alt Hacker NewsSony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For
Comments
It should be illegal to have others purchase what you as a company only licensed and therefore aren’t legally allowed to sell.
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.
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.
I am fine with "renting" a streaming movie, as an analogue to analog - going to Blockbuster and renting a movie.
But I not for a single second trusted "buying" digital goods, and I was quickly proved right. The first digital purchases getting yanked story must have been close to 20 years ago at this point.
I still buy CD's and books and game discs when the digital DRM-free equivalent cannot be had.
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...
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.
This might have repercussions in the UK. There are supreme court where T&C have been invalidated due to not being advertised well enough. The more onerous the clause is, the more burden is laid on the seller to make sure the customer understands that.
I doubt most of the people who "bought" the film understood that they weren't buying it and it could be taken away from theme at any time.
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...
2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48718967
4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346
4 years ago ( so it's not the first time studioCanal has done this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32010317
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:
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.
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.)
https://fmhy.net is the most comprehensive piracy guide ever creates with over 30k links.
What did those movies cost? More like a movie ticket or more like a Blu-ray?
Excellent time to get a Jellyfin instance setup!
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.
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...
I feel zero guilt to pirate movies.
This is one reason why piracy is legitimate and important
If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.
In similar fashon in year 2009 Amazon deleted books from Kindle. One of them was 1984 from George Orwell.
Incredible timing with the news they are discontinuing disks in 2028.
You will own nothing.
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...
A friend of mine owned the first Ipod, and diligently ripped all his cd's and cut and pasted them too his device. I asked if he had backups, and he said he had the cd's. I told him too make a copy, just in case the Apple mafia came too delete his stuff. He didn't, and then after a move he lost or scratched many of his CD's. His only backup WAS the ripped MP3's. A few years later Apple deleted all of his music claiming he hadn't purchased them. He didn't even know how to download music. Every single MP3 he had he ripped himself...
Yohohoho.
Going to bring Binks' Brew.
You will own nothing and be happy. Buying anything digitally now-a-days is the same as renting as far as they are concerned.
Ending the production of physical discs too. Ripe for disruption.
Your purchase has been literally deleted.
That "thank you" at the end is particularly classy. Thank you for getting fucked and giving us your money.
I'm surprised movies haven't yet moved to DRM free on purchases the way music did on iTunes back in 2009. With movie files being so large and people having streaming services integrated in their TV's I can't imagine there is all that much incentive for people to share them anyway. The only thing it does is help prevent situations like this.
Piracy is back, and stronger than ever. After all this bullshit happening with services, I will not be buying a movie from any service like sony, amazon, or youtube. Maybe a DVD or Blu-ray here and there, but no digital ownership.
It is legitimately impossible to purchase certain movies, especially classic, in any format due to regional blocks.
Simple example: "The Things of Life", a classic French movie from 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_of_Life
No way to get it in the US. No physical media, no streaming. It is on Apple TV ... in France.
You can torrent it.
Utterly brokem model.
Music is the same btw, Apple Music and Spotify geoblock music. Workaround is to add to your library when traveling in EU. Insane.
[dead]
[dead]
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)