alt Hacker NewsObviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
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Let's add inflation to that. Or charge interest for the loan.
People owning their own media was always a pain to these companies. They tried to make disposable DVDs at one point!
What a fun balance sheet that will create. Seems easier to just exit the business.
> need to refund in full the purchase cost.
In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money?
Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that if I'd published a game on PlayStation and then told Sony to rip it out of people's libraries, they'd tell me to pound sand. The contracts you sign to ship games on PlayStation specifically include redownload rights. So Sony knows this is a problem, and yet for whatever reason decided NOT to secure the rights they'd need for the digital purchases to actually work like a purchase.
There are services like Movies Anywhere and UltraViolet (now defunct) that store a licence when the user purchases one from an in-network licensor. Then the user can access the content via any supported platform.
The problem is that these are not legally mandated, so they can shut down (as UltraViolet did). If the ability to move the licence to another platform is mandated by law as a condition of continued copyright protection, this problem would largely disappear.