Reclaim Your Media

The rent for life (own nothing and be happy) agenda is in full force when it comes to the modern media/ subscription services.

We're creating an era where it is impossible to own music and movies.

Even PURCHASING media on a platform like Amazon does not guarantee ownership- Amazon and Sony have already lost license rights to movies and removed them from customers' libraries, despite them "purchasing" the movies.

More concerning are services like Spotify holding our playlists that have taken years to curate.

Spotify is always just one license agreement away from losing huge swaths of their music library, just as Netflix lost their popular content to competitors.

Multiple songs removed and marked as unavailable in my Spotify playlist

Sometimes I think I'm being hyperbolic and maybe it's only my obscure classical music that is being removed, but then I see songs from big artists like Drake and Michael Jackson disappear from Spotify.

Drake's song removed due to copyright issues

Publicly available media is also at risk

When these media and tech companies go under or their servers are inevitably turned off, the loss of information and cultural artifacts from our era will be greater than the loss of the library of Alexandria.

AWS and Facebook servers will not run forever.

Online content in general is ephemeral-

• Dead links
• DMCA takedown
• Licensing changes
• Bankruptcies
• Server outages

YouTube is an even worse offender with video removals

We need to take ownership of our media, wean ourselves off of the rent for life model, and stop assuming that the cloud will exist forever.

Running a self hosted server is the first step to fixing this.

Large capacity Network Attached Storage (NAS) is becoming more affordable and user friendly.

Self-host all content that is important to you.

Twitter currently offers full export of your posts

Instagram also offers full download of your posts

YouTube videos, and social media posts can be easily backed up; the former with third-party YouTube downloaders, and the latter with Facebook/Twitter's built in data export tools.

But the question remains, where do we get the music, movies, and shows?

Piracy is the Only Solution

There is a lot of advocacy for buying physical media, especially second-hand from ebay, Goodwill, etc, and I absolutely advocate for this.

But it is unrealistic to replicate your entire media library this way-

• Cost could amount to tens of thousands of dollars
• Most new media is no longer sold in physical form
• Many shows, movies, and songs have no current license holders, so it's not even possible to legally rent, stream, or buy them

Piracy is the only realistic answer.

This is justified for two reasons

• If buying no longer means owning, pirating isn't stealing
• We have a moral duty to backup our cultural artifacts and not allow them to disappear from the internet

Thankfully, we don't need to rely entirely on torrents, although those are an important part of cultural preservation.

Instead, we can rely on the massive media libraries that already exist- Netflix, Spotify, etc.

As long as there are streaming services, there will always be a way to intercept that data stream and take ownership of it.

There are many wonderful tools available to handle this.

Preserve your sovereignty; Preserve our culture.

Own everything and be happy 🏴‍☠️