Yarr Harr, Fiddle-Dee-Dee
I was typing up a lot of thoughts this morning about the common practice of taking inherently time-hardy information and media, and forcibly turning into ephemera. Namely because:
I recently discovered an app called Ribblr where you can buy and sell knitting and crochet patterns. However their whole selling point is the fact that they go out of their way to write and format the patterns in such a manner that they can only be read and followed through using Ribblr, and actively take measures to impede users converting them into a normal set of written instructions. Which is absurd because the nature of these patterns is that they are just written instructions.
My girlfriend and I were talking the other day about how common it is for modern PC games to be distributed through “launcher” programs where not only do you no longer get a physical disk, you don’t even get access to the installation files. Again, they're going out of their way to deliberately counter the way that installing a program onto a computer naturally works.
In both cases, the main argument for doing things in these convoluted ways is, of course, to prevent piracy. You see, an unfortunate side effect of writing and recording information is that it permits that information to then be read and used by other people. Clearly, this is a problem we need to fix.
I had a whole rant going, but then I realized I could probably summarize all of it with “If libraries weren’t such an old, established concept, I have no doubt that authors and publishing companies would currently be claiming that their existence promotes piracy.”
... And then I realized that somebody has almost certainly already done that.