In Defence of Hoarding CDs, More So When Digital Restrictions (DRM) Come to More 'Content' and Even Offline/Physical Media Won't Work When Some Remote Server Says "No" (or Goes Offline)
Yesterday Michael Tsai wrote about "Sony Removing Purchased Content," but he seems to be overlooking a more recent incident implicating Microsoft. As it turns out, even physical copies of some games no longer guarantee anything; think of it as remote deletion - a remnant of the mindset of Sony rootkits in Windows about 2 decades earlier.
Remember also what Amazon did to the book "1984" when stored digitally on a Kindle.
How far does this DRM creep go? How far will it go?
"You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs," Tsai noted, "but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games."
Worse yet, even if they do, some of them will attempt to "phone home" to "mother ship" and they can refuse to play based on some opaque process. Having one's physical media dependant on some remote company allowing it (or still being alive/online) sort of defeats the purpose of collecting physical media, which becomes akin to 'streaming' with local 'caching' (the full data is merely some large 'cache' waiting for remote servers or for playback authorisation).
In recent years I hoarded many CDs, all of them music CDs, many of them from the "golden era" (of CDs), the 1990s. Any PC with an optical drive can play them, sometimes (but not for long, they're poorly made these days) appliances too. Nobody can remotely "invalidate" or "brick" or "deny" them. They have no such concept.
Maybe the "millennials" who allegedly become fascinated with 1970s culture (including music, according to recent press coverage) will also come to grips with the merits of "old technology", not because it's superb technologically but it was made to serve and entertain owners, not to allow companies like Sony and Microsoft subjugate owners. █
Image source: Closeup on a stack of CD-ROM