Digital Rights Mean Nothing Without Rights

There's a largish number of people who are upset with Amazon this week over their policy (or lack thereof) of consumer rights on the Kindle. Apparently, a company that didn't own the publishing rights to 1984 by George Orwell self-published the work for use on the E-book reader. After they realized the mistake (and a bunch of people purchased and downloaded the book), they removed the book from E-circulation. Fine. Except that Amazon (who maintains a constant wireless connection with all activated Kindles) pulled the book in question not only from the servers, but from the devices of people who had bought the book. They gave instant refunds as well, but suffered a staggering loss of credibility. Not only did they redefine the E-book, they redefined the concept of purchase as well.

While this case is extreme (and ironic), it's part of a much larger problem. What does a purchase mean? In iTunes, it means that you can download a music file exactly once, and it can be played on no more than three (3) computers. For the Xbox, you can download it as many times as you want, but you can only play it on YOUR Xbox. The MPAA works feverishly to keep you from backing up your DVDs, even from companies that put another layer of DRM to keep you from pirating them. So I ask you: does the term purchase carry any weight at all? When we purchase digital media, we don't own the physical data, since it's against either the rules of purchase or copyright law to copy things as we wish, and we obviously don't own rights to the media either, since there's always byzantine restrictions on how we can consume it. So what's the solution?

Universal Streaming Rights. The technology is setting in place for this. Imagine a world where you don't buy the song, you buy the streaming rights. When a movie comes out, you shell out the cash to stream it from anywhere. Your TV, your computer, your phone, your car, anywhere you have access. Same with music. Same with books. Sure, it costs plenty in server capacity to stream content, but there are companies like Pandora and Netflix that are making a killing at it. People are already consuming the media this way. The only difference would be the consumers rights. And yes, some people would find a way to copy media, just like everything else. But I argue if you give the customer an ounce of dignity instead of searching a way to criminalize your consumer, you would have a following like no other.