Stumbled on the this article today:
http://conversation.which.co.uk/technology/digital-download-legal-rights-after-death-amazon-itunes-apple
"As it stands, the rights of iTunes and Amazon customers look pretty shaky when it comes to passing on downloads. If you buy a music track from a digital store, you’re essentially buying a license to play that track – a license granted to you only, which isn’t transferable upon death."
I guess that's why I still buy paper books and miss the old-style music media (CDs, tapes). The product that you can actually own, exchange and share freely with your friends and family.
The modern media distribution channels like iTunes or Kindle for example, in my humble option, promote somewhat egoistic thinking in many ways. Try to give your music collection or books that you have in one of your electronic DRM protected collections to your friends and family, good luck with that.
As this article points out you actually don't own what you buy, you can't transfer the ownership, such as give the book or the music album to anybody you want (it's not like giving the paper book).
In case of Kindle, Amazon controls you library and can delete any book at any time, as it did previously already. And if you die your relatives could not inherit what you have collected.
In many ways the content ownership and distribution got so much distorted by having so many "middle men" that the both ends of this system the content author and the content consumer are not getting the best deal they could.
Eventually I think, something has to change and one of possible ways the change might happen is with cutting off the "middle men" and by establishing the direct channels between the content authors and the content consumers.
I really hope it would be DRM-free, you own what you buy and you are free to use it however you
want with authors permission.
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