> The motion says the PlayStation Terms of Service put a binding arbitration agreement and a class action waiver in Section 14, and quotes the opt-out clause: ...
> The clause requires a user who does not wish to be bound to notify Sony in writing within 30 days of accepting the agreement.
Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident.
This "opt out" mechanism is made to let Sony lawyers argue that accepting it was your choice so it can't be struck down as forced, even if 99% of users have no idea it exists, by design. Evil all the way down.
Binding arbitration when there is a significant power imbalance should be illegal. If it's between two similarly abled parties (e.g. two individuals), it should be fine.
I studied a bit of this in a university course. Between a lot of organizations, binding arbitration is more efficient (i.e. cheaper) than the legal system. If your company wants to make a deal with another company, binding arbitration often makes sense.
Ditto for 2 individuals: If they had to go through the legal system, it could end up being a war of attrition - the one who has more money to pay lawyers wins. Binding arbitration is a way to "level" that field.
The down side (at least in many, if not all, states) is that you have little recourse if the arbiter is totally unfair. With the legal system, you can appeal, etc.
But between an individual and a large company - no way!
In my last job, the (very big) company automatically enrolls new employees into a binding arbitration agreement, but they do give a timeline to opt out. I was surprised I had that option. I even paid a lawyer to review the docs. He said "Yep, you can (and should) opt out. I'm surprised they even gave you that option."
Binding arbitration shouldn't be a thing. If we want to go to arbitration is because we are in the same level of negotiation. One side imposing arbitration or any other kind of restriction on the mechanism that the individual or organization has to redress issues shouldn't be a thing
The counterargument is that if you don't have binding arbitration, you can be constantly worried that the other party will drive you bankrupt with frivolous legal proceedings, and that fear discourages collaboration. A binding arbitration puts that fear at ease.
To me that is a flaw in the justice system that needs to be resolved by legislation and within the justice system, not something that should have some bs extralegal work around.
We have a legal system precisely because it's inefficient. Rather than arbitration lets just not have any laws, functionally equivalent and cheaper.
Having no enforcement would be cheaper too. What makes arbitration preferable is whatever meaningful protection it provides. So what protections does it give consumers in this case, and why are those adequate? "It's more efficient" doesn't answer that. There are practical limits to the number of individual claims Sony can lose. Of course if it's within their rights Sony would very much want to steal ~$1,000 from everyone that uses their services.
This all assumes that the arbitrator isn't getting kickbacks which they are more likely to than the traditional legal system.
In my country, many laws state that the consumer (or "weak" part) can not sign away their rights, any contract with stipulations regarding that would void that clause. Feel like that should be the norm. Shouldn't be able to lose your consumer rights just by pressing a button, then the rights are worthless if everyone just have a huge TOS / EULA for any service covering their asses.
Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of the party imposing these terms.
Courts often look at these contracts differently, but around the world, they allow them to exist because they are useful. A good example are the "terms of service" for public or private transit. If the carrier can't define some common-sense rules, like that you can be kicked out or fined for not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus, it'd complicate things.
The legal standard is basically that the rules hold unless they're unreasonable or unconscionable. But of course, what's seen as reasonable depends on the country, the state, and the judge.
> not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus
The problem for some of us here is that we're left without a viable transit option, as the yes-pants-no-bagpipes model of transit essentially has a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I suspect if market forces were allowed to operate in this area, we'd see fewer pants and more pipes.
This is also one of those scenarios similar to subscription or membership cancellation where we should not allow accepting/signing up for something require using an entirely different method of communication to cancel/opt out.
Requiring written notification while the TOS being accepted entirely via digital means should be illegal.
Not to mention I think its insane that we allow companies to be able to dictate how citizens are allowed to utilize their legal system.
I was recently reviewing a collective bargaining agreement (after being approached by a campaign to add my job category to an existing union at my employer), and was surprised to find that it forced arbitration for all employee disputes, with no opt out. It's not just employers that use binding arbitration to take away workers' rights.
Users should not be held to terms they were unaware of. Companies should be required to collect digital signatures and initials for every unusual term.
Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.
Just like being able to commit yourself to showing up to work everyday restricts your freedom. But it's essential to getting the other party to give up something in consideration.
Of course, you can argue that consumers should be treated like legal babies that can't enter into agreements.
There's a difference between restricting your freedom and restricting your rights. When you enter an employment contract, you agree to give up some freedom in return for a salary etc. but it doesn't take away any of your rights. You still have the right to life, liberty etc. You still have the right to not turn up to work, though too much of that will likely cause them to terminate your employment. An employment contract that removes rights is typically not legal in sane countries (e.g. agreeing to become a slave).
In Germany your employment contract can have Vertragsstrafen, ie the contract can say that if you do something you need to pay a penalty even above and beyond damages.
But in any case, employment contracts are weirdly restricted in many places, exactly because lawmakers think workers are metaphorical babies.
You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
> because lawmakers think workers are metaphorical babies.
To be fair, there's a long history of abusive employers, so it's wise to try to tilt the law in favour of the employee as otherwise they get exploited even more than usual. The nature of employment is typically skewed as employers will have a lot more power than the employees - that's why Unions were invented to try to redress that balance.
> You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
You give workers more power by making sure there's plenty of competition between employers, and plenty of other outside options for workers.
See eg how here in Singapore we have no minimum wage and basically no unions worth that name, and yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
> There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
Granted for the sake of argument. I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
> You give workers more power by making sure there's plenty of competition between employers, and plenty of other outside options for workers.
In theory that should work, but I have heard of U.S. companies that try to use non-compete clauses in employment contracts to prevent workers from being able to exercise their right to work in the same industry for a different company.
> here in Singapore we have no minimum wage
Just looked that up as I am not familiar with Singapore (apart from half a day due to airplane issues) and it appears that there is instead a sector specific Progressive Wage Model (PWM) that is mandatory for some of those sectors (e.g. food, retail, cleaning).
> I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
It's the notion of giving up your right to legal redress if Sony suddenly revokes your license to use what you've already paid for.
On the one hand, I agree that consumers should be better informed, but on the other hand, it may not be considered legal in some jurisdictions to include such a clause. The argument would be that no-one in their right mind would agree to pay someone for a license that could be removed at any point for no redress - the consumer clearly did not understand or read that part. It's usually not legal to include "hidden" clauses in contracts that go against what people would generally accept and agree to.
>Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.
Not when only one person gets to write the contract and terms are take-it-or-leave-it. If there is no chance to negotiate, it is clearly little more than the wealthy abusing the less wealthy to their own advantage.
If you don't like the burger at McDonald's, you go across the street to Burger King. Lots of power for the customer, even though the offer is take it or leave it.
Illusion of choice when Burger King & McD's end up under the same umbrella company run by the same fucking people. Your answer tries to put the onus on the individual, when those who replicate legal fiction are busy shaping the field of choice to their advantage.
At some point, the money doesn't flow anymore to the people who refuse to play the extractive game that causes problems in the first place.
I was once a juror during a very vindictive two day civil trial against what was essentially a hobby business. I left with a newfound respect for binding arbitration.
My feelings are different where there's grave power imbalances like you describe, but there's very little about dealing with a large corporations that is just or dignified these days.
> In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law
47/50 states also provide for this right in their constitutions. the remaining three don't have it in their constitution but still have legislation or rules supporting it
> Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident.
Hijacking to link to another website that has good information about how binding arbitration is stacked against the consumer/employee:
Access to the legal system is a fundamental right. It should not be possible to sign it away, any more than you can sign away your right to life or liberty.
I don't see signing away your right to access the legal system as an essential part of a settlement. You could just sign a settlement that says, here's what happened, here's the remedy we've agreed to. And then if one party decides to sue later on, the existence of the settlement could be used by the other side as extremely strong evidence that the matter was already concluded to the mutual satisfaction of both parties, and the lawsuit should be dismissed. But it would be "this was already handled" rather than "the plaintiff gave up their right to address this matter in court."
As far as the military goes, that's very much a special case, and it should remain so. The fact that you can give up certain fundamental legal rights by joining the military is not an argument for being able to give up certain fundamental legal rights by accepting a click-through agreement from Sony.
It's not difficult to communicate the difference between losing all future rights and settling a dispute over an incident that has already happened. I don't know why you'd act like it's a huge challenge to understand the difference.
And in any circumstances, the ludicrous notion of adding a contract after a purchase is made is unconscionable.
You buy a car. You pay cash. It’s yours. Afterward, the seller says “oh, and you have to agree to these terms before you’re allowed to start it.” Proper response: fuck off, I already paid you. It’s the same here. If you want to apply extra terms and conditions, negotiate them before the conclusion of the purchase. Anything afterward should be utterly laughed out of court.
Yeah, I bought an NVIDIA Shield, took it back to the store after I got it home and found out you literally can't use it without signing into a Google account (and this wasn't mentioned on the outside of the package).
My favorite was some (probaby Microsoft) boxed software I got in the 90s. The top of the box had a big warning that by opening the box you agreed to the terms of service that were IN the box.
Microsoft CD-ROM cases (jewel cases) were cool. There was this huge red sticker applied on it which said you wil agree to all terms and/or could not refund te product if this sticker was damaged.
Normal human beings had to tore the sticker in order to get the CD-ROM and install Windows, so they automatically 'agreed' to the TOS.
Until it was found out you can actually open a jewel case at the other side by carefully disonnecting the little plastic lids on the other side, thus never damaging the sticker.
A friend bought a rowing machine; turns out you can't use the fancy magnetic resistance element without agreeing to the app's terms and entering a credit card. I really tried to convince them to return it…
Guest died from allergic reaction despite informing staff multiple times of the risk, but the case was dismissed because they had signed up for Disney+ years prior.
The case wasn't dismissed because of the arbitration clause. Disney dropped the argument after they got severely lambasted in public over the absurdity of the defense. It was dismissed later by the plaintiff (so there was likely some settlement)
I don't think this is the last time we will see this argument. Disney has a lot of value in brand equity to protect so it made sense for them to back away, but a "bad guy" company that's already regarded with distrust will probably go all in on this in the future.
Since I stopped being a poor student, I pay for media that I consume so that the creators can continue to create. I told my wife that I’d renew my Disney+ subscription after the clocks change and we have less hours of daylight. But now I think it’s morally wrong to give Disney any money – even if they do make great shows like Andor.
Somehow I'd never encountered that shorthand before, so for anyone else wondering it's probably intended as the opposite of "/s", genuine rather than sarcastic.
I once saw a whole list of these like /j for joking and such, but they don't seem to be commonly used and it often feels forced when I do come across them. Maybe they're more common in certain communities.
> "Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then"
I buy a book. I now own the copy of that book. My friend buys the book. They also own a copy of that book. We do not own the same copy of that book
Ah, you could not have purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from the store on February 25th because I myself purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from that very same store the day previously!
To be fair, this example doesn't work because those chip bags are two physically different objects that one can consume.
Sony is trying to argue that because they are selling digital copies, that consumers cannot be granted rights to their copy because they can't transfer the intellectual property rights, which is complete nonsense. I have a 1999 DVD copy of The Matrix that I have owned for 27 years, and short of the physical disc-rot, I will be able to play that DVD until the day I die, and Warner Bros can't do anything about it unless I try reselling new copies, or claiming authorship because, despite owning the disc, I do not own the rights to the movie...
A download isn't any different just because it lacks a physical form.
Yeah I'm not sure what they are trying to argue with that defense. It's also clear that this is not the point that the plaintiffs are trying to make. We don't care if you call it a license or whatever, if we purchase something (like a digital movie), we should be able to at least maintain access to it for an indefinite amount of time. "oh but that's not feasible", that's not really my problem, you are the ones ditching physical
In software [copyright] terms I think this would be like you both have a license to use those books but you don't own the copyright to that book as you are not the author, so you can't change its license and you are somewhat limited in what you can do with it (plagiarism being one thing you can't get away with I guess). Whether something is physical or not seems to change how we think about things, and perhaps which laws/protections apply.
"own" kind of seems buzzwordy and divisive here. I noticed on re-reading my own post I said you "have" a license. I guess I could say you "own" a license, but that seems a bit weird. Do you own it if it can be revoked? Police/TSA can take your possessions legally.
I'm not on Sony's side here but I think fighting over "ownership" of intangible goods may be the wrong fight. It's a shame more games aren't free software and free culture as that seems easier to reason about and a better cause to fight for. When you go from the free software community bubble to the major video game bubble it feels like regressing 100+ years.
I guess the issue is that in Sony's walled garden they have near total control and we have to chip away at that control with legislation until it's closer to what we expect in other contexts.
No reasonable person has ever argued that a consumer buying a (digital) copy of a game obtains the exclusive rights to the game. This is such a cheap embarrassingly stupid attempt to come up with a straw man.
I'll listen to Sony management and lawyers whining about copyright after they paid the damages and fines and get out of jail for every rootkit they deployed. Should be any century now.
Eh “buy” vs “license” is a distraction. The real problem with online stores & licenses is that they charge the same amount of money for a worse product.
If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend. When the online store eventually goes offline, I can still play all the games I have on disc. If I lose access to my online account, I still own the game. I can just get another console and play it.
If digital purchases let you do all that, I’d be all for them. They’re more convenient and better for the environment. But Sony and friends want to take these rights away from us, without choice. And without a corresponding drop in game prices. I want the PlayStation store (and steam and Nintendo and so on) to let me remove a game from my account and give it to someone else. Let me do that and I wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. But the current online store system is too greedy.
It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
If Sony stopped trying to push a worse product on their customers, their customers wouldn’t be mad about it.
But consumers still pay it. No one has to play video games.
I am in no way defending Sony here but I think it’s beside to the point to chastise them for selling a worse product (I mean revocable license) for the same price because consumers continue to choose to pay that price. And this is not a purchase made out of necessity or duress such as food or housing.
I like physical media, but this is not objectively true. Digital purchases come with benefits consumers want like quicker access, less materials waste, and (in general) more longevity since a digital product cannot rot or be damaged. Obviously that last one is lessened because the seller is able to yank your "license" at any time, but it generally holds that you're in less danger of a little brother snapping a disc in half or a roommate borrowing and losing it.
> It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
FWIW, everything I ever bought digitally in the Nintendo E-Shop for my 3DS (gone since March 2023) still works, can't be disabled remotely, sits on a MicroSD card that I can freely remove and back up, etc. Although Nintendo did implement a system that's supposed to prevent it from working on another 3DS.
This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.
I wouldn't say NFTs per se, but I do think a blockchain could help here. If you can point to a specific block that documents that you purchased a copy of a piece of media, you should also be able to transfer that block to another person.
Why not? If you hash the book, it’ll match. It’s word for word the same book (editions not withstanding). It’s not the same if you tie in account permissions, of course. Or is this on a philosophical level?
Edit: the downvotes make no sense, aren’t we talking about digital copies here?
Because property law is not defined in terms of hashes. Why would you expect that property law operates on a mathematical construct that was discovered centuries after it?
It's about how copyright law was originally conceived. It did not particularly care about what you did with the information, apart from when you copied it. Copyright is only about the right to make more copies of a work (hence the name!), it doesn't give you any particular rights on its own to what anyone does with any given copy of a work, such as reselling it. This has changed more recently with (first with software) the concept of buying a license to a work as the primary means of purchasing it, which is far more restrictive.
It is a distinct physical object. Whether anyone stored digital information about it in a bit-wise manner, does not change that fact of a physical object being unique. The same book can not co-exist at the very same place and location and time in this universe. That makes no sense.
we may have been. the idea that two copies of the same thing are not the same object still applies. you can tell because if you own a PDF and I own a copy of that PDF, and I destroy mine, you still have yours.
Physical objects do not exist in a digital format. When I type the letter "a" is it not the exact same letter that you are using in your text? Even all the "a"s in this comment are identical, are they not?
In the physical world, no two letters "a" are exactly the same, not even printed ones.
Or do you suggest that all those letters "a" here are completely distinct from each other?
I don't think ownership works conceptually for digital stuff. There's no owning a letter "a" and there are no two letters "a" that are distinct from each other, unless you count the Cyrillic "а" which is completely different from "a".
Each of these letters "a" might be a different instance, but they are the same letter: "a". Similarly, two copies of a file are still the same exact copy. Just different instances of it.
Your comment is unique. Nobody before you has ever written a comment phrased exactly like that.
I saved a copy of your unique comment on my pocket supercomputer, including the letter "a". I didn't ask first; I just did it. It's fine because it doesn't really exist.
If I buy a game, and my friend buys a game, we can both own a copy of the game, without owning the same copy. My disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is not the same as my friend's disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
I can sell my copy of the book to a third person without interfering with your copy. And I can do so without the involvement or permission of the publisher or book store.
that even if they form the same pattern, one pile of bits on one storage medium and another pile of bits on a different storage medium are two separate things and it's possible for one person to own one of the piles and another person to own the other one.
> "Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then"
That's a very interesting defense. I wonder if it opens up a door maybe Sony would rather keep shut. If I can't own a copy of content because someone else has another copy, how does this play out for piracy? According to Sony's own argument, pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.
> pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.
Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.
This lawsuit is wasting a lot of time by not simply addressing the long-standing norm of buying a physical object which bundles the content, the license, and it many cases the copyright protection mechanisms.
Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.
Digital goods lack these distinct features but the language looks the same so people are now feeling the rug pull. Hence, the pushback against abandoning disc sales.
> Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.
That wasn't the direction I was going towards. Sony treats digital copies as if only one can have the ownership rights attached to it. This logic can be extended to any other right.
> Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.
The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce. The license is attached to the content of the DVD, not the plastic disc per se. This license gives me the right to read that disk and send that digital copy to my output device. It's also why I can't just copy the content to a disc I own and call it a day. So a digital copy read straight from Sony's storage and sent to my output device can very well have the same license attached to it.
To be honest, I think it's a stupid defense but one that may just fly in places with the best justice money can buy. And there's a lot of money trying to buy a carte blanche to not give ownership rights to digital content, coming from every producer or distributor of such content.
> The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce.
Fair point and I should have used less ambiguous terms. I'm also thinking about the "Permitted for Home Use Only" nature of DVDs. Playing DVDs on a projector for profit (assuming no prior permission) is, of course, a breach of their protected rights no different than those who re-stream live sports over IPTV.
It's easy to get caught in the details so I think it's useful to remind ourselves that "Intellectual Property" is fundamentally a temporary legal protection and that everything released to the public becomes public domain eventually, either de jure after N years or de facto (ie. "abandonware").
It's not a great defense if you ask me, unless they're counting on the judge not knowing the difference between owning a copy of something vs. the IP and license to sell the thing.
After all, Sony isn't selling the source code and IP for Resident Evil, they're selling a copy of the packaged software.
I have had three mirrorless Sony cameras (albeit two secondhand), and I think they made what is one of the low-key best hobbyist cameras of its class ever [0], and I don't even much mind their current camera software, which I installed somewhat reluctantly.
But back on the distributable content side, this is a company that hacked customers' PCs with a rootkit. They are a big enough and clumsy enough company to make bad decisions regularly.
[0] the NEX-6, a true joy that I would recommend to anyone who wanted an old knockabout camera even now, though even fourteen years since it was released, its used prices hold up almost too well because I am clearly not the only person who thinks it is lovely
I guess it's worth pointing out that Sony (the conglomerate) isn't one company. It's a whole lot of companies. The gaming related part is called Sony Interactive Entertainment (headquartered in San Mateo, California). Movies are done by Sony Pictures Entertainment (headquartered in Culver City, California).
The ones making cameras are Sony Corporation (headquartered in Tokyo).
As far as my understanding goes, the Japanese part is pretty good, while the people in California have lost the plot.
> I have had three mirrorless Sony cameras (albeit two secondhand)
Wait wait wait. Secondhand you say? We need to dig into that now. Was it a purchase by a binding agreement? Was it an original camera or did the owner made a 3D-printed copy? We have more questions, hold on... :P
I have the receipts. I've always retained them for the deposition. :-)
(It is, of course, not really out of the question that the first sale doctrine will always completely cover things like subscription-upgradeable cars and cameras)
Sony broke the Canon/Nikon duopoly of professional, digital cameras. They put out a mid-level mirrorless camera and rode it out. Today, I see Sony kits everywhere like on sidelines, press pools, and studios. But I'm not a Sony investor, so maybe like you, there's not much personal interest beyond "Wow, they made a great business decision."
They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.
More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.
But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.
They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.
So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.
They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.
The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.
Seems like we need some copyright reform WRT issues like this. We need a true way to have digital ownership; including putting assets in escrow and a way for access to continue after the store is shut down or the item removed from the store.
Your access to a digital product you have "purchased" should not be tied to the continued existence of the store you also bought it from. Similar to physical products.
If I bought a game at GameStop we aren't required to continuously reach back out to them every once in a while to check that they're okay with me playing the game I bought from them. And if GameStop goes out of business they aren't going to come knocking on my door to make sure I never play the game again or take it back from me.
Once a game or any other product is purchased from a digital store, it should not require the stores continued existence or permission.
Yes there are some drawbacks in that maybe they could argue then that they could stop allowing redownloading a game you've already purchased but so be it, they'd just be offering a worse experience and users would move away.
We also need to stop allowing unclear language. When we lease a car at a dealership they never use the term "buy" or "own". That's strictly reserved for ownership. We should require the same for other licensed/leased products.
One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.
The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.
It's ridiculous to me that trying to play some recent games from Microsoft-affiliated studios requires me to sign in with a Microsoft account even just to play also malone. Paying them for Halo MCC or Gears 5 isn't enough to be able to play the campaign alone; the main menu is literally blocked by a sign-in screen. There's no reason whatsoever this should be allowed.
I've been posting a similar idea for years. Require that for each piece of commercial software there is a "method" to open it up and use without requiring on-line servers. The method is be registered with a special government agency for that purpose, who first verifies that the method works.
Later when the agency considers the software to be "abandonware", it publishes the method.
Remove DRM laws and make copyright on all media expire after 5 or 10 years off market. Abandoned franchises should get the same treatment. Call it Sackboy's Law. See how quick Sony and EA rush to port their back catalogue.
On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:
Copyright has been broken for decades. Disney famously lobbied to pervert it for a century longer than reasonable. (Hence, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.) I'm honestly amazed we finally have new entrants to the public domain again.
We absolutely need reform, but it seems difficult (nearly insurmountable) when we have an ineffectual congress and highly effective lobbyists.
I've noticed something interesting here. Sony claims it does
not disown people because even when they purchased a physical
hard copy, Sony still would own it. Naturally this is wrong -
people could re-sell it if they want to and Sony could not
remote-control anything else. But it is interesting that Sony
TRIES to go that route now. I think the courts will have to
make a very simple decision as to what ownership constitutes.
IMO when there is a physical hardcopy, things have to stay as
they are for decades - this is the only logical conclusion.
So, Sony trying to prevent physical hardcopies, as means to
dis"own" future sales, should be closed down by the court
system. I'd even think legislation should change so that
Sony would be required to make these as a copy. That could
be as simple as on a USB stick for instance (does not even
have to be provided by Sony, could be purchased elsewhere by
the buyer). Sony's way to try to argue here makes no sense
to me. We need better right to ownershiper by customers
laws, in addition to right to repair laws in favour of the
customers. These corporations bribed legislation to their
favour - that must stop.
As is usual in the modern world (and probably since the beginning of time since there's nothing new under the sun for the last ~2,000-3,000 years), not enough people will care for it to have any measurable screwing effect.
If you measure it based on raw quantities of people reacting, sure. The issue is that the people who are upset about this are often tastemakers, whether through their local networks of people or online. It’s like saying a tiny vocal minority of people were pissed off enough about IE to use Firefox— true at one time, but with big consequences
Not so strange, there is lots of money to be made by people not owning things anymore. Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony again, who is the only store you will be able to buy Playstation games from.
But yeah, hopefully the community and ecosystem is aligned enough to massively fuck Sony over this, vote with your wallets people.
Xbox already lost one console war over plans to stop the second hand market so they know how important it is to players. Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.
If the PS6 is digital only and Xbox doubles down on discs it might be a slam dunk victory. Not all players understand or care about it now, but if they explain it well in the launch window and combine that with their back compat history I think they have a good chance to win.
Even Microsoft knows that gaming is a competitive market and pulling customers from PlayStation is better than trying to extract as much as possible from your existing user base. One Game Pass sub is worth more than marketplace fees from 3 extra games you would normally buy used.
> Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.
Heh, isn't that a move against resale as well? The disc will only work once for disc-to-digital won't it?
> Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony
That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.
The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.
Yeah, okay, I made the same mistake as Sony. I wrote "buy", but what I meant was "spending money" in a general sense (regardless if it's buying ownership or paying a license fee). Second hand customers simply can't afford (or willing to pay) the price of a new copy. Trying to force these people to the Sony shop is a really bad move and won't work.
Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.
Cars you've been able to lease since before I was born probably. Dishwashers and other home appliances are possible to finance here too, effectively renting it until you "own it", in comparison with leasing.
Still, not as bad as the "digital licensing" hell we're in when it comes to video games, but there is zero ownership at the end of it.
> Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.
This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.
Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.
This thing where companies can use custom definitions of words in order to intentionally build ambiguity into their agreements is designed to induce just this type of problem. Words have meaning outside these agreements and that outside meaning influences people's interpretation of the agreement. Words are, unfortunately, also ambiguous. So when we make these agreements we allow them to add more detail to definitions in an effort to clear up that ambiguity, but we end up with people trying to argue blatant contradictions like "any reasonable person would understand that own doesn't mean own"
Also, the definition of what a "reasonable person" is capable of understanding varies from case to case, depending on the interests of the companies involved.
E.g. meat and milk industry want us to believe that a "reasonable person" is dumb enough to be confused by labels like "soy milk" or "vegan burger".
everyone believes something different, everyone knows a different set of facts, everyone thinks of themselves as reasonable, and the law depends on what a reasonable person might believe. absent some objective standard of reasonability it's all just places where you can inject ambiguity and then leverage that ambiguity to make the law shift like sands in the wind while still thinking of it as absolute and immutable. "Reasonable people understand that words don't always mean what their common definition would imply and it's on the consumer to know the difference" for Sony immediately followed "reasonable people assume words mean what is implied by their common definition and it's on the producer to account for that" for the California Dairy Council, then when we accuse them of crafting separate laws for separate clients they can say "well we just applied the reasonable person standard here the same way we would for anyone else".
If 30 years ago someone suggested breaking into your house to take away your Nintendo games or remotely disabling them by sending something over the network to the console, it would have absolutely been beyond the pale.
But 30 years of boiling the frog and now we have a megacorp that has absolutely no qualms about maximizing their profits by doing the moral equivalent. The popular conception of what constitutes a transaction, what constitutes ownership, and what is fair use has swung so far away from what consumers want and expect, that I can't believe they're arguing, stupidly, in court, that ownership is "not possible" because one person can buy a game, and then a second person can!
Whatever happened, I dunno. I hate that consumers have become so powerless in the face of relentless erosion of basic transactional norms.
It just reinforces how much I will not be participating in that economy.
> In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining "ownership" of a digital game.
So their argument really is that it is unreasonable for anybody to believe they own any of the things they download or purchase digitally? What a leap there.
I mean thats as plain english as you can get to an official rubber stamp on "you will own nothing and you will be happy".
And then they want to have it both ways by interchangeably using the words "revocable license" and "ownership" when it suits their needs. License in small writing/text, but "own" in anything the user might actually reasonably read.
I'm not sure what this lawsuit is going to accomplish. Even if Sony loses, they will pay a nominal fine, and then they'll just change “Buy now” to “Play now” and “game you already own” to “game you already have” or something and it'll make zero difference.
If the plaintiffs are smart, they'll use Sony themselves calling digital licenses "owned" items, to say that Sony understood that licenses should be treated as other owned objects -which would naturally entail the non-revocability of a purchase outside exigent circumstances like malfeasance- but are now trying to change that post-hoc, and argue the court should not let them.
As a society we need to sort out this simple scenario:
* 16 years old Joe buys a $70 cartridge/disc game, already assuming and counting on the $35 that he'll get back on second-hand sell.
That's it. A simple idea that should never cease to be possible, regardless of the medium.
This particular example made games affordable, and it also inadvertently put a concrete price on several other factors like how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase, and how much it costs to keep it for your collection vs. allowing the product to flow back into the community.
> how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase
Nitpick, but in your example, they would cost exactly the same eventually (other than the effort it takes to sell it secondhand), so no reason to wait.
Steam trained a whole generation of gamers not to expect real ownership with resale rights. It's sad. The population old enough to even know this is how it used to be is shrinking.
PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.
This is very different on PC since Valve does not have the same iron grip on the platform that Sony has. If Steam becomes evil and tries to take my games away I'll just download a pirated copy instead. I purchase my games for convenience and to give some money to the creators. I don't need to purchase games to play them. I also can back up my Steam game files and use a crack on them if necessary.
Pirating has literally never been easier than it is today. Even Denuvo's been defeated for the most part, both via VM bypasses and through actual cracks in some cases. If it weren't so sad, it's hilarious that the games even run better without the Denuvo crapware running on top of the game process.
If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.
Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.
Another day, another Sony hate thread. It's not that I endorse Sony's legal/business practices, but rather than these sort of hyper-asymmetric claims are the norm in modern commercial contracts. Perhaps its coincidence that the tech community has decided to choose Sony as the epitome of all corporate greed, but I can't help wondering if this is an example of astroturfing. It'd be interesting to do a comparative Study of Sony's practices vs other publishers/platform operators.
yeah the outcome here is "we're sorry, here's your 0.50 class action settlement payment" and updated terms of service... it's not going to reverse anything, people need to stop buying
> The motion says the PlayStation Terms of Service put a binding arbitration agreement and a class action waiver in Section 14, and quotes the opt-out clause: ... > The clause requires a user who does not wish to be bound to notify Sony in writing within 30 days of accepting the agreement.
Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident.
This "opt out" mechanism is made to let Sony lawyers argue that accepting it was your choice so it can't be struck down as forced, even if 99% of users have no idea it exists, by design. Evil all the way down.
Binding arbitration when there is a significant power imbalance should be illegal. If it's between two similarly abled parties (e.g. two individuals), it should be fine.
I studied a bit of this in a university course. Between a lot of organizations, binding arbitration is more efficient (i.e. cheaper) than the legal system. If your company wants to make a deal with another company, binding arbitration often makes sense.
Ditto for 2 individuals: If they had to go through the legal system, it could end up being a war of attrition - the one who has more money to pay lawyers wins. Binding arbitration is a way to "level" that field.
The down side (at least in many, if not all, states) is that you have little recourse if the arbiter is totally unfair. With the legal system, you can appeal, etc.
But between an individual and a large company - no way!
In my last job, the (very big) company automatically enrolls new employees into a binding arbitration agreement, but they do give a timeline to opt out. I was surprised I had that option. I even paid a lawyer to review the docs. He said "Yep, you can (and should) opt out. I'm surprised they even gave you that option."
Binding arbitration shouldn't be a thing. If we want to go to arbitration is because we are in the same level of negotiation. One side imposing arbitration or any other kind of restriction on the mechanism that the individual or organization has to redress issues shouldn't be a thing
The counterargument is that if you don't have binding arbitration, you can be constantly worried that the other party will drive you bankrupt with frivolous legal proceedings, and that fear discourages collaboration. A binding arbitration puts that fear at ease.
To me that is a flaw in the justice system that needs to be resolved by legislation and within the justice system, not something that should have some bs extralegal work around.
Banning binding arbitration means that class actions can happen.
That's irrelevant to the point I'm making. Class action is, almost by definition, a case where there is unequal power.
We have a legal system precisely because it's inefficient. Rather than arbitration lets just not have any laws, functionally equivalent and cheaper.
Having no enforcement would be cheaper too. What makes arbitration preferable is whatever meaningful protection it provides. So what protections does it give consumers in this case, and why are those adequate? "It's more efficient" doesn't answer that. There are practical limits to the number of individual claims Sony can lose. Of course if it's within their rights Sony would very much want to steal ~$1,000 from everyone that uses their services.
This all assumes that the arbitrator isn't getting kickbacks which they are more likely to than the traditional legal system.
In my country, many laws state that the consumer (or "weak" part) can not sign away their rights, any contract with stipulations regarding that would void that clause. Feel like that should be the norm. Shouldn't be able to lose your consumer rights just by pressing a button, then the rights are worthless if everyone just have a huge TOS / EULA for any service covering their asses.
Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of the party imposing these terms.
Courts often look at these contracts differently, but around the world, they allow them to exist because they are useful. A good example are the "terms of service" for public or private transit. If the carrier can't define some common-sense rules, like that you can be kicked out or fined for not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus, it'd complicate things.
The legal standard is basically that the rules hold unless they're unreasonable or unconscionable. But of course, what's seen as reasonable depends on the country, the state, and the judge.
> not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus
The problem for some of us here is that we're left without a viable transit option, as the yes-pants-no-bagpipes model of transit essentially has a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I suspect if market forces were allowed to operate in this area, we'd see fewer pants and more pipes.
Not everyone who isn't wearing pants is playing bagpipes, but almost everyone who is playing bagpipes isn't wearing pants.
What do you have against bagpipes?
no-true-Scotsman...
Honestly, nowadays I'm tending towards the idea that huge TOS or EULAs (at all) should be criminalized.
It's ridiculous that rich people just get to use the justice system as a goon to harass normal people.
This is also one of those scenarios similar to subscription or membership cancellation where we should not allow accepting/signing up for something require using an entirely different method of communication to cancel/opt out.
Requiring written notification while the TOS being accepted entirely via digital means should be illegal.
Not to mention I think its insane that we allow companies to be able to dictate how citizens are allowed to utilize their legal system.
> taking away people's rights as [...] workers
I was recently reviewing a collective bargaining agreement (after being approached by a campaign to add my job category to an existing union at my employer), and was surprised to find that it forced arbitration for all employee disputes, with no opt out. It's not just employers that use binding arbitration to take away workers' rights.
Users should not be held to terms they were unaware of. Companies should be required to collect digital signatures and initials for every unusual term.
Sadly, the scammy parts of ToS are common enough to be "usual"
Has anyone tried arguing they didn't agree to the ToS? Without your signature it should be nearly impossible for the company to prove that you did.
Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.
Just like being able to commit yourself to showing up to work everyday restricts your freedom. But it's essential to getting the other party to give up something in consideration.
Of course, you can argue that consumers should be treated like legal babies that can't enter into agreements.
There's a difference between restricting your freedom and restricting your rights. When you enter an employment contract, you agree to give up some freedom in return for a salary etc. but it doesn't take away any of your rights. You still have the right to life, liberty etc. You still have the right to not turn up to work, though too much of that will likely cause them to terminate your employment. An employment contract that removes rights is typically not legal in sane countries (e.g. agreeing to become a slave).
In Germany your employment contract can have Vertragsstrafen, ie the contract can say that if you do something you need to pay a penalty even above and beyond damages.
But in any case, employment contracts are weirdly restricted in many places, exactly because lawmakers think workers are metaphorical babies.
You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
> because lawmakers think workers are metaphorical babies.
To be fair, there's a long history of abusive employers, so it's wise to try to tilt the law in favour of the employee as otherwise they get exploited even more than usual. The nature of employment is typically skewed as employers will have a lot more power than the employees - that's why Unions were invented to try to redress that balance.
> You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
You give workers more power by making sure there's plenty of competition between employers, and plenty of other outside options for workers.
See eg how here in Singapore we have no minimum wage and basically no unions worth that name, and yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
> There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
Granted for the sake of argument. I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
> You give workers more power by making sure there's plenty of competition between employers, and plenty of other outside options for workers.
In theory that should work, but I have heard of U.S. companies that try to use non-compete clauses in employment contracts to prevent workers from being able to exercise their right to work in the same industry for a different company.
> here in Singapore we have no minimum wage
Just looked that up as I am not familiar with Singapore (apart from half a day due to airplane issues) and it appears that there is instead a sector specific Progressive Wage Model (PWM) that is mandatory for some of those sectors (e.g. food, retail, cleaning).
> I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
It's the notion of giving up your right to legal redress if Sony suddenly revokes your license to use what you've already paid for.
You paid for exactly what the license agreement says. And that includes that Sony can pull the plug.
If you still pay, that's on you.
On the one hand, I agree that consumers should be better informed, but on the other hand, it may not be considered legal in some jurisdictions to include such a clause. The argument would be that no-one in their right mind would agree to pay someone for a license that could be removed at any point for no redress - the consumer clearly did not understand or read that part. It's usually not legal to include "hidden" clauses in contracts that go against what people would generally accept and agree to.
> See eg how here in Singapore we have no minimum wage
The US does as well if they can pretend you made it up with "tips".
The reality is that staff then just work for peanuts.
>Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.
Not when only one person gets to write the contract and terms are take-it-or-leave-it. If there is no chance to negotiate, it is clearly little more than the wealthy abusing the less wealthy to their own advantage.
If you don't like the burger at McDonald's, you go across the street to Burger King. Lots of power for the customer, even though the offer is take it or leave it.
Illusion of choice when Burger King & McD's end up under the same umbrella company run by the same fucking people. Your answer tries to put the onus on the individual, when those who replicate legal fiction are busy shaping the field of choice to their advantage.
At some point, the money doesn't flow anymore to the people who refuse to play the extractive game that causes problems in the first place.
I was once a juror during a very vindictive two day civil trial against what was essentially a hobby business. I left with a newfound respect for binding arbitration.
My feelings are different where there's grave power imbalances like you describe, but there's very little about dealing with a large corporations that is just or dignified these days.
You were a juror during a civil trial? Is that a thing? Where?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
> In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law
47/50 states also provide for this right in their constitutions. the remaining three don't have it in their constitution but still have legislation or rules supporting it
Thanks! Interesting, you can perhaps tell I'm based in Europe, seems like lots of countries don't have that here.
Seems like probably a good feature of American justice?
> Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident.
Hijacking to link to another website that has good information about how binding arbitration is stacked against the consumer/employee:
https://arbitrationinformation.org/
Binding arbitration as an abstract concept seems fair (really, the entire court system is a complicated system for binding arbitration)
However, in practice it isn’t fair at all.
Big capitalism has a way of taking things that should be fair and stacking the deck in their favor.
Access to the legal system is a fundamental right. It should not be possible to sign it away, any more than you can sign away your right to life or liberty.
A related outrage: Companies that are happy the law enshrines their private rules/standards, but they want to charge you for access.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/congress-no-one-should...
How would anyone ever settle a case? Also, it's pretty easy to sign away your life and liberty: join the military.
I don't see signing away your right to access the legal system as an essential part of a settlement. You could just sign a settlement that says, here's what happened, here's the remedy we've agreed to. And then if one party decides to sue later on, the existence of the settlement could be used by the other side as extremely strong evidence that the matter was already concluded to the mutual satisfaction of both parties, and the lawsuit should be dismissed. But it would be "this was already handled" rather than "the plaintiff gave up their right to address this matter in court."
As far as the military goes, that's very much a special case, and it should remain so. The fact that you can give up certain fundamental legal rights by joining the military is not an argument for being able to give up certain fundamental legal rights by accepting a click-through agreement from Sony.
It's not difficult to communicate the difference between losing all future rights and settling a dispute over an incident that has already happened. I don't know why you'd act like it's a huge challenge to understand the difference.
But yeah; don't join the military.
I agree with you to the point that I wrote this https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/
And in any circumstances, the ludicrous notion of adding a contract after a purchase is made is unconscionable.
You buy a car. You pay cash. It’s yours. Afterward, the seller says “oh, and you have to agree to these terms before you’re allowed to start it.” Proper response: fuck off, I already paid you. It’s the same here. If you want to apply extra terms and conditions, negotiate them before the conclusion of the purchase. Anything afterward should be utterly laughed out of court.
Yeah, I bought an NVIDIA Shield, took it back to the store after I got it home and found out you literally can't use it without signing into a Google account (and this wasn't mentioned on the outside of the package).
My favorite was some (probaby Microsoft) boxed software I got in the 90s. The top of the box had a big warning that by opening the box you agreed to the terms of service that were IN the box.
Good grief. "Bet I don't!"
Microsoft CD-ROM cases (jewel cases) were cool. There was this huge red sticker applied on it which said you wil agree to all terms and/or could not refund te product if this sticker was damaged.
Normal human beings had to tore the sticker in order to get the CD-ROM and install Windows, so they automatically 'agreed' to the TOS.
Until it was found out you can actually open a jewel case at the other side by carefully disonnecting the little plastic lids on the other side, thus never damaging the sticker.
I remember this, and my stubborn side rejoiced in the hack.
A friend bought a rowing machine; turns out you can't use the fancy magnetic resistance element without agreeing to the app's terms and entering a credit card. I really tried to convince them to return it…
Ugh. Yeah, I'd have that back at the store an hour later. I did not agree to this before handing over my money, therefore the sale was fraudulent.
what was the disney+ incident? /gen
Disney argued that the family of a man who died at one of their parks couldn't sue because he had signed up for Disney+, which has binding arbitration terms: https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit...
This pretty much flies in the face of what any reasonable person would think the law should allow IMO
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
Guest died from allergic reaction despite informing staff multiple times of the risk, but the case was dismissed because they had signed up for Disney+ years prior.
The case wasn't dismissed because of the arbitration clause. Disney dropped the argument after they got severely lambasted in public over the absurdity of the defense. It was dismissed later by the plaintiff (so there was likely some settlement)
I don't think this is the last time we will see this argument. Disney has a lot of value in brand equity to protect so it made sense for them to back away, but a "bad guy" company that's already regarded with distrust will probably go all in on this in the future.
Here’s a decent up-to-date report on this (now-resolved) case: https://www.allergicliving.com/2026/03/03/lawsuit-against-di...
Since I stopped being a poor student, I pay for media that I consume so that the creators can continue to create. I told my wife that I’d renew my Disney+ subscription after the clocks change and we have less hours of daylight. But now I think it’s morally wrong to give Disney any money – even if they do make great shows like Andor.
Somehow I'd never encountered that shorthand before, so for anyone else wondering it's probably intended as the opposite of "/s", genuine rather than sarcastic.
I once saw a whole list of these like /j for joking and such, but they don't seem to be commonly used and it often feels forced when I do come across them. Maybe they're more common in certain communities.
> deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident
Well, that led me down a wild rabbithole.
it is, just not in the US
> "Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then"
I buy a book. I now own the copy of that book. My friend buys the book. They also own a copy of that book. We do not own the same copy of that book
Ah, you could not have purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from the store on February 25th because I myself purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from that very same store the day previously!
To be fair, this example doesn't work because those chip bags are two physically different objects that one can consume.
Sony is trying to argue that because they are selling digital copies, that consumers cannot be granted rights to their copy because they can't transfer the intellectual property rights, which is complete nonsense. I have a 1999 DVD copy of The Matrix that I have owned for 27 years, and short of the physical disc-rot, I will be able to play that DVD until the day I die, and Warner Bros can't do anything about it unless I try reselling new copies, or claiming authorship because, despite owning the disc, I do not own the rights to the movie...
A download isn't any different just because it lacks a physical form.
Everyone understand what Sony lawyers are trying to say, and it’s still incredibly stupid. That’s the point.
Yeah I'm not sure what they are trying to argue with that defense. It's also clear that this is not the point that the plaintiffs are trying to make. We don't care if you call it a license or whatever, if we purchase something (like a digital movie), we should be able to at least maintain access to it for an indefinite amount of time. "oh but that's not feasible", that's not really my problem, you are the ones ditching physical
In software [copyright] terms I think this would be like you both have a license to use those books but you don't own the copyright to that book as you are not the author, so you can't change its license and you are somewhat limited in what you can do with it (plagiarism being one thing you can't get away with I guess). Whether something is physical or not seems to change how we think about things, and perhaps which laws/protections apply.
"own" kind of seems buzzwordy and divisive here. I noticed on re-reading my own post I said you "have" a license. I guess I could say you "own" a license, but that seems a bit weird. Do you own it if it can be revoked? Police/TSA can take your possessions legally.
I'm not on Sony's side here but I think fighting over "ownership" of intangible goods may be the wrong fight. It's a shame more games aren't free software and free culture as that seems easier to reason about and a better cause to fight for. When you go from the free software community bubble to the major video game bubble it feels like regressing 100+ years.
I guess the issue is that in Sony's walled garden they have near total control and we have to chip away at that control with legislation until it's closer to what we expect in other contexts.
No reasonable person has ever argued that a consumer buying a (digital) copy of a game obtains the exclusive rights to the game. This is such a cheap embarrassingly stupid attempt to come up with a straw man.
I'll listen to Sony management and lawyers whining about copyright after they paid the damages and fines and get out of jail for every rootkit they deployed. Should be any century now.
Eh “buy” vs “license” is a distraction. The real problem with online stores & licenses is that they charge the same amount of money for a worse product.
If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend. When the online store eventually goes offline, I can still play all the games I have on disc. If I lose access to my online account, I still own the game. I can just get another console and play it.
If digital purchases let you do all that, I’d be all for them. They’re more convenient and better for the environment. But Sony and friends want to take these rights away from us, without choice. And without a corresponding drop in game prices. I want the PlayStation store (and steam and Nintendo and so on) to let me remove a game from my account and give it to someone else. Let me do that and I wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. But the current online store system is too greedy.
It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
If Sony stopped trying to push a worse product on their customers, their customers wouldn’t be mad about it.
But consumers still pay it. No one has to play video games.
I am in no way defending Sony here but I think it’s beside to the point to chastise them for selling a worse product (I mean revocable license) for the same price because consumers continue to choose to pay that price. And this is not a purchase made out of necessity or duress such as food or housing.
> same amount of money for a worse product.
I like physical media, but this is not objectively true. Digital purchases come with benefits consumers want like quicker access, less materials waste, and (in general) more longevity since a digital product cannot rot or be damaged. Obviously that last one is lessened because the seller is able to yank your "license" at any time, but it generally holds that you're in less danger of a little brother snapping a disc in half or a roommate borrowing and losing it.
> It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
FWIW, everything I ever bought digitally in the Nintendo E-Shop for my 3DS (gone since March 2023) still works, can't be disabled remotely, sits on a MicroSD card that I can freely remove and back up, etc. Although Nintendo did implement a system that's supposed to prevent it from working on another 3DS.
> If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend.
Don't forget that retail is cheaper than online for consoles from day one!
> Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.
Changing how the ownership of a digital asset is tracked is completely moot when the digital asset is no longer retrievable.
I wouldn't say NFTs per se, but I do think a blockchain could help here. If you can point to a specific block that documents that you purchased a copy of a piece of media, you should also be able to transfer that block to another person.
A guid works fine
Define or clarify the use of the word 'copy' please
> We do not own the same copy of that book
Why not? If you hash the book, it’ll match. It’s word for word the same book (editions not withstanding). It’s not the same if you tie in account permissions, of course. Or is this on a philosophical level?
Edit: the downvotes make no sense, aren’t we talking about digital copies here?
Because property law is not defined in terms of hashes. Why would you expect that property law operates on a mathematical construct that was discovered centuries after it?
It's about how copyright law was originally conceived. It did not particularly care about what you did with the information, apart from when you copied it. Copyright is only about the right to make more copies of a work (hence the name!), it doesn't give you any particular rights on its own to what anyone does with any given copy of a work, such as reselling it. This has changed more recently with (first with software) the concept of buying a license to a work as the primary means of purchasing it, which is far more restrictive.
Two copies means two copies. I have a copy, my house burns down, your copy is fine.
Hashes have nothing to do with it.
If I buy a Billy book case from IKEA, is it not the same as your Billy book case?
Hashing said book case is left as an exercise for the reader.
It is a distinct physical object. Whether anyone stored digital information about it in a bit-wise manner, does not change that fact of a physical object being unique. The same book can not co-exist at the very same place and location and time in this universe. That makes no sense.
I thought we were talking about digital copies.
we may have been. the idea that two copies of the same thing are not the same object still applies. you can tell because if you own a PDF and I own a copy of that PDF, and I destroy mine, you still have yours.
Physical objects do not exist in a digital format. When I type the letter "a" is it not the exact same letter that you are using in your text? Even all the "a"s in this comment are identical, are they not?
In the physical world, no two letters "a" are exactly the same, not even printed ones.
Or do you suggest that all those letters "a" here are completely distinct from each other?
I don't think ownership works conceptually for digital stuff. There's no owning a letter "a" and there are no two letters "a" that are distinct from each other, unless you count the Cyrillic "а" which is completely different from "a".
Each of these letters "a" might be a different instance, but they are the same letter: "a". Similarly, two copies of a file are still the same exact copy. Just different instances of it.
Your comment is unique. Nobody before you has ever written a comment phrased exactly like that.
I saved a copy of your unique comment on my pocket supercomputer, including the letter "a". I didn't ask first; I just did it. It's fine because it doesn't really exist.
Now it's my comment.
exactly. delete all of the "a"s from your comment. what happens to theirs? nothing. because they're not the same thing.
are identical twins the same person?
If I buy a game, and my friend buys a game, we can both own a copy of the game, without owning the same copy. My disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is not the same as my friend's disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
I can sell my copy of the book to a third person without interfering with your copy. And I can do so without the involvement or permission of the publisher or book store.
This is a bad faith argument and the commenter knows it
games are actual physical bits stored somewhere.
I’m not denying that? What is the argument here?
that even if they form the same pattern, one pile of bits on one storage medium and another pile of bits on a different storage medium are two separate things and it's possible for one person to own one of the piles and another person to own the other one.
> "Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then"
That's a very interesting defense. I wonder if it opens up a door maybe Sony would rather keep shut. If I can't own a copy of content because someone else has another copy, how does this play out for piracy? According to Sony's own argument, pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.
> pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.
Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.
This lawsuit is wasting a lot of time by not simply addressing the long-standing norm of buying a physical object which bundles the content, the license, and it many cases the copyright protection mechanisms.
Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.
Digital goods lack these distinct features but the language looks the same so people are now feeling the rug pull. Hence, the pushback against abandoning disc sales.
> Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.
That wasn't the direction I was going towards. Sony treats digital copies as if only one can have the ownership rights attached to it. This logic can be extended to any other right.
> Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.
The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce. The license is attached to the content of the DVD, not the plastic disc per se. This license gives me the right to read that disk and send that digital copy to my output device. It's also why I can't just copy the content to a disc I own and call it a day. So a digital copy read straight from Sony's storage and sent to my output device can very well have the same license attached to it.
To be honest, I think it's a stupid defense but one that may just fly in places with the best justice money can buy. And there's a lot of money trying to buy a carte blanche to not give ownership rights to digital content, coming from every producer or distributor of such content.
> The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce.
Fair point and I should have used less ambiguous terms. I'm also thinking about the "Permitted for Home Use Only" nature of DVDs. Playing DVDs on a projector for profit (assuming no prior permission) is, of course, a breach of their protected rights no different than those who re-stream live sports over IPTV.
It's easy to get caught in the details so I think it's useful to remind ourselves that "Intellectual Property" is fundamentally a temporary legal protection and that everything released to the public becomes public domain eventually, either de jure after N years or de facto (ie. "abandonware").
It's not a great defense if you ask me, unless they're counting on the judge not knowing the difference between owning a copy of something vs. the IP and license to sell the thing.
After all, Sony isn't selling the source code and IP for Resident Evil, they're selling a copy of the packaged software.
I am deeply ambivalent about Sony.
I have had three mirrorless Sony cameras (albeit two secondhand), and I think they made what is one of the low-key best hobbyist cameras of its class ever [0], and I don't even much mind their current camera software, which I installed somewhat reluctantly.
But back on the distributable content side, this is a company that hacked customers' PCs with a rootkit. They are a big enough and clumsy enough company to make bad decisions regularly.
[0] the NEX-6, a true joy that I would recommend to anyone who wanted an old knockabout camera even now, though even fourteen years since it was released, its used prices hold up almost too well because I am clearly not the only person who thinks it is lovely
I guess it's worth pointing out that Sony (the conglomerate) isn't one company. It's a whole lot of companies. The gaming related part is called Sony Interactive Entertainment (headquartered in San Mateo, California). Movies are done by Sony Pictures Entertainment (headquartered in Culver City, California).
The ones making cameras are Sony Corporation (headquartered in Tokyo).
As far as my understanding goes, the Japanese part is pretty good, while the people in California have lost the plot.
> the people in California have lost the plot
I say this constantly about many topics.
Californians are a super different breed
> I have had three mirrorless Sony cameras (albeit two secondhand)
Wait wait wait. Secondhand you say? We need to dig into that now. Was it a purchase by a binding agreement? Was it an original camera or did the owner made a 3D-printed copy? We have more questions, hold on... :P
I have the receipts. I've always retained them for the deposition. :-)
(It is, of course, not really out of the question that the first sale doctrine will always completely cover things like subscription-upgradeable cars and cameras)
Sony broke the Canon/Nikon duopoly of professional, digital cameras. They put out a mid-level mirrorless camera and rode it out. Today, I see Sony kits everywhere like on sidelines, press pools, and studios. But I'm not a Sony investor, so maybe like you, there's not much personal interest beyond "Wow, they made a great business decision."
They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.
More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.
But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.
They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.
So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.
They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.
The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.
Don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Buy and enjoy their cameras while avoiding their software as much as humanly possible.
Oh, I do. I mean part of what is so great about these cameras is their everyman quality — plus secondhand availability.
There is a Sony mirrorless camera at essentially every secondhand price point you can imagine.
At heart, I am a Nikon guy. My wallet, though, is a proper little Sony fanboi.
Seems like we need some copyright reform WRT issues like this. We need a true way to have digital ownership; including putting assets in escrow and a way for access to continue after the store is shut down or the item removed from the store.
Your access to a digital product you have "purchased" should not be tied to the continued existence of the store you also bought it from. Similar to physical products.
If I bought a game at GameStop we aren't required to continuously reach back out to them every once in a while to check that they're okay with me playing the game I bought from them. And if GameStop goes out of business they aren't going to come knocking on my door to make sure I never play the game again or take it back from me.
Once a game or any other product is purchased from a digital store, it should not require the stores continued existence or permission.
Yes there are some drawbacks in that maybe they could argue then that they could stop allowing redownloading a game you've already purchased but so be it, they'd just be offering a worse experience and users would move away.
We also need to stop allowing unclear language. When we lease a car at a dealership they never use the term "buy" or "own". That's strictly reserved for ownership. We should require the same for other licensed/leased products.
One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.
The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.
It's ridiculous to me that trying to play some recent games from Microsoft-affiliated studios requires me to sign in with a Microsoft account even just to play also malone. Paying them for Halo MCC or Gears 5 isn't enough to be able to play the campaign alone; the main menu is literally blocked by a sign-in screen. There's no reason whatsoever this should be allowed.
Yeah, it's so disgusting. Mass Effect Legendary Edition comes to mind, it's filled with mandatory EA bullshit.
I think I'm just gonna ask Astra to hack this nonsense out of the games I have.
I've been posting a similar idea for years. Require that for each piece of commercial software there is a "method" to open it up and use without requiring on-line servers. The method is be registered with a special government agency for that purpose, who first verifies that the method works.
Later when the agency considers the software to be "abandonware", it publishes the method.
Remove DRM laws and make copyright on all media expire after 5 or 10 years off market. Abandoned franchises should get the same treatment. Call it Sackboy's Law. See how quick Sony and EA rush to port their back catalogue.
On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life
Copyright has been broken for decades. Disney famously lobbied to pervert it for a century longer than reasonable. (Hence, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.) I'm honestly amazed we finally have new entrants to the public domain again.
We absolutely need reform, but it seems difficult (nearly insurmountable) when we have an ineffectual congress and highly effective lobbyists.
We do but it'll never happen. Estates would accumulate huge libraries of digital goods and never need to buy anything new.
Which would be awesome which is why it won't happen.
I've noticed something interesting here. Sony claims it does not disown people because even when they purchased a physical hard copy, Sony still would own it. Naturally this is wrong - people could re-sell it if they want to and Sony could not remote-control anything else. But it is interesting that Sony TRIES to go that route now. I think the courts will have to make a very simple decision as to what ownership constitutes. IMO when there is a physical hardcopy, things have to stay as they are for decades - this is the only logical conclusion. So, Sony trying to prevent physical hardcopies, as means to dis"own" future sales, should be closed down by the court system. I'd even think legislation should change so that Sony would be required to make these as a copy. That could be as simple as on a USB stick for instance (does not even have to be provided by Sony, could be purchased elsewhere by the buyer). Sony's way to try to argue here makes no sense to me. We need better right to ownershiper by customers laws, in addition to right to repair laws in favour of the customers. These corporations bribed legislation to their favour - that must stop.
What's with all the line breaks?
Sony's lawyers really picked a strange hill to die on here... even if they win, the precedence will screw over Sony, at least in marketing.
> the precedence will screw over Sony
As is usual in the modern world (and probably since the beginning of time since there's nothing new under the sun for the last ~2,000-3,000 years), not enough people will care for it to have any measurable screwing effect.
If you measure it based on raw quantities of people reacting, sure. The issue is that the people who are upset about this are often tastemakers, whether through their local networks of people or online. It’s like saying a tiny vocal minority of people were pissed off enough about IE to use Firefox— true at one time, but with big consequences
Not so strange, there is lots of money to be made by people not owning things anymore. Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony again, who is the only store you will be able to buy Playstation games from.
But yeah, hopefully the community and ecosystem is aligned enough to massively fuck Sony over this, vote with your wallets people.
Xbox already lost one console war over plans to stop the second hand market so they know how important it is to players. Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.
If the PS6 is digital only and Xbox doubles down on discs it might be a slam dunk victory. Not all players understand or care about it now, but if they explain it well in the launch window and combine that with their back compat history I think they have a good chance to win.
Even Microsoft knows that gaming is a competitive market and pulling customers from PlayStation is better than trying to extract as much as possible from your existing user base. One Game Pass sub is worth more than marketplace fees from 3 extra games you would normally buy used.
> Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.
Heh, isn't that a move against resale as well? The disc will only work once for disc-to-digital won't it?
And possibly get tied to a specific xbox account.
> Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony
That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.
The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.
Especially not full price. The value of buying a license for a digital download can't be $60 if the value of owning the physical version is also $60.
Personally to me the value of a temporary license to a game is at best $10. Why would I rent a game for $60?
Yeah, okay, I made the same mistake as Sony. I wrote "buy", but what I meant was "spending money" in a general sense (regardless if it's buying ownership or paying a license fee). Second hand customers simply can't afford (or willing to pay) the price of a new copy. Trying to force these people to the Sony shop is a really bad move and won't work.
Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.
Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.
Cars you've been able to lease since before I was born probably. Dishwashers and other home appliances are possible to finance here too, effectively renting it until you "own it", in comparison with leasing.
Still, not as bad as the "digital licensing" hell we're in when it comes to video games, but there is zero ownership at the end of it.
I'm talking about removing the ability to own it, not leasing it. You can lease a toothbrush if you want to.
> Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.
This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.
Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.
And in some cases your car's on-board software needs a constant connection with the vendor's servers (meaning it must be up and you must pay for a license too). https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-happens-to-a-car-w...
It's even worse with houses. Most gen Zs will never ever own their homes, they are implicitly forced to rent only (no ownership in sight). https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-giving-up-on-buying-a-home...
Brave new world.
You're assuming the truth ever prevails in marketing and PR.
It doesn't.
HN trunks the url
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony_PlayStation_digital_game_...
This thing where companies can use custom definitions of words in order to intentionally build ambiguity into their agreements is designed to induce just this type of problem. Words have meaning outside these agreements and that outside meaning influences people's interpretation of the agreement. Words are, unfortunately, also ambiguous. So when we make these agreements we allow them to add more detail to definitions in an effort to clear up that ambiguity, but we end up with people trying to argue blatant contradictions like "any reasonable person would understand that own doesn't mean own"
Also, the definition of what a "reasonable person" is capable of understanding varies from case to case, depending on the interests of the companies involved.
E.g. meat and milk industry want us to believe that a "reasonable person" is dumb enough to be confused by labels like "soy milk" or "vegan burger".
everyone believes something different, everyone knows a different set of facts, everyone thinks of themselves as reasonable, and the law depends on what a reasonable person might believe. absent some objective standard of reasonability it's all just places where you can inject ambiguity and then leverage that ambiguity to make the law shift like sands in the wind while still thinking of it as absolute and immutable. "Reasonable people understand that words don't always mean what their common definition would imply and it's on the consumer to know the difference" for Sony immediately followed "reasonable people assume words mean what is implied by their common definition and it's on the producer to account for that" for the California Dairy Council, then when we accuse them of crafting separate laws for separate clients they can say "well we just applied the reasonable person standard here the same way we would for anyone else".
If 30 years ago someone suggested breaking into your house to take away your Nintendo games or remotely disabling them by sending something over the network to the console, it would have absolutely been beyond the pale.
But 30 years of boiling the frog and now we have a megacorp that has absolutely no qualms about maximizing their profits by doing the moral equivalent. The popular conception of what constitutes a transaction, what constitutes ownership, and what is fair use has swung so far away from what consumers want and expect, that I can't believe they're arguing, stupidly, in court, that ownership is "not possible" because one person can buy a game, and then a second person can!
Whatever happened, I dunno. I hate that consumers have become so powerless in the face of relentless erosion of basic transactional norms.
It just reinforces how much I will not be participating in that economy.
> In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining "ownership" of a digital game.
So their argument really is that it is unreasonable for anybody to believe they own any of the things they download or purchase digitally? What a leap there.
I mean thats as plain english as you can get to an official rubber stamp on "you will own nothing and you will be happy".
And then they want to have it both ways by interchangeably using the words "revocable license" and "ownership" when it suits their needs. License in small writing/text, but "own" in anything the user might actually reasonably read.
Does Sony believe in ownership of digital money?
No of course not, they merely license it from the government /s (or not /s? this whole thing is confusing)
All ownership is temporary. Even Earth's ownership of its atoms is really a lease granted temporarily by the Solar system.
All digital content, from e-books to games, should be DRM free.
I bought a few e-books on Apple’s Draconian Store over the years and discovered its ".epub" format is some DRM protected trash.
The whole industry needs correction. Not just Sony.
I'm not sure what this lawsuit is going to accomplish. Even if Sony loses, they will pay a nominal fine, and then they'll just change “Buy now” to “Play now” and “game you already own” to “game you already have” or something and it'll make zero difference.
If the plaintiffs are smart, they'll use Sony themselves calling digital licenses "owned" items, to say that Sony understood that licenses should be treated as other owned objects -which would naturally entail the non-revocability of a purchase outside exigent circumstances like malfeasance- but are now trying to change that post-hoc, and argue the court should not let them.
As a society we need to sort out this simple scenario:
* 16 years old Joe buys a $70 cartridge/disc game, already assuming and counting on the $35 that he'll get back on second-hand sell.
That's it. A simple idea that should never cease to be possible, regardless of the medium.
This particular example made games affordable, and it also inadvertently put a concrete price on several other factors like how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase, and how much it costs to keep it for your collection vs. allowing the product to flow back into the community.
> how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase
Nitpick, but in your example, they would cost exactly the same eventually (other than the effort it takes to sell it secondhand), so no reason to wait.
You're right! that's a bug in my comment then (or more like a spec redundancy I guess) :)
Steam trained a whole generation of gamers not to expect real ownership with resale rights. It's sad. The population old enough to even know this is how it used to be is shrinking.
PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.
This is very different on PC since Valve does not have the same iron grip on the platform that Sony has. If Steam becomes evil and tries to take my games away I'll just download a pirated copy instead. I purchase my games for convenience and to give some money to the creators. I don't need to purchase games to play them. I also can back up my Steam game files and use a crack on them if necessary.
Pirating has literally never been easier than it is today. Even Denuvo's been defeated for the most part, both via VM bypasses and through actual cracks in some cases. If it weren't so sad, it's hilarious that the games even run better without the Denuvo crapware running on top of the game process.
If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.
Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.
[dead]
Another day, another Sony hate thread. It's not that I endorse Sony's legal/business practices, but rather than these sort of hyper-asymmetric claims are the norm in modern commercial contracts. Perhaps its coincidence that the tech community has decided to choose Sony as the epitome of all corporate greed, but I can't help wondering if this is an example of astroturfing. It'd be interesting to do a comparative Study of Sony's practices vs other publishers/platform operators.
You own the license. The license can be revoked. Don’t look for ways to prove them wrong. Just don’t buy it.
> own
> revoked
I think the dispute is right here.
yeah the outcome here is "we're sorry, here's your 0.50 class action settlement payment" and updated terms of service... it's not going to reverse anything, people need to stop buying