recent Pew Research Center analysis revealed that a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, and around 38% of all webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today. Insane numbers.

Depressing and terrifying (source)

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V. Why Should I Care, Though?

You should care because you want to own your favourite movies, TV shows, and books for the rest of your life, without the constant threat of them getting censored or lost to the digital ether.

“Can’t trust anyone but yourself” (source)

New day, same old story (source)

You should care because you want to make sure that all your personal files on any cloud service are always readily available to you, at least as a backup.

You want to sleep soundly, knowing that you can watch Welcome anytime you wanted in the next twenty years, and don’t have to depend on a streaming service to provide it to you. You want to know that your tattered copy of The Namesake will always be with you anytime you want to pick it up. You want to listen to Yeezus with the knowledge that it’ll never be altered even a little, no matter what the artist who made it says or does next. (And he’s done too much lately.)

If you care about art and its preservation even a little bit, all of the world’s digital art being behind the gates of streaming services should terrify you.

Indeed (source)

As someone who’s extremely fond of both pop culture and archiving things, this issue is particularly important to me. I get that it won’t be for most people, but it’s heartening to know I’m not alone. There are folks all over the world who’ve made their own private digital museums of whatever things they’re into - you just have to find them. In his article, “Collecting Is an Act of Devotion, and Creation”, Questlove pretty much echoes exactly how I feel:

“I have been collecting things for as long as I can remember. As a very young child, when I listened to music, read interviews or watched movies, they lingered in my memory, and I didn’t want them to leave me. Eventually, I got to thinking about the physical objects that brought me those experiences — vinyl records, print magazines. Collecting those items became a way to prevent the past from slipping away.”

For me, this whole shtick about “media ownership” is not about showing the finger to tech companies, but about having everything that’s precious to me available for my own enjoyment in perpetuity. It’s simply a matter of removing external dependencies between myself and the things I love.

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VI. Counterpoints

The guy telling you about the drawbacks of streaming is a top 6% Spotify listener

Of course, a general rule of online writing is “if someone is advising you to X, they’re probably more guilty of X than any human being alive”. While I have painted the current media landscape as sort of an Orwellian ecosystem, I do use most of these model C services regularly. I’m always reading something or the other on my Kindle, I’m watching season 2 of Arrested Development on Netflix as I write this, and I might one day learn to live without oxygen but not without Spotify. And don’t even get me started on the miracle that is YouTube.

Am I a hypocrite for criticizing these products but using them so frequently at the same time? I don’t think so. We’ve established that model C is an incredible win for the average consumer and that we can never go back. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the ways in which it fails us. All these flaws with model C companies are worth highlighting precisely because this model is so ubiquitous. It reminds me of the Bjarne Stroustrup quote: “There are only two kinds of [programming] languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

At the end of the day, it’s good to remember that streaming companies are not public utilities that provide art to us. They are for-profit entities that’ll do what it takes to increase revenue even at the cost of media preservation, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But somewhere along the line, because all digital media ended up behind the paywalled gates of these services, we somehow expected them to act as museums of culture, a role they never signed up for. Or maybe they did, who knows.

All that said, I do wish there was a middle ground somewhere, a way by which we could get all the benefits of streaming while also retaining full control over the content we stream. Maybe that’s paradoxical and thus inherently impossible; I don’t know. As of today, though, there are only two ways I can think of that allow us to fully own the media we want to consume: to use outdated technology, and to go another way I can’t quite legally endorse.

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VII. Solutions

Make Media Physical Again

How do we gain ownership over digital media? Let’s think about this from first principles. You basically want to go from model C to models A & B. This means that you want your favourite content to be offline, on some kind of local storage.

(For personal files and photos hosted on your Google Drive/iCloud/whatever, this is quite easy: just backup your data regularly.)

The first way to do this is is to buy media that is available on local storage already: physical books, VCRs, cassettes, CD, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and so on. This is how music and movies have been historically sold anyways. Now you might find these technologies to be slightly or extremely outdated, depending on how old you are, but they are definitely a viable option, if not the most convenient one. In fact, DVD sales in the US have even gone up in the last few months.

He’s right. I still remember the DVD store near my house that my friends and I used to visit as a kid (source)

@haydenbegley#DidYouYawn #fyp #fy #foryou #foryoupage #fypシ #mom #hoarder

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The second way to go from model C to models A & B is to pirate the media you want, using Torrents and the like. I imagine that this is not a radical idea for any guy who grew up playing video games in the late 2000’s. If you don’t fit this bill or have no idea what Torrents are, well, time to git gud.

I disagree with the overall sentiment of this often-shared meme but it does have a couple of good points, especially the one on the bottom left

Now, I’m not saying that you should Torrent all your favourite movies and TV shows. I’m not saying that piracy is not morally wrong - it absolutely is. What I am saying, though, is that as of the time of this writing, there are zero (0) products that let you legally purchase a movie, a song, or a show as a digital file, and own it in a non-proprietary format that’s guaranteed to last forever. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this.

This is precisely why Torrenting and P2P file sharing in general will never become obsolete, even with all the convenience streaming provides us with. It is the only way that guarantees the procurement of uncensored, unaltered media in popular file formats that you know will work as long as your computer does.

And I’m sure there’s good legal and technological reasons for why the entertainment landscape became this way, but purely from a collector’s perspective, it’s quite sad that the most reliable way to collect digital art is the one method that completely screws over the creators of said art.

Many have gone through this arc

I don’t have much of a thesis or conclusion to end with here, except to say that you might want to seriously think about which works of media are truly precious to you as an individual, and find some way to have them stored offline for your own sake. You might thank yourself later.

Of course, in a universe abundant with irony, it’s quite fitting that I’m writing an essay about media ownership not on a personally hosted website but on Substack Dot Com, a privately owned domain. Which means that the good folks at Substack, Inc can, quite easily, censor this very blog post without me ever finding out about it. They can alter my words, delete my essays, and do pretty much whatever they feel like with my content. All of this also means that if Substack, Inc. goes belly up tomorrow, there goes this piece and the rest of my blog into the unreachable digital ether, never to be salvaged again.

But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Because, of course, things like that only ever happen to other people.