We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.

I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

It should be illegal to have others purchase what you as a company only licensed and therefore aren’t legally allowed to sell.

  "The feature was controversially removed by Sony since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010.[2] A class action lawsuit was filed against Sony on behalf of users, but was dismissed with prejudice in 2011 by a federal judge. The judge stated: "As a legal matter, ... plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable."[3] However, this decision was overturned in a 2014 appellate court decision[4] finding that plaintiffs had indeed made clear and sufficiently substantial claims. Ultimately, in 2016, Sony settled with users who had installed Linux or had purchased a PlayStation 3 based upon the availability of OtherOS."

I've heard there's a service called PirateBay that offers movies free of DRM. Maybe people considering being Sony customers in the future should give it a try.

Ever since Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. started offering "free" online storage for photos, ever since streaming started to be popular, I have ALWAYS extolled the virtues of µSD card slots in phones and owning your own media (i.e., purchasing CDs and DVDs). Many people would give me a hard time about this, calling me a Luddite, but I will never lose access to my photos, music, or movies ... unless it is the end of the world as we know it, which I happily have on R.E.M.'s Eponymous album.

Not the first time and not going to be the last. Unless you can download it to hardware you completely own and can make a backup, it's not really yours. Online purchases I can get on with, like Bandcamp are pretty good. I bought the new Globular album on CD and it took 10 days to get to me from the UK. I also had access to high quality downloads. That works, these other models do not.

Wait, people trusted a corporation and got screwed?!? Why, that's...unheard of!(My wife, bless her, has "purchased" dozens of movies on amazon. I warned her that when the amazon wind changes, she may regret those purchases. I got the look.)

And with more and more content being distributed digitally, and even Sony announcing that physical disks won't be a thing from 2028 [0], the days of media ownership are gone. The only way to "own" content is it being DRM free (rare) or piracy. And ironically, DRMs justify the existence of piracy.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...

The honest product description would be: "You are purchasing a revocable license to stream this content at our discretion, for an unspecified period, subject to change without notice."

Nobody would buy that. So they say "buy" instead, and courts have largely let them get away with it. Until legislation actually forces the word "buy" to mean ownership, this will keep happening.

Should mention today Sony also announced the end of physical releases for their consoles, and the closure of the PS3 and PSVita stores.

It used to be that streaming services were an excellent option even over torrenting because of the ease of access and use.

Now we're not even getting to retain what we buy, this is not a streaming service, these were sold to users individually.

We've gone full circle where I honestly believe pirating is a far better offering.

The root of the problem is these ridiculous content licensing agreements, it should be very very obvious to the customer when they're buying that "Hey, you will own this until X date when our content licensing agreement is finished"

Not hidden by design in some dense ToS.

Related discussions:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346

You've already paid for it. Just download it from somewhere else with a clean conscience.

It is in times like these that I start getting messages from friend and family that asks:

> What's the name of that website?

I tell them to use yandex, they will find plenty of such websites...

No refund?

I have a similar grief with YouTube movies although in that one, they don't play UHD. Some do like Valerian plays at least in 1080P, most movies are capped to 480P unless you have an "approved device" eg. something probably riddled with ads.

They should at least make an effort to let you sync them into MoviesAnywhere which is supposed to solve the "I have this on iTunes, but not Android TV" problem by unlocking it across platforms if you sync your accounts. They should really let you permanently keep movies on defunct platforms as part of your standard MoviesAnywhere movie collection.

I really hope this leads to a class action that sets precedence, but I won't hold my breath or even consider whether that's even possible.

That's why I pirate content and will continue to pirate content. I'm not hurting artists. I go to shows and premiers and book signings. I'm perfectly fine with stealing from publishing cartels.

People will soon enough realize the only alternative to actually own a copy is by going back to torrenting.

This is one reason why piracy is legitimate and important

In similar fashon in year 2009 Amazon deleted books from Kindle. One of them was 1984 from George Orwell.

If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.

Sony literally distributed a rootkit in the guise of DRM for Audio CDs back when piracy meant CD-R distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Anyone remotely surprised at their history of utter contempt for the end-user need only remind themselves of SVP Steve Heckler's remarks to conference attendee's in 2000

"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."

https://web.archive.org/web/20090318115847/http://www.nyfair...

The remarks of Stewart Baker of the DHS admonishing Sony are as relevant today as they were then; namely that "it's your intellectual property - it's not your computer."

https://web.archive.org/web/20051229031842/http://www.mp3new...

You will own nothing and be happy. Buying anything digitally now-a-days is the same as renting as far as they are concerned.

Reminds me of 1984, not the book itself, but the time when Amazon deleted it from everyone's Kindle because of some sort of copyright issue. I think that's when most of us first realized that the digital media being purchased doesn't really belong to you.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...