Sony Removing Purchased Content
Cindy Harper (Hacker News, ArsTechnica):
Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back.
[…]
Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be. PlayStation’s notice states it without apology: “You will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.”
The justification Sony offers runs to six words, “due to our content licensing agreements.”
You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.
Sid Shuman (via Nick Heer):
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only.
Timothy Geigner (Hacker News):
In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don’t actually own the things they think they’re buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We’ve spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where an unsuspecting public thinks they’re buying “a thing” only to learn months or years later that “the thing” they bought was actually a license to use/view/listen to another “thing”, and that license exists at the pleasure of the company that collected the money for it.
[…]
As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.
And that’s because of the purposeful obfuscation of that fact.
Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended.
Previously:
- Xbox Outage Affected Discs
- Removing Archives of Comedy Central and MTV News
- Sony Removing Purchased Discovery TV Shows
- HomePod Late Adopter
- Arrested Development Leaving Netflix Soon
- Apple Sued for Removing Purchased Content
- Apple Can Delete Purchased Movies From Your Library Without Telling You
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
The only sure path to digital ownership is to steal it, and no one should feel even a crumb of guilt for doing so.
“You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.”
Yeah, that’s why people have started to realize physical media matters. What Sony is doing should be illegal, obviously, but we were foolish to let ourselves get to this place
And Apple pushed us into this mess sooner by removing disc drives so quickly
I think we lived through a pretty glorious decade from roughly 2010 to 2020, where actually buying things was more convenient than pirating them. We've now exited that period at a rapid pace.
Recently, I rented a Spider-Man movie on a Sony platform. It only had subtitles in a small subset of languages, excluding the one I needed. It took me 10 minutes to pirate it. The player let me pick a subtitle language, and then found and downloaded the subtitles by itself.
I don't mind paying for stuff, but ffs, actually provide a service that is at least equally as good as what piracy offers.
I think you are saying this from a very US-centric position.
Just an example, Netflix. Everyone here in Israel was ecstatic to get it, at the ~ same price as the US! Oh, but turns out it's only ~ half the library of US & Canada. And, if you want 1080p (and 4K later), you might get it, or you might get stuck with a 360p … because their client is retarded and doesn't allow more than 10 second buffering. Oh and you can't have 4K on your computer because reasons. Oh, and you can't save a video file for your trip, for the 15 hour TLV-SFO trip.
Even ignoring the library situation, if you find this acceptable, I am sorry to say, but your standards are low. Downloading DRM-free content has always been a much, much better alternative. Same wight audio books. And don't get me started on video games and their insane and hostile DRM schemes. The only exception I can think of was the period of time when Apple had clout, and managed to remove DRM from its audio purchases. That was a good move. They had a lot less clout when video came to iTunes, so we got the current situation, which is terrible.
I am all for going paying for what I use, it just seems fair. Many of these streaming platforms have become quite user experience-hostile. Netflix on AppleTV makes discoverability of content nearly impossible, other services will show adds, implemented in a horrific way (e.g. if you skip back in content, you get to see more adds).
Yes, during 2010-2020 I was very happy paying for a subscription or two, now I just don't see the value. Removing digitally purchased content (especially in such a volume) has to hurt user trust in these platforms, as it should. Hopefully many users will notice this, and decide to no longer purchase the content digitally.
If there were any effective consumer protection in the US, using the word “buy” there would be illegal. Sure, the fine print makes it clear you’re buying a license that can be revoked at any time with no recourse. But that’s not what the word “buy” by itself is taken to mean. You can’t buy lunch and then have the restaurant come try to take it back later.
It’s much closer to buying a movie ticket. Which is essentially rental. But they don’t say that.
@Bart, exactly. Let me add a few more examples:
-- Long before 2010, you had these things called DVDs. DRM? Too technical of an answer is required, but everyone remembers how the very first thing you would get - before the chapter selection - was a warning from the FBI. How about live sports? "... any rebroadcast without the EXPRESS WRITTEN consent of [carrier, sport, team] is strictly prohibited...". I'd bet that if I attended a baseball game in 1980 and took pictures I was already breaking the law if I chose to share it with someone else.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. All digital streaming and DRM-wrapped content is rental. It doesn't matter if you paid $0.01 or $1000 for that content. If the operator of the server can remove the content, or shut down the server or go out of business, then you've only rented that content.
Everybody using a Zune (all five of them) learned this lesson many years ago.
