Google un-sells videos

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.

Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:

• you have bought this
• you have borrowed this
• and, you have rented this

DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.

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The difficulty here is that in order to play a particular video that you have 'bought', your computer has to contact Google to chat about whether you are allowed to play it. For starters this makes it a crippled product compared to recording something directly from television or owning/ripping a DVD of a show. You can't get on a plane and watch it; you can't watch it when your internet connection goes down; you can't move it to your random video-playing widget or mobile phone and crucially you've only bought it subject to the retailer staying in business and providing the servers to let you watch it.

Cory Doctorow, in an article from back when the service launched, makes a number of decent points about how this isn't good for consumers, including:

But with Google DRM, auto-update means that it's never really yours. Third parties always have the possibility of taking away the rights you bought, after you bought them.

Technically, this doesn't matter a great deal. I imagine people will be stripping the digital sweetie wrapper from these videos within a week or so (if they haven't already). I hope Google is clever enough not to send goons round when somebody publishes a handy tool for making this easy.

Moreover, there is no video anyone has bought this way that isn't available by sticking the name of it into a popular BitTorrent site. I can't see a moral problem with grabbing a copy after you've 'bought' it, but you hardly have a legal leg to stand on.

I'm not sure, however, that there's much overlap between people who bought DRM-laden video from Google and people who can operate a computer skillfully. That will get better with better tooling, but for now Google have just highlighted some of the consumer-rights problems with fake-sales.

Which will be the first popular site which has to break previous purchases either because of legal action, bankruptcy or just because they shift the focus of their business? My money would probably be on a record company having a spat with Apple as part of a concerted poke-paying-customers-in-the-eye programme.

More coverage elsewhere:

• ArsTechnica article, with some commentary on how this ought to feed in to the next review of the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which outlaws most practical circumvention of such technology.
• Buzz Out Loud #537 opens with some great ranty chatter from Tom Merrick and Molly Wood.
• Cory Doctorow calls for class-action lawyers to muck in.