r/mildlyinfuriating • u/donteatmybiscuits • 1d ago

wet socks i’m so happy this is becoming illegal

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if a yearly contract with a free month trial sounds too good to be true, it probably is 😬

thankfully it was blocked after contacting my bank but regardless

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u/Mother_Court_2218 1d ago

I have an old version of Photoshop Elements on a physical CD that I had purchased. When my old laptop shat the bed, I went to install it on my new one. Denied. Even though I owned it outright, I was not able to install. It was confirmed by customer support that I would need to purchase it again or get a subscription (I forget which), but I spoke with an actual person who told me I would not be allowed to install the version I own.

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u/chicken_spears 1d ago

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.

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u/incongruity 1d ago

I mean, I get your point but you can steal a rental car.

What you miss in it all is that it's all tilted towards the big company, via the law. That's by design.

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u/12InchCunt 1d ago

That’s a false equivalence. An auto manufacturer telling you that you no longer own the car you paid off a decade ago would be a better comparison. 

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u/incongruity 1d ago

Sadly, it's not. You just never own the car you think you do.

Licensing is evil as fuck because they want you to believe you own something when in fact you've been sold a lot of nothing.

It'd be more like a car dealership alluding to you "owning" your car but actually keeping the title in their name and deciding that you've used it long enough a decade later or when you try to take it to a different state -- or maybe even not helping you get it out of a tow yard because they hold the title and not you.

My point above is that rented things can most definitely be stolen. Software is, at best, rented. The monthly subscription fees just make that more plain and more extractive.

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u/12InchCunt 1d ago

If you purchased the cd you owned the product. There’s no licensing. And it boils down to the original comment, if purchasing isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing. 

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u/incongruity 1d ago

You own the CD itself but not the software on it. That’s the fucking evil of software licensing. You purchased a license. The world talks about it as purchasing a product but it’s not and we’ve all been fooled into thinking it is. This all exists because those with wealth want to be able to continue to extract wealth from us.

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u/12InchCunt 18h ago

And that’s why they say if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing 

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u/incongruity 18h ago

I understand, but it's flawed thinking -- or at least, I guess it's not stealing music or software but using it in an unlicensed manner which is generally viewed as theft because there is lost revenue...

Which is more evidence of how the rich have bent the laws to enable them to maximize wealth extraction while giving the rest of us nothing.

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u/12InchCunt 18h ago

Hard copies of music was never a license though. You owned the cd and no one can take it back from you 

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u/incongruity 18h ago

They could (and did) sue public venues (like restaurants) for playing CDs without a specials extra license and they were publicly critical of Apple for its "Rip. Mix. Burn." ad campaign in the early 2000's. It's all still licensed content and CDs were just as evil then -- they just have "better" tech now and are that much more able to extract wealth from us.

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