Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
I wonder why their license affects your local copy of a purchased product.
Imagine a supermarket losing the contract to sell Nescafé, so Nestlé comes into your house to take their coffee. Okay, Nestlé would totally do this anyway, but it’s bizarre.
As described, the Apple version is that they won't remove local copies you already have? They just can't facilitate copying a new instance to your device.
I have a smart playlist that gets automatically populated with songs in my library that are not available (evidently pulled) on Apple Music anymore, and it is growing with tunes that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen to them. I don’t think there’s any way to download them, but I didn’t “buy” them via iTunes Store, just streamed them.
If I download it on my iPad I’m pretty sure it will delete itself or eventually got deleted on an update. I might be wrong but this is how these systems work.
If you buy it on a PC, you get a file you can do whatever you want with. In Apple's case it's at least possible to keep if you're vigilant.
I'm sure the file disappearing from your iOS device is naught more than a convenient bug. It's not ideal, but I don't think one can realistically expect much more (at least not without actual consumer protection, which will probably take a while).
Sony and Apple aren’t the only offenders. Google Play Music did something similar 12 years ago or so. It’s been a bit but I recall permanently losing access to a lot of music I owned at the time.
I don't remember that happening. What I do remember is that Alphabet decided to axe Google Play Music, but they announced that months in advance and made it fairly easy to download my entire collection. Which is why I now have a couple hundred gigabytes of music backed up on several devices.
Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.
What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.
The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.
This is technically true, but not helpful. These online services have buttons that say "rent" and "buy", they don't say "rent for a little while" and "rent for a longer but unknown amount of time". Of course they can go out of business, but the impression they intentionally give to the customer is that if you click "buy", you get access to the movie for as long as the site exists.
If you're the ethical type you can "buy" it on one of these services and then pirate it in order to keep it in perpetuity. If you're the less ethical type you can skip the "buying" step.
Is it really ethical to keep giving them money? Eventually you have to face the fact that you're feeding a monster that lobbies for anti-consumer laws and makes anti-consumer technology. They're actively working to make our world worse. Helping them in that endeavor is not ethical.
Okay, but who do you donate to in the case of a movie or show? Because for authors and musicians I agree with your take. I wish more musicians were on Bandcamp, and more authors sold e-books directly from their website.
Even with musicians it can be tricky. Imagine an album with various classical pieces performed by different orchestras. Not only are there the conductors and the musicians of the orchestras, but the album also wouldn't have existed without the sound engineers and recording crews and the composers...
Even authors are dependent on their editors, so the idea of 'giving money to the people who create the things we like' is more complex than it may seem at first glance.
Well, if I had been the ethical type (I'm not), having my paid content deleted would convert me into a non-ethical type really really quickly. Just saying.
I don't care if some lawyer suit says it's ok because I really bought a license and not the content. Screw that. I bought a movie. If that's allowed by the law, the law deserves no respect.
Another example of Analog Virtual is Hokusai's The Great Wave (and similar prints). I recently watched David Bull's videos about his recreation of it [0] and it was fascinating to hear him tell about how even the "original" prints were made from slightly different woodblocks made in the same workshop.
Arguably the raw binary data still has a physical aspect, because it hasn't been interpreted yet (other than a reordering by the file system). The virtual thing is what the data ultimately represents.
Another subtlety is that a drawing on a page would be an analog representation of the thing, but if the drawing has the shape 右 and the page is placed between two doors, there would be a virtual idea encoded digitally as well.
> Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves.
It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.
It already drove the needle way past acceptable copy protection, do not buy Blu-Rays!
> It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.
Buy this definitions, DVDs are also problematic, given they're also encrypted.
Blu-rays are universally cracked by this point, so I fail to see the problem. MakeMKV is not going away to the point you won't be able to rip your blu-ray.
UHD blu-rays are a different story, since they added more encryption.
no the difference is CSS (the encryption of DVDs) has been broken, but AACS of Blu-ray has never been broken itself. Cracking it relies on player keys being leaked and those are getting rotated in newer disks, that's what I was hinting at. They also do some ridiculous stuff with obfuscated virtual machines in BD+ and audio watermarking that may mute your ripped disk on newer TVs (I'm not joking[1]). So again: don't buy blu-ray either!
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Not to worry, eventually somebody will file a class action lawsuit, and after mere 12 years of litigation everybody affected will get $2.17 in store credits (in another 5 years).
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
>Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway
Well, they were wrong, weren't they? The way it works now is much worse: what you're purchasing is a license for playback for an indeterminate amount of time, which can be arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated by the provider.
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
Single player games putting out "seasonal content" is kind of obnoxious too though so I wouldn't exclude them all. One example is the Moogle Chocobo Carnival and Assassin's Festival in Final Fantasy XV which players had to work very hard to patch back into the game after it was removed. The limited time Stellar Blade Summer Event wasn't nearly as impressive as the carnival, but it was still a black mark on a game that was otherwise refreshingly free from bullshit.
Yes, it is very comfusing. "Buy" buttons should be replaced by "License" buttons when you are licensing stuff instead of buyimg it. There should be a law for that.
That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.
And if that one-time purchased software stops working at an arbitrary date, it should be subject to the same rules. Especially online software or software requiring servers to run.
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
Copyright law has been playing semantic games with "buy" and "own" for decades. When I buy(1) something, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. The person whom I buy it from doesn't have the right to rescind my rights over the thing I bought. When I buy(2) a software license, does the seller have the right to claw back the license? If not, then buy(1) and buy(2) are conceptually identical, and there's no difference between buying a license and buying the (copy of the) software. If yes or unknown, then buying(2) is not buying(1), as it does not grant ownership, but something else; not even over the license.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
Clearly, in Sony's case here it is buy(2), and they've reached into people's accounts and removed content (even using the term "purchased" in the notice email).
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
Have there been situations were licenses are mass revoked? That would be quite nasty, I don’t recall any. My licenses to Things, Alfred, Little Snitch, etc. still work to this day. They don’t even bother with upselling.
Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly, but consumers should still be aware of the fact that their rights are limited. While the Gaben lives valve will store many people's games - when the Gaben dies... well, it's going to suck - but it'll probably take a while to completely suck, we'll probably go through drawn out enshittification first. This outcome seems inevitable[1] but it is likely a fair distance off.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
> Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
Companies selling these titles should know a minimum end date. Even if contracts don't get renewed, it's unlikely they will only have the rights for less than a year.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
If Valve continue to stay privately owned I've some confidence that the status quo will remain, regardless of whether Gaben's around. Enshittification is a feature of publicly traded companies and those owned by private equity.
Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
> This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
Thing is, changing what the button says doesn't change the fine prints nor the central issues.
A ton of stores just moved away from the "buy" language and replaced the buttons with "order", "add to cart", "pay" etc. Stores like Amazon kept the "buy" button while expliciting it's for a license. All the whining on the meaning of buying just went into word tweaking with no further effects.
We need to talk about digital licenses, it's complex and there's no simple answer, but IMHO we first need to get past what the button says.
> You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
You bought a ticket that was advertised as a ticket for a concert and you got that. No one ever claimed or implied you were buying the musicians so they would perform the concert for you whenever you like.
When you 'buy' a movie in the way we are talking about here it is advertised and implied as buying the movie in the sense of owning a copy (or the right to access a copy) of the movie to watch whenever you want forever. What you get is more similar to an unlimited ticket to a cinema that allows you to watch that movie as long as it is shown in the cinema, but the cimema can decide to stop showing the movie any time. Unlike the concert ticket that is purposefully not clearly communicated (and the concert has a fixed service you purchase (one concert) unlike the movie ticket where the service you get is dependent entirely on the goodwill of the cinema)
I'd argue that it is not, especially regarding advertisement.
It could have been an expectation in the early DVD days, but at the time the Playstation Store started providing movies we were already deep into the digital store area, and we'd already had a bunch of "you own nothing" stories.
To my point the Kotaku title goes "_Reminding Us_ Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours", we've been through this many times now.
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
> it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when [...]
The use of "buy" and "purchase" were never restricted to ownership or unlimited rights, we buy licenses, usage rights, priority tokens, all sorts of lottery tickets and weirder abstractions every day.
GP probably wants digital movies to have a specific purchase model, but the discussion has to be about the model, not the vocabulary. Right now I actually have no idea what they'd be willing to accept as a middle ground to rights management.
I think it's perfectly clear? If you buy a ticket, it's clear you own that ticket. But the usefulness of the ticket is that it can be exchanged for a service (admission to the concert), which is also clear. Nobody would expect the ticket to grant them admission to every future concert by the artist, or at the venue. The date and start/end times are on the ticket you buy, otherwise it would say "lifetime pass" or something.
The same is true with movie downloads, except that Sony very strongly, probably deceptively and maliciously, implies the "lifetime pass" part while they full well know they're only selling you a ticket for access during a limited timeframe.
We wouldn't have this article or discussion if Sony had been truthful and had their store pages not say "purchase movie", but "purchase temporary ticket".
It is. You can either be purchasing a license to a movie, or purchasing the movie itself. You have never been purchasing the movie itself from these services, because you're not entitled to it even after you purchase (i.e. there is DRM, etc. preventing you from ever getting it, you don't get it in any alternative forms, etc). If you want to own something, you buy on iTunes, where they let you download DRM-free copies, to do whatever you want with. But if you buy it on PlayStation, Amazon, etc. you are only getting a revocable license. You are only buying a revocable license. That is what "purchase" or "buy" means, because you're "purchasing" or "buying" the license, not the movie
Citizens don't need a license to read and/or watch stuff in their own private homes, that's a basic right guaranteed by the First Amendment (in the US; similar laws apply in the rest of the civilized world). Whatever you want to claim that people are purchasing it can not be a "viewing license" because that would violate the Constitution.
I never said you need a license to watch something you own. I said when you purchase a license to stream online, you're purchasing the license and not the movie itself. You don't own the movie then, even though you did make a purchase (of the license).
I think we're all agreed on that. What people are upset about is that Sony (and many others) clearly imply in their wording that you're buying a copy when in fact you're buying a streaming license. Same as in the case of Ubisoft's The Crew, which is about people feeling misled about what they were actually purchasing.
Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
For streaming yes, but downloads are still copyright infringement on the part of the downloader. An unauthorized copy is being made on the recipient's machine. It's true that copyright holders rarely pursue cases against individuals, and tend to focus on distributors though.
Have there been any cases since the Meta ruling with the books they torrented? If I understood it right they argued and won that they didn’t seed any of the torrents so is fair use and the judge agreed. That case made it seem like as long as you don’t seed/distribute the copyrighted material then it is legal
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
streaming is downloading, otherwise it wouldnt be visible on your hardware.
if you pay for a stream and the distributor downloads it to your buffer, the only thing preventing it from persisting is wrapping the data to contain it in a file structure. if we really want to split hairs, everytime the data is accessed a streams bits are copied into registers, but those bits have no identity beyond 1 or 0
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
The argument is that it doesn't create another copy, so it's more analogous to receiving a broadcast. Like, if a pirate radio station plays copyrighted music, then the mere act of receiving those signals isn't a copyright violation. But recording that broadcast would be.
Is this seriously true in the US? I doubt this is the case in any European jurisdiction.
Recording radio and TV is legal in any other case (the relevant companies didn't want that to be the case either, but we hadn't yet fallen far enough down the hole yet for that possibility to disappear).
To make another comparison:
You record House on your Tivo = Legal (you now have a file you can play anywhere (barring DRM, but libre DVRs exist), you've copied it)
You 'record' House on Netflix (either literally with OBS or just capturing the video stream via some other means) = Illegal
The only difference is the source. The actual video stream could be functionally identical. There's the fact that actual TV and radio isn't on-demand, but that to me is just an implementation detail, and not an inherent reason to treat them differently (then again, I'm not deep into the mindset of defending copyright).
Bear in mind that "illegal broadcast" is important here. A pirate radio station does not have a license to play the music it's playing. If recording pirate broadcast is legal, then effectively all copyright laws are moot so long as the copyrighted material is transmitted over radio.
Tivo is legal because cable providers are legally transmitting their cable programming.
Things get different on Netflix because recording Netflix requires circumvention of DRM, which is its own can of worms.
> If recording pirate broadcast is legal, then effectively all copyright laws are moot so long as the copyrighted material is transmitted over radio.
My understanding is that this is in fact the case, since the relevant laws don't even touch the listening side of radio/TV (modulo jurisdiction).
It's like buying a pirated DVD from a random shop. It's illegal to run a shop selling pirated films, but is it illegal to buy their DVDs? If there is a law for that, there's probably a 'knowingly' in there too.
the thing is its not like a radio or TV broadcast. some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public, you just cant sell it like its yours.
when a server downloads data to you, the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
appending header and footer to a data structure is not copying the data.
the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else. [dont do that]
> some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public
I can still legally record cable TV (or is that also illegal in the US?), even though I probably need to pay a lot more for it than I would for both Netflix and open broadcasts.
> when a server downloads data to you,
*Uploads.
> the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
As opposed to what?
> a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
The same way a TV broadcast is (barring implementation details). What's the difference between me displaying that data instantly and it then going to /dev/null, and me sending that to copy.mkv? I can do the latter legally with TV, why not everything else?
tv-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
tv-Stream.ts > copy.mkv = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > copy.mkv = Illegal (why?)
> restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
Yes.
> the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else.
Obviously. But I'm not doing that when recording TV, radio, Netflix, a blu-ray, your mum, you name it. I'm only making a copy for myself. Yet it's legal in some cases but not in others, just because the implementation is different.
it's all just silly semantics but even under the highly specific definition in the article I would say water is wet.
the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
On the topic of silly semantics, science as a discipline has the tendency to paint itself into linguistic paradoxes where the words does not mean what it means.
An example is "bug" where there is a (sighs) true bug(a very specific type of insect) But the one that really bothers me is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is the origin of the term, it literally means hanging stone. but... they started cataloging other similar circle-of-stone type monuments and calling them henges, a henge got defined to be more specifically a circle of stones with an inner ditch. But Stonehenge has an outer ditch.... So Stonehenge is not a henge... (Sighs again).
> the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
I disagree with your interpretation as that is using "wet" as a verb i.e. water can wet a surface.
I had no idea about the Stonehenge misnomer - I shall attempt to wrangle that into future conversations as I have some friends that are into ancient history/geology.
My favourite naming oddities are usually around fruits and nuts - a banana is a berry, but a strawberry isn't and of course, a brazil nut isn't a nut at all.
I believe this is the current situation in switzerland, plus, the swiss have a tv license you have to pay if you have anything that could show media digitally so i feel doubly justified pirating things.
copyright infringement is not theft, it is also not piracy.
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
I take advantage of AWS S3 for multimedia storage duty these days. My goal is to maintain stable access to content I enjoy without worrying about data loss or the burden of time it takes or maintain all the storage infrastructure.
If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.
Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.
There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.
I had to move, haven't settled yet, so my entire setup of Radarr/Sonarr/Kodi + torrent in a VPN container is gone and I miss it so much. The result is that I haven't been watching any movies or TV show for the past year or so. I miss them, but doing it legally or setting up something anew on a VPS is too much work or too much risky.
That said, wouldn't you have an invite for PassThePopcorn? Never heard of this one, I thought it was yet another iteration of that popcorn streaming app that was popular a decade ago. I always managed with public trackers, never cared about the entire interview process: I hate it for work, I hate it for fun even more. Email in the profile if you wish to share.
How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?
On most private trackers if you level up to Power User you unlock an invite forum where other trackers explicitly advertise with set requirements. No risky trading or begging, no need to participate in the forums at all, nobody “finds you”. You just send a dm once you meet the requirements.
Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.
All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.
Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.
None of the major movie/tv trackers have onerous ratio requirements. But yeah you don’t need them for new mainstream releases. They’re only necessary if you’re particular on quality or want niche stuff.
That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.
This discussion applies to any product from every virtual store, including game stores.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.
If you buy a DVD you have the right, in every sane jurisdiction I'm aware of, to rip the movie from the DVD into an iso. You can then discard/recycle the media and retain the digital copy you have the right to view privately in perpetuity. It is a single consumer license though, as is logical, so it's likely illegal for you to continue to watch the ripped iso if you resell the media with the content still on it or resell the media with any portion of the value coming from the markings from the content or the fact that it used to contain that content. You probably want to shove it in a closet somewhere or just reuse it as rewriteable media for whatever purpose you need - retaining physical ownership of the media makes things simplest legally.
In Finland DVD's CSS was ruled to be strong technical copy protection system (tehokas tekninen toimenpide). In that exact case a person had made a program which bypassed it and published it. He was found to be criminally liable though he didn't get any fine/prison time from what I remember.
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Shoutout to DVD-Jon from Norway.[1] I'm pretty sure we've settled on it being legal nowadays, but it took at least that court case for it to happen (not to mention that it was a fucking clown show).
There's a quote on his Norwegian Wikipedia page from the then minister of justice: 'Some people may think [circumventing DVD DRM] is cool and stuff, but this is an activity that is devastating for the industry'.
If it really is devastating for the industry, the industry should really figure itself out. And for that matter, with hindsight, it doesn't look like it really did anything.
Finnish case happened after DVD-Jon. To my knowledge there also hasn't been any new cases which went other way (or any way) in Finland & law hasn't changed so it's technically still illegal. Of course it's up to prosecutor to determine if they want to actually go ahead with prosecution & it's also not a crime which gets discovered often so the risks are quite low, especially if you are just ripping DVDs for personal use.
DRM is like a vibe, man - if you have the ability to output a video stream to an arbitrary display device you can always bypass DRM and it's never been illegal[1] to do so (though publishing approaches to defeat it often is).
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Gosh, I didn't know the DMCA went that far. I had assumed it was in line with Canada's TPM related laws which do disallow direct circumvention of DRM but do specifically except format shifting if the copy will be used for a legal purpose. I guess be careful and check your local jurisdiction.
The US Library of Congress is given a Special Exemption in the DMCA [1] and so far the Library has been using it to grant a Backup Exemption that format shifting is legal for backups. Due to the nature of this exemption it has to be debated and reviewed every 3 years, so it's in a weird legal status if it "will always" be around.
I’m still playing CDs from 1985 without any issue. And they often sound way nicer than overcompressed remasters I can find on Spotify. Would it be different with DVDs for a reason I ignore ?
They may be more susceptible due to the finer grooves alone, I guess? Although so far I've also never had any DVD or Blu-ray go bad.
Recordable discs are another matter, though. Much more sensitive because the pits are "burned" instead of "pressed" (not sure about the correct terminology). And some of those materials were so bad that back in the day, I often had blank discs that went bad before I even had a chance to burn them. Nowadays I'm using M-Discs and hope they'll hold up their promise. They should outlive me, anyway.
everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.
>I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not.
You also get the play the same version stored on DVD regardless where you are. You are limited by location when you purchase it online, and sometimes they might even automatically swap the version / cuts for you depending on your location.
We really need a storage media that last 100+ years, store 200GB+, tiny footprint, and inexpensive to produce.
How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc? I have multiple games that you can't "buy" anymore, but Steam doesn't stop me from reinstalling them as often as I like.
Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?
That's just how Valve's license agreement works. You publish with Steam and you grant Valve the right to publish the work in perpetuity.
The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.
When a movie or show gets removed from Netflix sucks but no as much since it's a subscription and you can cancel if they don't have what you like but what you do with something you bought
> How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc?
Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)
I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.
It's just a matter of negotiating sensible licensing deals. But that would require the distributors to actually care a little bit about not screwing over their customers.
Look how it works over at Steam. If a license expires, even if the publisher goes out of business, Steam removes a game from its storefront, but the files are still on their servers and they keep them available for anyone who purchased a license. I think the only cases where they actually removed files from their servers and blocked redownloads were when there was an actual legal or liability issue forbidding them from continuing to offer the files (for example if they contain malware).
Both parties are incentivized for this abuse of consumer ownership. When this deal was arranged, there was plenty of precedent. Sony probably got a better price from Studio Canal by including the provision to mandate removing the films from customer accounts when the contract ended. The studio would be ok with the discount because it would improve leverage with the next customer, to whom it could pitch that their market is larger. No one (or at least no PlayStation customers) currently own their product.
Even if they did download the movie, Sony would be legally required to remotely delete it, because they can. The only way that doesn't happen is if they can't, such as when you download an mp3 on a PC from a company that is not Microsoft.
I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
I believe DVDs and Blu-Ray discs and players will increase in value over time, almost like samizdat printing presses -- underground video viewers that let us watch movies without the monolithic globalist corporate police state observing, penalizing, demanding identitification, and trying to extract an ounce of monopolist rentier blood.
I don’t know it sounds a lot more likely to me that piracy will just come back in popularity in a big way instead. Why pay inflated prices for old machines that will certainly break and old discs when you can just download a DRM free copy easily for free?
When streaming first took off piracy hit all time lows, but it’s already been coming back in a big way and I’m sure will only continue to do so going forward as things like this keep happening and streaming keeps getting more expensive and fragmented.
I find it a bit sad that everyone is dumping on Sony here, considering it's StudioCanal that is presumably demanding the movies be made inaccessible to customers, but presumably is not offering to refund the royalties they collected. I't's natural for people to direct their ire at the reailer to whom they gave their money, but in my view its the rightsholder who is generally the abd guy in these situations.
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
Wow, "purchasing a revokable license" is an insane concept. Purchase of something revokable in general feels like... not purchasing? If there was a definite time bound that's one thing, but imagine if I sell a revokable license and then revoke it a week later -- it seems like that would be allowed?
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.
ISTM there's a good argument for a plaintiff to ask the court to ignore that on the basis that it's a contract of adhesion and one that's effectively unreadable for anyone without a law degree. We're not talking about terms and conditions that fit on a single sheet of paper in a normal font, bu thousands upon thousands of words.
What’s wild is there is no legal way to actually buy and truly own movies anymore. Any major service is a license and if you can even get a DVD the legality of ripping it is questionable since you have to break DRM. I have purchased a few movies (surf films) from people who actually give you the digital file and it is so wonderful.
This remains my favourite quote from any user agreement I've ever seen, from the PlayStation Terms of Use:
> Use of the terms "own," "ownership", "purchase," "sale," "sold," "sell," "rent" or "buy" in this Agreement or in connection with the Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content
I mean, this is chef's kiss level of deceit. No parody could top that.
Any jurisdiction where a company can just put "when we say you'll own it, it doesn't mean you'll own anything" in their contracts and get away with it, is broken.
What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.
A Jellyfin or Plex server can be had for real cheap using used hardware. A Ryzen 3 build can be found for next to nothing here in Brazil[1], so I imagine it’d be even cheaper in the US.
Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.
Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.
How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
Sony sucks and I will never give them another dime. Had a PS5 with a 120+ games (majority PS4), also PSVR2, got f-ed over by Sony when they would not refund in incorrect game purchase I'd bought literally minutes before asking for the refund. Gave up my PS5, I will never purchase anything from Sony ever again. Recommend everyone else do the same.
Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!
This is ridiculous. I thought at first that it concerned pirated movies that people were playing on their playstation.
But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.
I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.
Makes me glad I never got in the habit of buying digital copies of movies or TV shows. This a one off many reminders that if you really want to purchase a title, get the Blu-ray or DVD
I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.
"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.
If you're not experienced in media servers, I'd recommend a QNAP NAS and then install either Jellyfin or Emby. (Plex has really gone downhill in the last 10 years imho.) QNAP is terrible for experienced users, but as Baby's First NAS it's absolutely sublime.
Of course! It's fantastic. I went from Plex --> Emby --> Jellyfin and honestly if I could have afforded it I would have purchased the 100 USD lifetime license. They work really hard and deserve the money.
Is it just me who thinks that everything went wrong when we accepted the closed model hardware and their ecosystem?
If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.
Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.
Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
I wonder why their license affects your local copy of a purchased product.
Imagine a supermarket losing the contract to sell Nescafé, so Nestlé comes into your house to take their coffee. Okay, Nestlé would totally do this anyway, but it’s bizarre.
As described, the Apple version is that they won't remove local copies you already have? They just can't facilitate copying a new instance to your device.
I still think this is crazy, mind.
Because it's not a purchased product. It's a sub-license of Apple's license for you to temporarily play a work.
Yes but this is not how it’s marketed. The button says purchase not license/Rent for a random period of time.
With Apple, you can at least download the media you bought and keep it.
Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?
I have a smart playlist that gets automatically populated with songs in my library that are not available (evidently pulled) on Apple Music anymore, and it is growing with tunes that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen to them. I don’t think there’s any way to download them, but I didn’t “buy” them via iTunes Store, just streamed them.
Right, I meant songs you’ve purchased.
If I download it on my iPad I’m pretty sure it will delete itself or eventually got deleted on an update. I might be wrong but this is how these systems work.
If you buy it on a PC, you get a file you can do whatever you want with. In Apple's case it's at least possible to keep if you're vigilant.
I'm sure the file disappearing from your iOS device is naught more than a convenient bug. It's not ideal, but I don't think one can realistically expect much more (at least not without actual consumer protection, which will probably take a while).
Sony and Apple aren’t the only offenders. Google Play Music did something similar 12 years ago or so. It’s been a bit but I recall permanently losing access to a lot of music I owned at the time.
I don't remember that happening. What I do remember is that Alphabet decided to axe Google Play Music, but they announced that months in advance and made it fairly easy to download my entire collection. Which is why I now have a couple hundred gigabytes of music backed up on several devices.
> Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours
Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.
What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.
The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.
This is technically true, but not helpful. These online services have buttons that say "rent" and "buy", they don't say "rent for a little while" and "rent for a longer but unknown amount of time". Of course they can go out of business, but the impression they intentionally give to the customer is that if you click "buy", you get access to the movie for as long as the site exists.
If you're the ethical type you can "buy" it on one of these services and then pirate it in order to keep it in perpetuity. If you're the less ethical type you can skip the "buying" step.
Is it really ethical to keep giving them money? Eventually you have to face the fact that you're feeding a monster that lobbies for anti-consumer laws and makes anti-consumer technology. They're actively working to make our world worse. Helping them in that endeavor is not ethical.
Why is it ethical to give $29.98 to a forcefully inserted middleman and $0.01 to a creator? If you're ethical, pirate and then donate.
Okay, but who do you donate to in the case of a movie or show? Because for authors and musicians I agree with your take. I wish more musicians were on Bandcamp, and more authors sold e-books directly from their website.
Even with musicians it can be tricky. Imagine an album with various classical pieces performed by different orchestras. Not only are there the conductors and the musicians of the orchestras, but the album also wouldn't have existed without the sound engineers and recording crews and the composers...
Even authors are dependent on their editors, so the idea of 'giving money to the people who create the things we like' is more complex than it may seem at first glance.
Well, if I had been the ethical type (I'm not), having my paid content deleted would convert me into a non-ethical type really really quickly. Just saying.
I don't care if some lawyer suit says it's ok because I really bought a license and not the content. Screw that. I bought a movie. If that's allowed by the law, the law deserves no respect.
I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical
A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
>What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
The image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape.
>A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
Correct, a digital physical thing stores digital virtual things, and an analog physical thing stores analog virtual things.
> image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape
If I am following along...
analog virtual: representation of apple on photographic film digital physical: disc with film.mkv
Given the two remaining combinations:
analog physical: unexposed photographic film? digital virtual: binary-encoded data (film.mkv)?
Anything beyond this and it becomes a philosophical or metaphysical discussion though.
Another example of Analog Virtual is Hokusai's The Great Wave (and similar prints). I recently watched David Bull's videos about his recreation of it [0] and it was fascinating to hear him tell about how even the "original" prints were made from slightly different woodblocks made in the same workshop.
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUd...
>digital virtual: binary-encoded data
Arguably the raw binary data still has a physical aspect, because it hasn't been interpreted yet (other than a reordering by the file system). The virtual thing is what the data ultimately represents.
Another subtlety is that a drawing on a page would be an analog representation of the thing, but if the drawing has the shape 右 and the page is placed between two doors, there would be a virtual idea encoded digitally as well.
> Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves.
It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.
It already drove the needle way past acceptable copy protection, do not buy Blu-Rays!
> It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.
Buy this definitions, DVDs are also problematic, given they're also encrypted.
Blu-rays are universally cracked by this point, so I fail to see the problem. MakeMKV is not going away to the point you won't be able to rip your blu-ray.
UHD blu-rays are a different story, since they added more encryption.
no the difference is CSS (the encryption of DVDs) has been broken, but AACS of Blu-ray has never been broken itself. Cracking it relies on player keys being leaked and those are getting rotated in newer disks, that's what I was hinting at. They also do some ridiculous stuff with obfuscated virtual machines in BD+ and audio watermarking that may mute your ripped disk on newer TVs (I'm not joking[1]). So again: don't buy blu-ray either!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
Yep, this is the reason I was an avid DVD collector, but when the Blu-ray switch happened, I never rebuilt my collection.
Looks like I was wrong. Fair enough.
Digital in this context is merely shorthand for "digitally distributed", as opposed to "physically distributed"
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Not to worry, eventually somebody will file a class action lawsuit, and after mere 12 years of litigation everybody affected will get $2.17 in store credits (in another 5 years).
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
When this was originally tried under the OG "DIVX" brand name, everybody (including me) threw a fit.
Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway, and everybody (including me) blew them off.
>Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway
Well, they were wrong, weren't they? The way it works now is much worse: what you're purchasing is a license for playback for an indeterminate amount of time, which can be arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated by the provider.
I thought divx came with one play when you bought the disk, and then PPV after that
it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when in reality you’re only renting it with a to be determined end date
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
"Rent for 48h", and... "Rent until we say the time is up"?
and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
Single player games putting out "seasonal content" is kind of obnoxious too though so I wouldn't exclude them all. One example is the Moogle Chocobo Carnival and Assassin's Festival in Final Fantasy XV which players had to work very hard to patch back into the game after it was removed. The limited time Stellar Blade Summer Event wasn't nearly as impressive as the carnival, but it was still a black mark on a game that was otherwise refreshingly free from bullshit.
Yes, it is very comfusing. "Buy" buttons should be replaced by "License" buttons when you are licensing stuff instead of buyimg it. There should be a law for that.
That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.
I'm quite alright with that can of worms being opened for software. Enthused, even.
And if that one-time purchased software stops working at an arbitrary date, it should be subject to the same rules. Especially online software or software requiring servers to run.
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
Copyright law has been playing semantic games with "buy" and "own" for decades. When I buy(1) something, it's mine, and I can do what I want with it. The person whom I buy it from doesn't have the right to rescind my rights over the thing I bought. When I buy(2) a software license, does the seller have the right to claw back the license? If not, then buy(1) and buy(2) are conceptually identical, and there's no difference between buying a license and buying the (copy of the) software. If yes or unknown, then buying(2) is not buying(1), as it does not grant ownership, but something else; not even over the license.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
Clearly, in Sony's case here it is buy(2), and they've reached into people's accounts and removed content (even using the term "purchased" in the notice email).
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
What's the can of worms? Either actually sell a copy, or if you're merely selling a license then say so explicitly.
I'm reasonably certain when I ordered linux CDs in the 90s, no one put a limit on the time frame I could be using them
Have there been situations were licenses are mass revoked? That would be quite nasty, I don’t recall any. My licenses to Things, Alfred, Little Snitch, etc. still work to this day. They don’t even bother with upselling.
Yes, 100%, and that end date should be very clearly listed too.
Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly, but consumers should still be aware of the fact that their rights are limited. While the Gaben lives valve will store many people's games - when the Gaben dies... well, it's going to suck - but it'll probably take a while to completely suck, we'll probably go through drawn out enshittification first. This outcome seems inevitable[1] but it is likely a fair distance off.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
> Oftentimes that end date is not clearly knowable and can't be communicated explicitly
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
Companies selling these titles should know a minimum end date. Even if contracts don't get renewed, it's unlikely they will only have the rights for less than a year.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
If Valve continue to stay privately owned I've some confidence that the status quo will remain, regardless of whether Gaben's around. Enshittification is a feature of publicly traded companies and those owned by private equity.
Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ?
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
> This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
"Oh but they didn't read the fine prints so that's on them".
What a great argument.
To people, "buy" when in the context of a movie largely means owning the freaking thing.
> we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
That's normalization of deviance. It's fine if you're fine with that scam, don't come onto people who aren't.
Thing is, changing what the button says doesn't change the fine prints nor the central issues.
A ton of stores just moved away from the "buy" language and replaced the buttons with "order", "add to cart", "pay" etc. Stores like Amazon kept the "buy" button while expliciting it's for a license. All the whining on the meaning of buying just went into word tweaking with no further effects.
We need to talk about digital licenses, it's complex and there's no simple answer, but IMHO we first need to get past what the button says.
> You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
You bought a ticket that was advertised as a ticket for a concert and you got that. No one ever claimed or implied you were buying the musicians so they would perform the concert for you whenever you like.
When you 'buy' a movie in the way we are talking about here it is advertised and implied as buying the movie in the sense of owning a copy (or the right to access a copy) of the movie to watch whenever you want forever. What you get is more similar to an unlimited ticket to a cinema that allows you to watch that movie as long as it is shown in the cinema, but the cimema can decide to stop showing the movie any time. Unlike the concert ticket that is purposefully not clearly communicated (and the concert has a fixed service you purchase (one concert) unlike the movie ticket where the service you get is dependent entirely on the goodwill of the cinema)
> it is advertised and implied
I'd argue that it is not, especially regarding advertisement.
It could have been an expectation in the early DVD days, but at the time the Playstation Store started providing movies we were already deep into the digital store area, and we'd already had a bunch of "you own nothing" stories.
To my point the Kotaku title goes "_Reminding Us_ Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours", we've been through this many times now.
People understand the game that’s being played. Folks aren’t going to move past it as you say until there’s reform to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Why haven't you given me your soul yet? It was in the fine print you agreed to last week.
> Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
The original post was about the use of verbs.
> it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when [...]
The use of "buy" and "purchase" were never restricted to ownership or unlimited rights, we buy licenses, usage rights, priority tokens, all sorts of lottery tickets and weirder abstractions every day.
GP probably wants digital movies to have a specific purchase model, but the discussion has to be about the model, not the vocabulary. Right now I actually have no idea what they'd be willing to accept as a middle ground to rights management.
I think it's perfectly clear? If you buy a ticket, it's clear you own that ticket. But the usefulness of the ticket is that it can be exchanged for a service (admission to the concert), which is also clear. Nobody would expect the ticket to grant them admission to every future concert by the artist, or at the venue. The date and start/end times are on the ticket you buy, otherwise it would say "lifetime pass" or something.
The same is true with movie downloads, except that Sony very strongly, probably deceptively and maliciously, implies the "lifetime pass" part while they full well know they're only selling you a ticket for access during a limited timeframe.
We wouldn't have this article or discussion if Sony had been truthful and had their store pages not say "purchase movie", but "purchase temporary ticket".
In California it isn't legal
Pretty sure the Terms of Use say just that. They should update the language on the frontend though.
Renting what? The non-exclusive, revocable license? Because that's what purchase or buy means.
No, that’s not what “purchase” or “buy” means.
It literally is.
"Verb
"purchase (third-person singular simple present purchases, present participle purchasing, simple past and past participle purchased)
"To buy, obtain by payment of a price in money or its equivalent."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase
"Verb
"buy (third-person singular simple present buys, present participle buying, simple past bought, past participle bought or (archaic, rare, dialectal) boughten)
"(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buy#English
It is. You can either be purchasing a license to a movie, or purchasing the movie itself. You have never been purchasing the movie itself from these services, because you're not entitled to it even after you purchase (i.e. there is DRM, etc. preventing you from ever getting it, you don't get it in any alternative forms, etc). If you want to own something, you buy on iTunes, where they let you download DRM-free copies, to do whatever you want with. But if you buy it on PlayStation, Amazon, etc. you are only getting a revocable license. You are only buying a revocable license. That is what "purchase" or "buy" means, because you're "purchasing" or "buying" the license, not the movie
Citizens don't need a license to read and/or watch stuff in their own private homes, that's a basic right guaranteed by the First Amendment (in the US; similar laws apply in the rest of the civilized world). Whatever you want to claim that people are purchasing it can not be a "viewing license" because that would violate the Constitution.
I never said you need a license to watch something you own. I said when you purchase a license to stream online, you're purchasing the license and not the movie itself. You don't own the movie then, even though you did make a purchase (of the license).
I think we're all agreed on that. What people are upset about is that Sony (and many others) clearly imply in their wording that you're buying a copy when in fact you're buying a streaming license. Same as in the case of Ubisoft's The Crew, which is about people feeling misled about what they were actually purchasing.
Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!
If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...
Correct: it's copyright infringement, not theft.
But the point is the movie industry has been trying to tell us that it is stealing.
"You wouldn't still a car" etc etc..
Stilling a car is what the brakes are for.
Brakes are for driving faster. Having the car come to a stop is secondary.
We all just need to compress them into LLM weights.
Sir Dario, we already swallowed the whole internet.
Finally the non-existing scenes I thought have "disappeared" from the movies I've seen could make a reappearance!
Which is on the side of the distributor, not the end recipient.
For streaming yes, but downloads are still copyright infringement on the part of the downloader. An unauthorized copy is being made on the recipient's machine. It's true that copyright holders rarely pursue cases against individuals, and tend to focus on distributors though.
Have there been any cases since the Meta ruling with the books they torrented? If I understood it right they argued and won that they didn’t seed any of the torrents so is fair use and the judge agreed. That case made it seem like as long as you don’t seed/distribute the copyrighted material then it is legal
It's quite clearly explained on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
Both uploading and downloading is a violation. All the major cases are against distributors, because those are the big fish. But rights holders have gone after individuals: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/lit...
It’s too bad the judge told rights holders to forget about it when Meta violates copyright.
streaming is downloading, otherwise it wouldnt be visible on your hardware. if you pay for a stream and the distributor downloads it to your buffer, the only thing preventing it from persisting is wrapping the data to contain it in a file structure. if we really want to split hairs, everytime the data is accessed a streams bits are copied into registers, but those bits have no identity beyond 1 or 0
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
The argument is that it doesn't create another copy, so it's more analogous to receiving a broadcast. Like, if a pirate radio station plays copyrighted music, then the mere act of receiving those signals isn't a copyright violation. But recording that broadcast would be.
> But recording that broadcast would be.
Is this seriously true in the US? I doubt this is the case in any European jurisdiction.
Recording radio and TV is legal in any other case (the relevant companies didn't want that to be the case either, but we hadn't yet fallen far enough down the hole yet for that possibility to disappear).
To make another comparison:
You record House on your Tivo = Legal (you now have a file you can play anywhere (barring DRM, but libre DVRs exist), you've copied it)
You 'record' House on Netflix (either literally with OBS or just capturing the video stream via some other means) = Illegal
The only difference is the source. The actual video stream could be functionally identical. There's the fact that actual TV and radio isn't on-demand, but that to me is just an implementation detail, and not an inherent reason to treat them differently (then again, I'm not deep into the mindset of defending copyright).
Bear in mind that "illegal broadcast" is important here. A pirate radio station does not have a license to play the music it's playing. If recording pirate broadcast is legal, then effectively all copyright laws are moot so long as the copyrighted material is transmitted over radio.
Tivo is legal because cable providers are legally transmitting their cable programming.
Things get different on Netflix because recording Netflix requires circumvention of DRM, which is its own can of worms.
> If recording pirate broadcast is legal, then effectively all copyright laws are moot so long as the copyrighted material is transmitted over radio.
My understanding is that this is in fact the case, since the relevant laws don't even touch the listening side of radio/TV (modulo jurisdiction).
It's like buying a pirated DVD from a random shop. It's illegal to run a shop selling pirated films, but is it illegal to buy their DVDs? If there is a law for that, there's probably a 'knowingly' in there too.
the thing is its not like a radio or TV broadcast. some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public, you just cant sell it like its yours.
when a server downloads data to you, the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
appending header and footer to a data structure is not copying the data.
the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else. [dont do that]
> some countries consider open broadcast to be public domain so once its broadcast its public
I can still legally record cable TV (or is that also illegal in the US?), even though I probably need to pay a lot more for it than I would for both Netflix and open broadcasts.
> when a server downloads data to you,
*Uploads.
> the server is creating a copy on your hardware right out of the gate.
As opposed to what?
> a stream is a download. a central server, is pushing bits into your hardware, and making a copy on your hardware.
The same way a TV broadcast is (barring implementation details). What's the difference between me displaying that data instantly and it then going to /dev/null, and me sending that to copy.mkv? I can do the latter legally with TV, why not everything else?
tv-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
tv-Stream.ts > copy.mkv = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > /dev/dri/card0 = Legal
netflix-stream.ts > copy.mkv = Illegal (why?)
> restricting any copying at all means your hardware cant use what you were legally given, because by a split hair definition, the bits are being copied when they move from memory address to register address vice versa.
Yes.
> the real problem unilaterally, is when you are not a legal distributor, and you provide a copy to someone else.
Obviously. But I'm not doing that when recording TV, radio, Netflix, a blu-ray, your mum, you name it. I'm only making a copy for myself. Yet it's legal in some cases but not in others, just because the implementation is different.
There is a good epigram about DRM that goes something like
"Asking a computer to not copy things is like asking water to not be wet."
Water isn't "wet" , but has the ability to "wet" other objects.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet
it's all just silly semantics but even under the highly specific definition in the article I would say water is wet.
the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
On the topic of silly semantics, science as a discipline has the tendency to paint itself into linguistic paradoxes where the words does not mean what it means.
An example is "bug" where there is a (sighs) true bug(a very specific type of insect) But the one that really bothers me is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is the origin of the term, it literally means hanging stone. but... they started cataloging other similar circle-of-stone type monuments and calling them henges, a henge got defined to be more specifically a circle of stones with an inner ditch. But Stonehenge has an outer ditch.... So Stonehenge is not a henge... (Sighs again).
> the articles definition "a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface" Water has this property therefor water is wet.
I disagree with your interpretation as that is using "wet" as a verb i.e. water can wet a surface.
I had no idea about the Stonehenge misnomer - I shall attempt to wrangle that into future conversations as I have some friends that are into ancient history/geology.
My favourite naming oddities are usually around fruits and nuts - a banana is a berry, but a strawberry isn't and of course, a brazil nut isn't a nut at all.
I believe this is the current situation in switzerland, plus, the swiss have a tv license you have to pay if you have anything that could show media digitally so i feel doubly justified pirating things.
Has this line of argument actually held up in court, though?
Piracy isn't stealing regardless of whether or not buying is owning.
copyright infringement is not theft, it is also not piracy.
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
I fully understand you, but then, copying copyrighted data can't be piracy (because literal piracy is stealing).
> PlayStation Store users who bought movies
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
There, FTFY.
Which I'm fine with, if and only if the "Buy" button is explicitly labeled "Buy a limited, revocable with no notice, license."
They EU could just require these companies to label the button "license" instead of "buy"
Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
I take advantage of AWS S3 for multimedia storage duty these days. My goal is to maintain stable access to content I enjoy without worrying about data loss or the burden of time it takes or maintain all the storage infrastructure.
If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.
Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.
There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.
I had to move, haven't settled yet, so my entire setup of Radarr/Sonarr/Kodi + torrent in a VPN container is gone and I miss it so much. The result is that I haven't been watching any movies or TV show for the past year or so. I miss them, but doing it legally or setting up something anew on a VPS is too much work or too much risky.
That said, wouldn't you have an invite for PassThePopcorn? Never heard of this one, I thought it was yet another iteration of that popcorn streaming app that was popular a decade ago. I always managed with public trackers, never cared about the entire interview process: I hate it for work, I hate it for fun even more. Email in the profile if you wish to share.
How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?
On most private trackers if you level up to Power User you unlock an invite forum where other trackers explicitly advertise with set requirements. No risky trading or begging, no need to participate in the forums at all, nobody “finds you”. You just send a dm once you meet the requirements.
Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.
Where did you get a seedbox with 16 TB for just 50$/month?!
https://whatbox.ca/plans
How did you get a private tracker?
All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.
Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.
Sounds like how the AvZ network works.
You don't need a private tracker for stuff that comes out now.
In fact, for those things, I'd say a private tracker isn't that interesting because of the share requirements.
None of the major movie/tv trackers have onerous ratio requirements. But yeah you don’t need them for new mainstream releases. They’re only necessary if you’re particular on quality or want niche stuff.
That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.
You find someone who is already a member and ask for an invite.
This discussion applies to any product from every virtual store, including game stores.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
Edit: clarification
However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.
If you buy a DVD you have the right, in every sane jurisdiction I'm aware of, to rip the movie from the DVD into an iso. You can then discard/recycle the media and retain the digital copy you have the right to view privately in perpetuity. It is a single consumer license though, as is logical, so it's likely illegal for you to continue to watch the ripped iso if you resell the media with the content still on it or resell the media with any portion of the value coming from the markings from the content or the fact that it used to contain that content. You probably want to shove it in a closet somewhere or just reuse it as rewriteable media for whatever purpose you need - retaining physical ownership of the media makes things simplest legally.
In Finland DVD's CSS was ruled to be strong technical copy protection system (tehokas tekninen toimenpide). In that exact case a person had made a program which bypassed it and published it. He was found to be criminally liable though he didn't get any fine/prison time from what I remember.
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Unfortunately I cannot find the exact page right now, but I found one of the appeal documents from from https://www.yumpu.com/fi/document/view/38482300/1-helsingin-.... It's probably under https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikki/, but it's no longer available and Internet Archive is currently giving 503 when trying to access the old pages.
Shoutout to DVD-Jon from Norway.[1] I'm pretty sure we've settled on it being legal nowadays, but it took at least that court case for it to happen (not to mention that it was a fucking clown show).
There's a quote on his Norwegian Wikipedia page from the then minister of justice: 'Some people may think [circumventing DVD DRM] is cool and stuff, but this is an activity that is devastating for the industry'.
If it really is devastating for the industry, the industry should really figure itself out. And for that matter, with hindsight, it doesn't look like it really did anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
Finnish case happened after DVD-Jon. To my knowledge there also hasn't been any new cases which went other way (or any way) in Finland & law hasn't changed so it's technically still illegal. Of course it's up to prosecutor to determine if they want to actually go ahead with prosecution & it's also not a crime which gets discovered often so the risks are quite low, especially if you are just ripping DVDs for personal use.
You are only able to do this because the DRM was cracked long ago.
DRM is like a vibe, man - if you have the ability to output a video stream to an arbitrary display device you can always bypass DRM and it's never been illegal[1] to do so (though publishing approaches to defeat it often is).
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
"bypassing DRM" is explicitly illegal according to DMCA. Don't conflate "unenforce{d,able}" and "legal".
Gosh, I didn't know the DMCA went that far. I had assumed it was in line with Canada's TPM related laws which do disallow direct circumvention of DRM but do specifically except format shifting if the copy will be used for a legal purpose. I guess be careful and check your local jurisdiction.
The US Library of Congress is given a Special Exemption in the DMCA [1] and so far the Library has been using it to grant a Backup Exemption that format shifting is legal for backups. Due to the nature of this exemption it has to be debated and reviewed every 3 years, so it's in a weird legal status if it "will always" be around.
[1] (a)1(C) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
You don't have that right on the US. The AHRA is the only law which permits format shifting and it only applies to audio.
> DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable
If I am the reason for damaging my purchase then I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase.
Same happens with books, you buy the copy and if you don't take care of it, soon it will become unreadable.
DVDs degrade naturally. Good care will extend the lifespan but not indefinitely.
Other things as well degrade naturally, some faster, some slower, some depending on the use.
I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase, I am not fine when my purchase can be taken away from me abruptly by the decision of random Joe
I’m still playing CDs from 1985 without any issue. And they often sound way nicer than overcompressed remasters I can find on Spotify. Would it be different with DVDs for a reason I ignore ?
They may be more susceptible due to the finer grooves alone, I guess? Although so far I've also never had any DVD or Blu-ray go bad.
Recordable discs are another matter, though. Much more sensitive because the pits are "burned" instead of "pressed" (not sure about the correct terminology). And some of those materials were so bad that back in the day, I often had blank discs that went bad before I even had a chance to burn them. Nowadays I'm using M-Discs and hope they'll hold up their promise. They should outlive me, anyway.
everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.
punishing customers for not using BitTorrent seems like a weird strategy but I’m not an MBA so what do I know
The amount of people who are willing to tolerate the "cable-ization" of streaming services is far larger than those who will torrent
The trick is to punish them more if they do use BitTorrent
California did. All the stores, like Steam, just changed.the word to "rent" or "purchase license" when you're in California. It's a start.
>I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not.
You also get the play the same version stored on DVD regardless where you are. You are limited by location when you purchase it online, and sometimes they might even automatically swap the version / cuts for you depending on your location.
We really need a storage media that last 100+ years, store 200GB+, tiny footprint, and inexpensive to produce.
They'll combine the "buy" and "rent" buttons if there's ever any realistic pressure to change. The typical consumer doesn't care.
It's almost already like this. Buying a movie is sometimes the exact same price or only a dollar more. They know what they're doing.
Initially, the new button might say "buy license" and then eventually it will go back to just "buy".
This isn't exactly a case of lack of regulation but IP rights/arrangements expiring. The world needs less IP protection laws, not more.
How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc? I have multiple games that you can't "buy" anymore, but Steam doesn't stop me from reinstalling them as often as I like.
Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?
That's just how Valve's license agreement works. You publish with Steam and you grant Valve the right to publish the work in perpetuity.
The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.
When a movie or show gets removed from Netflix sucks but no as much since it's a subscription and you can cancel if they don't have what you like but what you do with something you bought
> How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc?
Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)
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I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.
It's just a matter of negotiating sensible licensing deals. But that would require the distributors to actually care a little bit about not screwing over their customers.
Look how it works over at Steam. If a license expires, even if the publisher goes out of business, Steam removes a game from its storefront, but the files are still on their servers and they keep them available for anyone who purchased a license. I think the only cases where they actually removed files from their servers and blocked redownloads were when there was an actual legal or liability issue forbidding them from continuing to offer the files (for example if they contain malware).
Both parties are incentivized for this abuse of consumer ownership. When this deal was arranged, there was plenty of precedent. Sony probably got a better price from Studio Canal by including the provision to mandate removing the films from customer accounts when the contract ended. The studio would be ok with the discount because it would improve leverage with the next customer, to whom it could pitch that their market is larger. No one (or at least no PlayStation customers) currently own their product.
Even if they did download the movie, Sony would be legally required to remotely delete it, because they can. The only way that doesn't happen is if they can't, such as when you download an mp3 on a PC from a company that is not Microsoft.
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I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
I believe DVDs and Blu-Ray discs and players will increase in value over time, almost like samizdat printing presses -- underground video viewers that let us watch movies without the monolithic globalist corporate police state observing, penalizing, demanding identitification, and trying to extract an ounce of monopolist rentier blood.
I don’t know it sounds a lot more likely to me that piracy will just come back in popularity in a big way instead. Why pay inflated prices for old machines that will certainly break and old discs when you can just download a DRM free copy easily for free?
When streaming first took off piracy hit all time lows, but it’s already been coming back in a big way and I’m sure will only continue to do so going forward as things like this keep happening and streaming keeps getting more expensive and fragmented.
What good is a disc player when your display... can't... show it? Can't have unauthorized computing devices connected to displays in the future.
I expected better from Sony's lawyers. How did they not get the right agreement to keep purchases in perpetuity?
I find it a bit sad that everyone is dumping on Sony here, considering it's StudioCanal that is presumably demanding the movies be made inaccessible to customers, but presumably is not offering to refund the royalties they collected. I't's natural for people to direct their ire at the reailer to whom they gave their money, but in my view its the rightsholder who is generally the abd guy in these situations.
No — both the person who pulls the trigger and the person who gives the order are criminals.
Sony created a contract where this was possible, is who sold the product to customers, and is physically carrying out the act.
They deserve every bit of blame.
'Criminals'? Get a grip.
A decade ago they pulled my purchased copy of mortal kombat 2. Not the first time they've done stuff like this.
I stuck to buying hard copies and dwindled off the series as they started to charge just to play multiplayer.
Again? They already tried to pull that one a few years ago.
[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony%27s_attempted_removal_of_...
They did get away with it in 2024:
https://filmstories.co.uk/news/funimation-streaming-app-to-s...
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
they can do it as many times as they want until it works, then that's precedent
Off to small claims court people should go. Amazon tried something similar and got in trouble because people when after them.
And people wonder why some people sail the high seas.
> Off to small claims court people should go
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
I believe you’d lose in small claims court as all of the streaming companies make it clear you’re purchasing a revokable license.
Wow, "purchasing a revokable license" is an insane concept. Purchase of something revokable in general feels like... not purchasing? If there was a definite time bound that's one thing, but imagine if I sell a revokable license and then revoke it a week later -- it seems like that would be allowed?
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Would likely win in the UK as we have an unfair terms regulation, a small claims court could easily rule it an unfair as any reasonable consumer would assume they were purchasing the movie to watch whenever they want to.
ISTM there's a good argument for a plaintiff to ask the court to ignore that on the basis that it's a contract of adhesion and one that's effectively unreadable for anyone without a law degree. We're not talking about terms and conditions that fit on a single sheet of paper in a normal font, bu thousands upon thousands of words.
Tech EULAs are just absurdly long, and I'm sure they've expanded since this article was written in 2020: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
No, that is not what the plain meaning of “purchase” is.
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No refunds. Sounds like Playstation customer support. The most customer-unfriendly policies a company could think of.
What’s wild is there is no legal way to actually buy and truly own movies anymore. Any major service is a license and if you can even get a DVD the legality of ripping it is questionable since you have to break DRM. I have purchased a few movies (surf films) from people who actually give you the digital file and it is so wonderful.
Would love to know how hidden the fine text was on that buy button. Unless it said rent this should be illegal.
I'd recommend qbittorrent over transmission tbh.
I'd recommend usenet over torrents tbh.
I'd recommend anonymous torrents in I2P over non-anonymous standard implementation.
There's perfectionism and then there's reality.
This remains my favourite quote from any user agreement I've ever seen, from the PlayStation Terms of Use:
> Use of the terms "own," "ownership", "purchase," "sale," "sold," "sell," "rent" or "buy" in this Agreement or in connection with the Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content
I mean, this is chef's kiss level of deceit. No parody could top that.
Any jurisdiction where a company can just put "when we say you'll own it, it doesn't mean you'll own anything" in their contracts and get away with it, is broken.
I own a playstation. I do not buy digital games, only discs. See the article for why not.
The game discs hold digital data. They're certainly not analog.
it's common to refer to download-only purchases as digital and discs as physical
Analog is not the opposite of digital in this context. I feel like you knew that though.
Fix the headline to say Sony
What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.
I will only buy digital media from DRM free stores, which as far as I know, means I can buy music, not movies.
I don’t trust any provider to honor purchases I made 20 years from now. I really wish I could, as it would simplify things for me.
A Jellyfin or Plex server can be had for real cheap using used hardware. A Ryzen 3 build can be found for next to nothing here in Brazil[1], so I imagine it’d be even cheaper in the US.
Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.
Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.
N5105 boards are also super cheap, and low power draw, but still with the transcoding hardware. Great experience with mine.
How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?
Movies have been pushing political agendas pretty much since the beginning of cinema.
Buddy I hate to tell you, but this already happened several years ago.
Here is the full list of the 551 movies and TV shows being removed: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
Sony sucks and I will never give them another dime. Had a PS5 with a 120+ games (majority PS4), also PSVR2, got f-ed over by Sony when they would not refund in incorrect game purchase I'd bought literally minutes before asking for the refund. Gave up my PS5, I will never purchase anything from Sony ever again. Recommend everyone else do the same.
Nobody can delete 551 or even 1 movie from my Plex library other than me or the hard drive grim reaper.
Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!
This is ridiculous. I thought at first that it concerned pirated movies that people were playing on their playstation.
But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.
I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.
There's actually a statutory right that says they have to do this.
Makes me glad I never got in the habit of buying digital copies of movies or TV shows. This a one off many reminders that if you really want to purchase a title, get the Blu-ray or DVD
By not teaching the younger generations the virtues of piracy, millennials have failed them.
It'll be all the more critical in years to come when we get more and more AI remastered versions of stuff so even stuff pre-2020 is slop.
I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.
"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.
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This is making me mad enough that I’m going to spend my weekend figuring out a media server and pirating movies.
If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Fuck those guys.
It’s been 20 years since I’ve pirated shit, but here we are again…
If you're not experienced in media servers, I'd recommend a QNAP NAS and then install either Jellyfin or Emby. (Plex has really gone downhill in the last 10 years imho.) QNAP is terrible for experienced users, but as Baby's First NAS it's absolutely sublime.
Thank you for mentioning Emby. I've been using it for years. It's rarely ever mentioned in the Plex/Jellyfin conversation.
Of course! It's fantastic. I went from Plex --> Emby --> Jellyfin and honestly if I could have afforded it I would have purchased the 100 USD lifetime license. They work really hard and deserve the money.
> If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing
A queerly sticky ego defense mechanism.
At this point, "piratery" is not just valid, it's our obligation
Sony is “stealing” 551 movies from customers.
Is it just me who thinks that everything went wrong when we accepted the closed model hardware and their ecosystem?
If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.
Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.
Wow.