Open Media Boston

metro news from the ground up

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Treverton's comment about our desire to "own" and "acquire" things is interesting in light of how young people, especially, are increasingly giving up ownership rights to so much digital media that they purchase. Digital rights management on music files, ebooks on the Kindle, and now stories distributed by the Associated Press effectively prevent users from owning these products. Rather, in essence, they rent the rights to consume said media by verifying their license with authentication servers.

As we've seen with the closing of Google Video's authentication servers and others, once these schemes fail or otherwise expire, users are left with useless data that by virtue of their electronic format can't even be used as paperweights.

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