One Down Side to Going All Digital

[Lunar Ronin]

One down side to going all digital... I was kicked out of my Amazon.com account last night, and I received a "Your password is incorrect" error message every time I tried to log back in. I knew my password was correct, but I tried resetting it anyway. Twice. Still, "Your password is incorrect." I contacted Amazon.com customer support this morning. Turns out that "Your password is incorrect" is Amazon.com's stealth way of saying your account has been banned. Amazon.com banned my account last night. I have no idea why, and neither does the customer support agent I talked with this morning. He said that he'd push my ticket up to an "account specialist," who should contact me by tomorrow.

I'll be quite pissed if I lose access to hundreds of eBooks and thousands of digital comic books.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

It's at this point that I realize Amazon, a site I use very rarely, is apparently more complicated than I realized. People depend on its cloud for their book storage? There are things people can do on Amazon that merit bans!? (we need a "one-eyebrow raised" smilie)

Anyway, yes, that's a major downside of the own-nothing-rent-everything media landscape we're sinking into. I'm very conscious that some day, some entity will cause cultural artifacts I value to disappear from the cloud, and I'll be scrambling to find ways to get them back. I try to make sure I have saved copies of all my PDFs (or even more universal formats) in more than one non-cloud location. I'm increasingly tempted to start keeping DVDs again too. Not sure what I'll do about video games.

 

[Endless Flight]

Very strange. I have never heard of this happening to anyone I know. Hopefully this is resolved in a timely manner.

 

[noman]

That moment when you realize you don't 'own' your digital content.

Which is why I only buy physical goods from Amazon.

Then again, I do own a lot of Steam games, so there's my hypocrisy.

 

[The Butcher]

That moment when you realize you don't 'own' your digital content.

Which is why I only buy physical goods from Amazon.

Then again, I do own a lot of Steam games, so there's my hypocrisy.

Yeah, I keep thinking about this with regards to Steam — shit, if I move out of Latin America I can’t access my games!

I don't have a lot of Kindle books but I'd miss the ones I have. I'd be very, very peeved if this happened to me; Apparition you have my sympathy. Score another point for piracy, I guess?

 

[noman]

Yeah, I keep thinking about this with regards to Steam — shit, if I move out of Latin America I can’t access my games!

I don't have a lot of Kindle books but I'd miss the ones I have. I'd be very, very peeved if this happened to me; Apparition you have my sympathy. Score another point for piracy, I guess?

I wasn't going to bring up the "P" word.

Online content services like Steam and Amazon are fine, for what they are. They do provide services and content worth purchasing. However, a consumer needs to understand that by making use of these services, they don't fully own their digital content, as that content can be removed, edited, etc. by the host company for any number of reasons. Most digital consumers don't understand this, nor do they take into consideration that companies can change, their policies can change, they can be bought out, or they can go bankrupt. Nothing is permanent, and Amazon, Steam, etc. aren't completely invulnerable to market forces.

There's risk in every purchase. There's good with the bad, as there is with everything.

GOG is a good, DRM free, alternative to Steam. They have a lot of titles that Steam has. So they usually get my money. Steam gets my money when they have a game I can't get anywhere else (such as CIv 5 or 6).

Regarding piracy. I'm not a pirate, but if I were, I'd totes have a lot of ebooks about various subjects waiting to be read. If I like a book, I'll buy a physical copy, so I can properly mark it as I read. Which I'm totally not doing, because I'm not a pirate.

Some books are out of print, and can only be found on a file sharing site. And I'm not joking when I say I have come to believe file sharing sites are the libraries of the 21st century.

Getting back to the OP. Apparition, I really hope this gets sorted out. I'm a heavy Amazon user, and their support is usually pretty good. It wouldn't do well for Amazon to have it come out that they can and will just ban someone from their account. Give it time, and see what happens.

 

[Baulderstone]

I'm more comfortable with the idea my video games being owned in this fashion. Losing the ability to play games is something I got used to a long time ago as platforms die or evolve. I expect that Windows will lose backwards compatibility with the titles I currently have in Steam before I lose access to Steam.

 

[Lunar Ronin]

I received an e-mail message from an Amazon.com account specialist that my account has been reinstated. Nothing about why my account was temporarily banned. Still, at least it's been reinstated.

 

[noman]

I'm more comfortable with the idea my video games being owned in this fashion. Losing the ability to play games is something I got used to a long time ago as platforms die or evolve. I expect that Windows will lose backwards compatibility with the titles I currently have in Steam before I lose access to Steam.

Agreed.

I received an e-mail message from an Amazon.com account specialist that my account has been reinstated. Nothing about why my account was temporarily banned. Still, at least it's been reinstated.

That's great to hear!

 

[Spinachcat]

Score another point for piracy, I guess?

Like my fellow not-pirates, I am also not a pirate. Just a major Alestorm fan.

I doubt Steam or Amazon will fold anytime soon, but they could be acquired - and certainly terms altered.

It is an important distinction that if you aren't hosting your own stuff, your host is who really owns your stuff.

 

[Ladybird]

I'm more comfortable with the idea my video games being owned in this fashion. Losing the ability to play games is something I got used to a long time ago as platforms die or evolve. I expect that Windows will lose backwards compatibility with the titles I currently have in Steam before I lose access to Steam.

Windows' biggest security holes ultimately come from it's legacy code and poor implementation of standards at the time (If they even bothered), and those holes aren't practically fixable without breaking backwards compatibility, something MS is really loathe to do - look at the furore whenever Apple impose hard breaks (Like the recent "no 32-bit apps on iOS 11", frex), and they basically only have the consumer market to deal with. Even when Microsoft do take some good security measures - like UAC in Vista, or mandatory auto-updates in W10 - consumers hate them, and they cause problems in corporate environments. I've had a long-standing ticket in at work for an in-house diagnostic utility which doesn't work in Windows 10 due to it wanting to write to a directory it shouldn't be allowed to (It shouldn't ever have wrote there, but Windows XP let you do stupid things); and this is the most trivial fix imaginable - a developer needs to change a target directory for one command - but that's going to take about an hour of dev and test time to get done (And the reason it hasn't been done yet is that it only affects me and it's not business-critical ).

At some point, Microsoft are just going to have to bite the bullet and kill Win32 support, with all that entails. Of all the bad solutions available for them, a hard break will be least-worst; and from a gamer point of view, someone will come up with some sort of VM-based backwards compatibility solution, like DOSbox..

 

[noman]

I doubt Steam or Amazon will fold anytime soon, but they could be acquired - and certainly terms altered.

Amazon's net earnings have been lackluster at best this year. They're expanding, but their stock is under-performing. This can lead to vulnerability.

Steam is solid, but I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat at the thought that Microsoft buying them out.

Is it likely these companies will fail in the next ten years? No. But nothing is too big to fail. My only point about this is company failure is a possibility, however remote, in addition to the more possible events such as policy changes, etc. that may disrupt one's access to content.

Sorry if I took this to far. This is just how my mind works and the subject of digital ownership, copyright, etc. is an interest of mine. Feel free to disregard.

 

[Endless Flight]

If Amazon fails and is picked apart in Chapter 11, some other company will pick up the video and audio on-demand part of th company. I don’t think anybody will have to worry about their digital movie collection disappearing.

 

[noman]

If Amazon fails and is picked apart in Chapter 11, some other company will pick up the video and audio on-demand part of th company. I don’t think anybody will have to worry about their digital movie collection disappearing.

I respectfully disagree, but I'm not going to try to argue my point, as I've inadvertently taken this thread way off in another direction, and by doing so, I'm skating the edge of the "No Politics / No Current Events" rule.

I apologize for that; it wasn't intentional.

I'll bow out of this topic.

 

[Raleel]

one nice thing about DTRPG is they have a client to download your entire library for off-site backup.

 

[Lunar Ronin]

At some point, Microsoft are just going to have to bite the bullet and kill Win32 support, with all that entails. Of all the bad solutions available for them, a hard break will be least-worst; and from a gamer point of view, someone will come up with some sort of VM-based backwards compatibility solution, like DOSbox..

Yep. Really, probably the best method would be to run a Windows 7 virtual machine.

Linux has WINE to play Windows based games, but sadly it still has problems with games that use DirectX 11+ last time I checked.

 

[Lunar Ronin]

I already buy all of my computer video games either from GOG.com or Humble Store, which are DRM-free so that's not an issue. For RPG PDFs, as Raleel mentioned, you can back up your DriveThruRPG purchases so that's not an issue either. There are currently ways to... liberate... eBooks purchased from Amazon, which I employed yesterday just to be on the safe side. So while that is no longer an issue, who knows how long it will be before Amazon patches that hole.

The main issue for me are digital comic books and graphic novels. While some publishers issue their content DRM-free, most are locked down tight. This whole incident is making me consider just buying the DRM-free digital comic books and graphic novels from this point forward, although that would leave out all of DC Comics and BOOM! Studios...

 

[Ladybird]

I already buy all of my computer video games either from GOG.com or Humble Store, which are DRM-free so that's not an issue. For RPG PDFs, as Raleel mentioned, you can back up your DriveThruRPG purchases so that's not an issue either. There are currently ways to... liberate... eBooks purchased from Amazon, which I employed yesterday just to be on the safe side. So while that is no longer an issue, who knows how long it will be before Amazon patches that hole.

Yeah, I definitely see your point. But the other PC storefronts come with their own issues - GOG versions of recent games aren't always kept as up-to-date as Steam, frex, because Steam tends to be where the majority of the userbase and money is. And there are still some AAA games that I want to play; plus I like a lot of Nintendo titles, and consoles are inherently DRM'd.

It's tough; there are no good options.

 

[Baulderstone]

Yeah, I definitely see your point. But the other PC storefronts come with their own issues - GOG versions of recent games aren't always kept as up-to-date as Steam, frex, because Steam tends to be where the majority of the userbase and money is. And there are still some AAA games that I want to play; plus I like a lot of Nintendo titles, and consoles are inherently DRM'd.

It's tough; there are no good options.

Also, owning all your games in DRM versions because you are worried about losing access also means you need to have storage for your entire game library as well as keep it backed up. If you are just downloading games from GOG when you want to play them, you don't own them any more concretely than the ones you have on Steam.

It would be an issue for me at least, but I have a ridiculous library of games. If you have a more modest collection of older titles from GOG, it might not be a big deal.

I buy from everywhere depending on the deal. I like that we have multiple vendors in the computer game field. While I have no real issue with RPG Now/Drive-Thru, I wish there was at least one other company giving them a challenge. You can often buy PDFs direct from the publisher, but while I don't mind having my computer games spread over two or three vendors, having my PDFs scattered over a dozen publishers is too fragmented for me.