Originally published at: PlayStation deleting TV shows that users already paid to "own" | Boing Boing
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Sony fanboys will apologize enough for Sony about this somehow. . I don’t understand this sentiment.
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Can’t understand any corporate gimp. Ever.
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Just another example of the risk you take when you rely on corporations to serve you content on all but the shortest terms of agreements.
Anything involving a cloud connection and DRM is ultimately not owned but on rented, at full cost or otherwise. We’ve gone from media to software to IoT to cars and tractors.
There’s no first sale doctrine if they can claim they never sold it to you in the first place.
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Some class action lawyer is going to jump on this and collect a big payday, meanwhile immunizing warner from further lawsuits and getting the ripped-off consumers a 50 cent discount on future playstation purchases and a stick of gum.
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This really puts a pall on the convenience of digital media.
With physical media, you may have to put up with storage issues and degradation of the disc, but at least you have it until you choose to part with it.
The nice thing would be if you could actually own digital media, but that seems impossible, in the current climate of capitalism.
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microsoft has been removing “purchased” content for over a decade.
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Given the current law dealing with the enforceability of terms of service, unless something was purposefully buried, disguised and ambiguous in the terms of service, no lawyer would touch a class action lawsuit over this. The law, sadly, is on Sony’s side here. I mean, it’s not like this is the first time this has happened. Amazon, Apple, Google, and probably some others, have all deleted content that their users “purchased” and none of them were successfully sued over it. The truth is, if you read the terms of service, it’s pretty clear you are buying a license, revocable at any time, to stream the content. You are not purchasing a digital copy of the content outright.
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Yeah, I bought the PS3 game version of “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” and remember when Sony both pulled that off my account, claiming copyright issues, and when only a few years later they re-released it for the PS4 – without a refund, comping the PS3 owners a PS4 copy, or even reactivating the perfectly-good PS3 version. Just a “Nope, thank you for your money, please give us more money if you’d like to play this game again. For a while.”
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Back in the 1970s, evangelism on the part of the user base might have ensured that software was published and available.
Sony is hardly in danger of going under.
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Huge Sony fanboi, and this is crap. I get their hands might be forced by WBD, which, fair enough, but in that case, they need to refund the purchases, to cash, and not just PS Store credit.
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Owned.
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I have no idea why anyone would want to ‘buy’ a media product in the first place.
I remember being baffled when my friends would spend thousands of dollars to build a big ‘collection’ of VHS movies. No matter how much you like a movie, it isn’t and wasn’t worth dropping cash to have in your house. I’m even less interested in ‘owning’ the right to rewatch some tv show now.
Yes, the deletion of ‘owned’ content is awful and should be illegal. However, the purchase of said content is bizarre.
Do you own any books?
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The international day against DRM is this Friday. Let this story be a reminder we need to end DRM and the dmca
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm
(not oneboxing for unknown reasons)
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And people thing I am the crazy person for wanting physical copies of the content (i.e., blu-rays, DVD, CDs, etc.)
The few things that I have in digital only format are generally copied somewhere to where the company I bought it from can’t access, and transcoded into a format that does not have something that can be revoked in order to play it.
And for the very, very few things that I can’t get physical copies of, or locally stored digital copies of? Then I Hoist the colors and fire up the torrent client. (and make sure that the people who created the content get payment either via something like Patreon, a tip jar, etc.)
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Sony is not at fault here (for a change). Discovery’s customers were deceived by Discovery’s advertising using language like “buy a digital copy” and “own it today” when their contract language clearly meant “rent”.
Imagine a realtor hanging a “for sale” sign in a yard, and when the buyer gets to the bank to take the title the paperwork says “rental agreement”. It’s 100% bait and switch.
I think every company that’s offered access to digital content “for sale” should be held liable for their misdirection. If that means mailing out BluRay discs to their purchasers to make them whole, they should be forced to do so.
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All of these companies have essentially the same terms of service, all of them offer content “for sale” in their marketing in one way or another, and all of them have engaged in removing content people “purchased”. Just because Discovery has fault here doesn’t mean that Sony doesn’t also. If you “purchased” the shows through the Playstation, you were buying it per Sony’s terms of service.
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It’s only a matter of time before physical DVDs are time-coded in addition to region-coded.
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In one sentence you have identified my hypocrisy. In my defense I don’t buy books anymore (aside from cookbooks), and I am a big user of my local library. I am also slowly giving away almost all of my existing books, again with the realization that no matter how much I enjoyed it at the time I am not likely to read any of them over again.
I do ‘buy’ ebooks when they are the only option. I have no delusions that such ‘ownership’ is permanent however.
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