Ownership and access

My brother and I have this ongoing discussion about his media collection. He is fond of possessing and outright owning physical media that he can play locally on technology that, again, he owns and maintains. I understand this position, but I don’t entirely subscribe to it.

There are advantages to be sure: You need not rely on a stable internet connection or on the whims of the rights holders or platforms, if the decide to no longer offer certain content. Likewise there is a wealth of content that is simply not, nor ever was, available through streaming services. And local copies you have aren’t so easily updated, censored, or otherwise modified by the original publisher.

That said, I wonder how long those statements will remain true. How long will it be before your local media won’t play without a stable internet connection? I can easily imagine production companies wanting to be able to exert that kind of control. At that point, your ownership of the media is basically moot. Likewise, all physical media has a shelf life. At a certain point it won’t work or won’t work as well. The same is even more true for media players. What happens when physical media simply isn’t on offer. Or is on offer at only choice pricing?

I’m not saying I think this is a healthy dynamic or one we should strive toward, but it does seem like a likely direction we are headed. Given that, my feeling is that to try and create a local media library to endure the potential vicissitudes of the rights holders is futile. You may weather the storm for a decade or two, but always with diminshing returns.

Conflating ownership with access is a crunchy topic. But most, if not all, things in life are on loan—including our lives themselves. We don’t keep anything forever. We only get to hold onto things for a certain amount of time. That’s something worth bearing in mind.

It is also worth considering that in the past it wasn’t possible to create media libraries as we can today. The content wasn’t available for purchase and the technology wasn’t around to support it. You saw a production, and that was that. Maybe it was run again, but over that you had little to no control. This is a new tension and one we have little right to think of as being fixed.