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The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you "buy" the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don't show that so clearly but that's the reality.
Hell, this isn't the first time Amazon has done this, even if it's the first time they've done it for video. Of all things, they retroactively removed a version of 1984 from Kindle, including having Kindle devices delete local copies the next time they connected to Amazon.
I remember the 1984 incident. At the time I thought this is so ironic, it has to be satire. Now, just a few years later it doesn't even register as odd anymore.
If I recall correctly there was a time, where they did a deal with Disney a few years back. Disney wanted to bring one or more of their classic animations back to the cinema and Amazon disabled playback of those movie(s) for that time even for people who had "bought" them.
Even that isn't strictly true, as IP laws metasticize and mutate over time. But its far more expensive to try and reclaim a book than to revoke a digital license on a 3rd party repository.
If you kept your digital copy of a digital book on an e-reader in airplane mode, you'd have as much access to that as any trade paperback. And backing up my collection of PDFs to a drive is significantly easier than shouldering a shelf's worth of books.
The fundamental issue with digital media is that its ultimately convenient to access a central digital archive than to keep your own personal collections on hand and catalogued. But then you have to ask the question "Who controls that central digital archive?" And if its a bad actor, there's your problem. Its the same problem physical libraries have, too. Don't let the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria run your neighborhood branch. Don't let Ron DeSantis near it, either.
When it comes to corporations, the problem is there are no good actors. They are required by law to do what ever maximizes shareholder value.
People need to fuck off with this "I'm surprised you're surprised" stuff. It contributes nothing to discussion except showing how far superior of an internet user you are, by no longer being surprised by sketchy shit.
Meh, makes me feel a little better about our slide into dystopia knowing we had it coming are too damn lazy and apathetic to do anything about it.
Alternatively: People know Amazon would do this, they're just surprised that we are all standing around letting it happen
I wouldn't do that if I hadn't warned everyone who would and wouldn't listen about this since the start of the business model. I'm just frustrated, that nobody listens until it's to late.