i agree with all this except the last part. it has changed, and the enforcement is what has changed that. GTA games have songs removed from them years after they come out. this is possible due to patching. however if you use media that does not have patching (or indeed simply play offline, using the physical disc) then this enforcement is bypassed. your ownership is secured. but that is only if you keep the physical disc. physical media cannot be controlled as easily. you have more ownership of it.
That's fair - but it's a 2 way street and is a uniquely applicable to software over other forms of media.
The GTA example is entirely apt, but rather isolated. And this was borne of licences expiring - effectively the issue was of R*s ownership of the material they'd licenced to use in their product. They no longer could use it, their access had been revoked and they were obligated to reflect that in their product. This could be done through a patch. I would imagine if new boxed copies of GTA are put on shelves, those new editions would also have the same content removed from them for the same reasons.
So this is not quite the same as a publisher<>consumer relationship about ownership/access, but a reflection of a product <> content-licence relationship.
If you buy a ticket to watch a movie and that movie has been told to cut certain scenes for it to be allowed to be shown in your country then that would be a more apt comparison.
But the very same mechanism that allows content to be remove in this example of GTA is one that, by any reasonable measure, gives consumers far more than it takes.
GTA has used patching to add far more content to the original game than to remove it.
Patching games often allows for later bugs to be removed for example. This is also, arguably, removal of content. So we have a quandry - is removal of content still a negative if it's making the product better?
Patching games often allows for extra content to be added - such as the recent Ghost of Tsushima patch that added a new game-mode along with other things.
No Man's Sky is a high-profile example of a game where people would probably favour the patched or 'game of the year' edition version over the vanilla release.
You're absolutely correct in that if you only ever run the physical copy of something then (assuming there's no online check-in when starting it) you will always have that content.
But there are pros and cons to that - though it seems, in most cases, they are pros.
or simply ban me for wrongthink
For a content / streaming platform I would want to see example of this happening and in the context you're referring to in order for me to consider it with more weight.
I would expect that if I broke the terms of service for a platform that I had agreed to abide by, then my access to it - and its content - would be revoked. I don't think that's unreasonable.
If those terms were attempting to dictate what I am allowed to think then that is the part I'd have issue with.
As an aside, I don't want to sound dismissive of that point.
I recall Facebook wanting to start its own cryptocurrency and that genuinely concerned me - on the basis that these social media companies can (and do) lock people out of their accounts and content at a moment's notice - sometimes with very questionable reasoning. If that content included currency then I could see things getting very ugly very quickly. (Even so, I would expect something like that to be regulated to hell and back to protect users' finances).
physical media cannot be controlled as easily. you have more ownership of it.
I don't disagree with that - except the notion of "more ownership" is a misnomer. You have more control of access, not of ownership.
