Sure but who's gonna pay to keep those servers up in perpetuity?
I would never buy digital thinking I'll have access indefinitely. At least with DVD's I can rip them and burn them on new DVD's if I wanted them to be "forever"
The company can use part of your purchase price to buy a long term debt instrument (e.g. a 30-year T-bond) and use the yield to keep the server running.
Or, more realistically and prosaically, they can and should debit the net present liability of keeping the server running in perpetuity from their corporate accounts at the time of purchase. Accountancy knows how to value such things and finance delights in monetizing them.
Make DRM free versions available for download? Music has had to go that route so that people can 'own' their downloads.
Maybe a self-hosted auth server of some kind is possible?
Adobe recently stopped letting you install CS3 even if you have the CDs because they took the auth server down. Do you think there was a reasonable expectation that when someone paid thousands of dollars for those discs, that they 'owned' them and had the right to install them repeatedly on their own computers?
>You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2, 3 or 4 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.
Looks like they just added CS4 to the list...which is still usable software (and in fact offers features that are currently unavailable!)
I would never buy digital thinking I'll have access indefinitely. At least with DVD's I can rip them and burn them on new DVD's if I wanted them to be "forever"