A handful of digital services will be terminated this year, and you’ve probably bought digital copies of games or movies from them. You’ve purchased this digital property, but there’s a chance that you won’t be able to keep it.
The number of times that users have been unable to access digital content that they have paid for is unprecedented. We aren’t discussing something theoretical, either; this is something that’s happened in the past and will continue happening in the future.
You’ll Probably Lose Some Digital Property This Year
It’s fair to assume that a ton of digital services will shut down in 2019; that’s just the way things work. But the big three that we know about are the Wii Shop Channel, the Ultraviolet movie streaming service, and the Google+ social network. At some point or other, these were pretty popular services, and their termination may cut you off from the digital property for which you’ve paid.
The Wii Shop Channel was a service that sold digital copies of video games, and most people used it to purchase classic Nintendo games. The service was discontinued this past month (January 2019), and the only way to save your purchases was to download them on your Wii console—you couldn’t transfer those purchases to newer Nintendo consoles.
Ultraviolet is a video service that lets you purchase movies. Some DVD’s come with codes that you can use to redeem a digital copy of the movie on Ultraviolet. This is mostly a movie streaming service, but you can use it to download movies if you put in a little bit of work. Sadly, Ultraviolet is shutting down on July 31, 2019. If you want to save your Ultraviolet purchases, the company suggests transferring licenses to a competitor’s service, like Movies Anywhere. These competitors are probably just trying to poach the remaining Ultraviolet users, but if it weren’t for them, you’d lose all of your Ultraviolet purchases.
Google+ is shutting down on April 2, 2019, and Google is going to clear all of the data from the Google+ servers. But you have the opportunity to save your data (a form of digital property) before Google kills the service. This isn’t really property that you’ve purchased, but it’s valuable for personal and public archives, and the loss of this data will probably come as a source of mild frustration for archivists in the future.
Looking at this list, you’ll notice an annoying trend. These services, which are either failing or being discontinued, aren’t really doing anything to preserve your digital property. They put that responsibility on the customer.
It’s kind of understandable for Ultraviolet and Google+. Ultraviolet can’t afford to offer a solution, and Google+ was a flop from the get-go. But why is Nintendo operating like this? You’re not going to boot up your old Wii to play a download of Super Mario Bros 3, so why can’t you just transfer that purchase to one of the other four digital platforms that sell Super Mario Bros 3?
For that, you can blame DRM.
Most Digital Property Is Controlled By DRM
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Source : What Happens to Your Digital Property When a Company Goes Out of Business?
