Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries | Hacker News Reader

Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries

arstechnica.com

225 pointsderstander526 comments

Recent and related:

Playstation removing previously purchased Discovery content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492747 - Dec 2023 (174 comments)

If you download something from a torrent, that's digital ownership too, and it doesn't suck. The "digital" is not the issue here, the "ownership" is.

If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.

And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).

I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.

The way the law is currently structured, there is no such thing as digital ownership, only licensing. And since there is an enormous disparity in negotiating power between consumers and massive copyright owners, the prevailing licensing terms overwhelmingly favor the copyright holders.

The solution is to change the law. But the disparity in power between corporate copyright holders and consumers manifests itself in politics just as it does in the market.

From Sony's website...

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

Note the use of "purchased" (not "licensed"). To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing". US consumer protection law sucks goat ass - language around digital content licensing could easily be "fixed" (but won't because our government is a revolving door with industry insiders).

Yeah, they definitely pretend you've purchased the content. But you've only purchased a license, and even the license is so weak that it effectively says "you can use this as long as we arbitrarily decide you can, and we can take your license away at any time without refunding your money." So you're not really buying anything at all.

Polls have found that the average person in the US can't tell you many of the basics of how their government works. The laws aren't based on people taking the time to understand them. It is complex enough there really isn't the time. Especially if you spend the average amount of time staring at rectangle screens.

"our government is a revolving door with industry insiders" ... this is partly due to government compensation compared to the free market and our present desire for those with the ability to navigate this complexity to want to make piles of money. It's all about the benjamins. Which is also why IP holders use the law the way they do.

You can "purchase" a "license". In fact, what else would you call the exchange of monetary value for a license?

If the license expires I would call it a rental.

For me if DRM is involved it is always a rental, license or no, as I am left unable to legally keep an archival copy to retain access to the purchased item beyond the undisclosed access window.

>If the license expires I would call it a rental.

A license is a license. They don't have to expire either. I can sell a perpetual license to something.

> For me if DRM is involved it is always a rental, license or no, as I am left unable to legally keep an archival copy to retain access to the purchased item beyond the undisclosed access window.

Call it whatever you want. The correct term is a license. You were licensed something in accordance with a bunch of terms that may have included, for example, DRM. It's a license to use the good in accordance with the terms of the license. Why confuse things?

> Why confuse things?

That's...exactly the issue at hand. These companies are not doing much, if anything, to educate their customers on the difference between purchasing a license and purchasing the thing itself. This is, of course, deliberate.

The problem here is, that it shouldnt even be labeled as "purchase" (well, "buy" usually), but "rent". Purchasing a licence to rent the content is weasel wording around stuff that is well known and consumers expect it to work in a certain way (eg. buying a dvd or renting a dvd, where in the first case you actually own the dvd, and in the second, you know that they expect you to return it after some time). In every other business, "buy" means "buy", buy a dvd, buy a sandwich, buy a car, buy this, buy that... nowhere else are you expected to return the item (at least not without a refund, eg. in case of a recall).

Weird, never seen this complained of in the context of purchasing a software license, which I assume is something the HN crowd is familiar with.

It's not "weasel wording" it's the accurate term. It can also be true that the media companies can make it more clear that what is being purchased is a license which is subject to terms.

I think buying a DvD is the perfect analogue here. You own the shiny disc, you don't own the contents on that disc.

We're just taking away the shiny disc in the digital era. It's not a perfect term, but for 99.999% of people, "indefinitely rental for years until the servers die", would associate with "buy".

But in the dvd case you don’t expect someone to effectively repossess your dvd a couple years down the road without reimbursing you. You don’t own the content but you do own your dvd which allows you to indefinitely watch the content.

In my view, you my friend are the one who is confused. “Purchasing a license” is lawyerese nonsense. How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim? That cannot reasonably be called purchasing in my view. Either ownership transfers in a way that the seller loses control, or they retain control and no transfer of ownership occurs, only a transfer of possession. Now I know IP law says something else, but just because a bad idea is encoded into law does not make it a good idea.

Or think of it like this: what if I “purchase a license” to use a hammer, and as part of that license the hammer’s owner can ask me to return the hammer at a time of their choosing. Am I buying the hammer, or am I renting the hammer? Don’t get distracted by the nonsense of “buying a license to use the hammer”. What am I doing with the hammer?

>“Purchasing a license” is lawyerese nonsense

I guess you need to take it up with a lawyer, then?

>How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim?

same way with a physical license. I have a license to drive, I still need to pay every year to renew my license to ensure my car meets safety standards and that I'm a registered citizen and whatnot. I also need to be re-tested every so often and my picture retaken every year to update my likeness or that license is rendered null.

I don't see it as any different from a digital license. No one would say I "rented my license".

> Either ownership transfers in a way that the seller loses control, or they retain control and no transfer of ownership occurs, only a transfer of possession

Those aren't technically impossible. Just not a feature in enough demand for anyone to implement. Car metphor works here too: I can't transfer my license to drive to another person.

>Now I know IP law says something else, but just because a bad idea is encoded into law does not make it a good idea.

not at all. But it's what you need to argue against and challenge to make any real change. And "it's nonsense" isn't the most sound argument. We can interpret all we want here, but ultimately it does nothing to society at large.

>Or think of it like this: what if I “purchase a license” to use a hammer, and as part of that license the hammer’s owner can ask me to return the hammer at a time of their choosing. Am I buying the hammer, or am I renting the hammer? Don’t get distracted by the nonsense of “buying a license to use the hammer”. What am I doing with the hammer?

sounds like something that can happen if you tweak it slightly. s/Hammer/Gun (albiet we now enter controversial territory) and you see how it settles in. You need a license to own a gun, you can buy and own a gun, but you can have that gun revoked for crimes that may not even be related to the gun itself.

People would still say you own the gun and have a license to operate one. But you can have it taken away. A bit strong armed for a metaphor to video games, but this is more to show that the model of ownership and revoking of possession isn't necessarily stuck in the digital realm.

>> “Purchasing a license” is lawyerese nonsense. How can I buy something and then be arbitrarily deprived of it by the person who sold it to me at their whim?

> same way with a physical license. I have a license to drive, I still need to pay every year to renew my license...

What do you mean? Did you "purchase a driver's license"? Have you ever heard someone use that phrase?

I didn't buy my license, no (or maybe I did in various misc. fees back then. But that's not the largest barrier to owning one). But I do need to purchase the ability to operate my car on my country's roads. Which effectively means my license costs money in some way or form to be usable.

And no, I've never heard anyone say they "bought a license". But I've never heard anyone say they "rented a movie in perpetualty" either. Real life conversation generally isn't that verbose.

No, they would just say "i rented a movie", even if it's in perpetuity, that makes things way more clear. But people read "buy", so they bought.

No one rents movies in perpetuity. People rented movies from blockbuster, and they charged you fees if you brought it back late.

No, everybody who bought a digital movie rented it in perpetuity (until license is withdrawn), so the point is just getting people to use a different language by changing the button

After one day's thought, "rented a movie in perpetuity" is almost as bonkers as "bought a driver's license". Yesterday, I was only asking for more explanation why you introduced the latter into the conversation.

> But I do need to purchase the ability to operate my car on my country's roads. Which effectively means my license costs money in some way or form to be usable.

I see a gulf between "costs money" and "bought". FWIW, I paid registration fees for my driver's license -- aka taxes.

I never ever read or heard "buying a driver license", but I "buy" videogames and audiobooks every time, even though it's a license, and that's the problem

I mean, yes. You are not allowed to circumvent the terms of the license. Why would you think that you would be able to do that? Do you make archival copies of keys to AirBnBs so you can retain access to the purchased room after the access window?

You didn't purchase a room, you rented a room for X days. Imagine buying (purchasing) an apartment at full price, and after a year or two living there, someone comes and "we made a whoopsie with our licences, we need your apartment back".

The text on the button on their site was “purchase” as of a few years ago (it’s now “reserve”). Also, the apartment analogy is a good one. There are a lot of clauses in apartment leases which can get your lease revoked. In no case would it be ok for you to have made an archival copy of the key to keep access.

>Imagine buying (purchasing) an apartment at full price, and after a year or two living there, someone comes and "we made a whoopsie with our licences, we need your apartment back".

2008 housing crash in a nutshell. Your metaphor would work if you were rich enough to not require a mortgage and can truly buy it outright, but the vast majority of people don't "buy a house", unfortunately. They seek a mortgage (fancy term for "loan"), the seller gives the home to the bank, and the buyer gains the deed when they pay off the loan, likely for an amount greater than the cost of the home.

This is just a huge tangent, but your example was a sad reality for some unlucky "homeowners" when the system failed.

The difference is that you bought a perpetual, permanent license to that thing, not an ephemeral one.

Revoking that license should be impossible without a full refund+interest.

If you buy a table they can't come and take it back without your consent, even if they leave the full purchase amount on one of the chairs.

Sure, that's what I said. But the distinction between "license to a thing" and "own a thing" is lost of most people, especially when the seller goes out of their way to make the "licensing agreement" look like a normal sale.

Yes, I thought you were pretty clear on this:

>To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing".

But the quote is "content", not license

And what else is "pay for a license"

Nothign about the law precludes you from owning anything digitally. I can sell you a digital copy of a photograph, giving you the copyright and everything. No need for a license. What makes you think otherwise?

You've answered your own question here. It's not so much about what precludes you from selling something digitally, as it is about what precludes that person from simply making copies and distributing them for the marginal compute cost plus some profit. The answer is copyright law, which has been steadily strengthened over the years in response to the lobbying of corporate copyright holders. In order to sell even one digital copy to another person, they'd have to buy the copyright from you. And why would you sell the copyright to them when you can leverage it to sell licenses instead?

Agreed that I should've said "there is no such thing as digital ownership in practice", at least for consumers.

I agree, in principle, but "ownership" is almost too nebulous. To get down to brass tacks, to look for unambiguous features that cannot be weasel-worded away, we're really looking at remote revokability or, the Bizarro cousin to that, the ability of any other party to suspend or cease playable activation via DRM.

Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.

Ownership isn’t fuzzy though, it has a clear definition. The problem is that clear definition makes pirates angry because they want it to mean something other than what it does, so they try to make the situation cloudy.

If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.

Playstation users did „purchase“ that content. Is that enough for a claim or not?

Purchasing a license is not the same as purchasing the thing, and everyone knows that. It’s not 1997 anymore.

Whether they have an enforceable claim to access the content depends on the terms of their license, and while I haven’t read it I think we all know they won’t.

Purchasing a rent license! Yay for newspeak. Rent is rent, purchase is purchase.

Hey, we ended contract with the store were you bought your DVDs. Please return them.

Please, please let me know before you fly next. I cannot wait to hear you explain to the gate agent that you purchased a ticket so legally the plane is now yours.

The better example would be when I'm kicked out from am over-sold flight.

The difference would be that airlines usually make up for it. Meanwhile in this case „purchased“ stuff is gone for good. No refunds or transfer of purchases to Warner's platform.

This is a really great example of trying to use outrage to distract from the fact that you’re not addressing the point you’re allegedly replying to.

You got stuck because you didn’t understand the implications of the original hot take you had. It’s ok, it happens.

I’m still addressing the same point. You purchase something and then it’s taken away from you without any sort of compensation.

You are willfully ignoring the part you don’t like and hoping it will go away.

Is the point you're getting at that no one owns anything digitally?

No, my point is about whether ownership has a clear definition or not. It does. This is separate from whether or not we like the way the system works for licensing content, and it’s important that people not muddy the waters here.

I think Playstation is doing the muddying.

Did people "buy" something? Was that the word used? If so, shouldn't they have an expectation of "ownership"? If so, then Playstation has destroyed or stolen someone's property.

That's why I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of "What does to mean to own something?" because it appears that there are various groups, not just pirates, who would like to impose their own definitions, just as the RIAA attempted to state that copying was equal to theft, despite copying not depriving anyone else of the use and enjoyment of the original property.

> I think Playstation is doing the muddying

You are certainly welcome to your opinion. This is how the industry has worked for decades at this point though, so it’s hard to argue that the people doing the standard thing with the standard words are the ones creating confusion.

Yes, they bought a license. They own a license, which means they own the ability to exercise the rights included with that license under the terms and exclusions included in the license. Sony lawyers know what they’re about, you’re welcome to go read the license to find out exactly how they worded their claims about giving you access to material owned by Discovery.

In a way, I'm glad you disagree with me, it proves my original point that "buy" and "owns" have become terms where differing parties can't seem to agree on what they imply, and so we need to be more specific about it.

You could say that about literally anything by just refusing to accept the actual definition, though. One person not accepting that the word means what it means doesn’t mean that the word is unspecific.

It's much muddier when you consider the rights that the possessor of a DVD retains.

If the copyright owners tried to do the same stuff to physical media that they do with digital media, courts would rule against them.

The ownership is still clear in both cases, but the scope of what that ownership means is different.

That’s not muddy at all. You presented cases where one owns something and cases where one owns a license to use a thing and seem surprised that they’re different.

You think it’s muddy because you want owning a license to mean owning the thing. It doesn’t, it never has, and the license terms are clear (if of course a bit verbose).

No, ownership doesn't have a clear definition. You can own all sorts of interests in real property or personal property which fall short of the whole.

All of which, as I said, provide an enforceable claim against those things.

Claim of what though? If my claim is for real property, but with a reversion, and the reversion is triggered, I have no claim left...

Reversions are a common clause in leases, which nobody would call ownership. It’s certainly the case that the word could be viewed to have a confusing meaning if it’s misused in situations where it obviously doesn’t apply.

You can own a partial stake in something, either real or not, and have an enforceable claim which is to less than total control or subject to conditions. You can also have a purchase a contract which provides access or use in some way but isn’t ownership. The latter is very common digitally and is the subject of this thread.

"If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it."

Let me repeat myself for clarity. You can own a property with a reversion. You can own a leashold with a reversion. They are both enforceable claims. You can exclude people for the term of your lease. How is that not an enforceable claim? You said an enforceable claim means ownership. I think you were mistaken in saying because it's not true.

Now you are caveating it to portions of a whole. But a leasehold is for the entirety, just for a term.

We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline. If I go and buy a set of LEGOs, i get that set of legos, i can lend them to someone, can resell them, can use them after 10 years, etc. Having a "buy" button for a movie should mean the same (as it does when you "buy" a dvd). LEGO can't come to your house and demand the bricks you bought and paid for back, why should sony?

If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.

>We can just apply the same rules and expectations that we have offline.

Due to the ease of reproduction, you really can't. That's why we really shouldn't rely too heavily on that analouge for comparisons. You can't clone 1000 more insteances of your lego set, you can't upload your lego set to the internet to be cloned further. Even if we get to that point in 3d printing, "pirating" a lego set properly requires resources to your 3d printer to produce those legos. Materials you may not have on hand, or that cost just a much as buying the lego set yourself.

>If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy".

You could make that distinction, but the colloquial mind treats "perpetual rental until we are forced to remove content from servers" as "buy". both types of purchase go down once that part of PSN servers decide to shut down like they want to do soon-ish for PS3/Vita (they wanted to do it last year, but consumer backlash delayed it).

You can put rent (infinity sign). Short and effective.

And I heard about the issue with reproduction before, in fact this is such a big issue that many of the richest company in the world are software

The end user expects some connection between “buying a Lego” and buying digital content. We use metaphors such as “a cart” or “add to your library” that make a user think this is just like buying from a store bringing something home — it is in my library. If we aren’t going to keep these metaphors true, we should stop using them. It’s not in “my library”, it’s more like an amusement park I have perpetual access to until it one day closes.

Then for content it will never be possible to "buy" it, according to your view.

(Because it would mean I would be able to lend my copy to the rest of the US population and the original seller would never make more money than from my 1 copy.)

Lending usually deprives the owner of usage for the period of the lease.

At least with a digital lend, you should be able to revoke the lend status and have it "returned" for the owner's usage again. This would be much more satisfying than lending your physical item to a friend who then moves across the country before returning the borrowed item.

Sure, you can buy a book/dvd/lawnmower/drill and lend it to the rest of the US population, why not?

Well, you can show a movie to a group of hundreds of people simultaneously, which is something you can't really do with a physical book.

> If you download something from a torrent, that's digital ownership too

No, that’s possession. That’s why they call it piracy; you have it but you definitely don’t own it.

Periodic reminder that torrents != piracy. Parent could have been referring to Linux ISOs or the contents of Wikipedia.

Sure sure, we can grant them their fig leaf. Note however that the same logic applies to their “Linux ISOs”. Possession does not imply ownership.

Edit: there’s no need to give these reminders, btw. Everyone knows that torrents have theoretical uses beyond piracy. Just like everyone knows they’re almost entirely used for piracy.

> you have it but you definitely don’t own it.

This could apply just as much to "buying" something from the Playstation store.

In that case, you neither have it OR own it.

I haven't given a fuck if I own it or not for about 25 years.

Suppose I "buy" a piece of digital media, which let's agree for the sake of argument actually means "bought a license for". Suppose I also then torrent a copy of that same media for the purpose of backup and/or offline access. Is it still piracy? After all, I have a license for it.

In practical terms for most people most of the time this is going to be a purely moral question; you're not going to face any consequences so it's just down to what you consider legitimate.

Legally, "owning" an episode of a TV show on Playstation Network (to take the current example) doesn't give you any right to download a copy from elsewhere. Same for owning (this time in a more real sense) a copy on disc. Maybe you could make a fair use argument fly; I'm skeptical.

> Is it still piracy?

Yes.

> I have a license for it.

The “it” for which you have a license is not the media you torrented. It’s the version you access from the licensor via the licensed mechanism.

These kind of faux-legal arguments are extremely tiresome because they’re proposing gotcha hypotheticals which are clearly covered in the text of the license.

> Is it still piracy?

Legally you can make personal backups of media you purchase, subject to any licensing restrictions.

That said technically it's still piracy if you're sending chunks to other peers since you don't have distribution rights. This is why copyright cases usually go after the seeders

You should be careful with that advice, as virtually all media that you might want to backup contains drm, and there is no exemption to the DMCA for bypassing drm for personal or archival (unless you’re a museum) use. There are such exemptions for things like critique and education.

>and there is no exemption to the DMCA for bypassing drm for personal or archival (unless you’re a museum) use

Sure, there technically isn't. But in reality, there's no practical way to enforce this without breaking much bigger laws. So very few companies care about some single person breaking DRM, if they are made aware at all.

The main exception would come from online games. But the "worst" retaliation you'd get is your account being banned. THey may not even bother sending a C&D despite companies technically being able to detect it unless you were cheating (which breaks the EULA, different from DMCA).

Your comment isn’t responsive to what I wrote. I was making a very narrow point responding to the phrase “Legally you can make personal backups…” by pointing out that you frequently cannot legally make those backups. Whether it’s possible and whether you’re likely to face consequences have no bearing on it's legality.

>Whether it’s possible and whether you’re likely to face consequences have no bearing on it's legality.

If a law is written but never enforced, is it really a law? On a technical level, yes. On a practical level, no. A law that is practically impossible to enforce is at best an add-on charge for someone being thrown the book for an actually enforced law, not one people worry about when weighing consequences.

I don't think it's too productive to only talk in terms of spherical cows in a vacuum, so it's a point worth keeping in mind for anyone interested in such conversation.

Depends if you rip it to mpeg or just dd it though right?

True though, but I was hoping the 'subject to licensing restrictions' would cover it

Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.

I keep seeing things that seem like they would be good uses for blockchain security and then I remember that all the investment in that space has gone into trying to print money.

I think there is a misconception. Most of the time you don't own the digital asset. This is an intentional quirk around money, contracts, etc. You have the right to use it in the present form through the platform as long as the platform has a contract with the IP owner to enable that.

For this to change there either needs to be incentive for the platform and IP owners or there needs to be legal changes to require it.

Also, blockchain means that anyone who has your ID can know you entire catalog of ownership. This removes privacy.

Putting digital ownership on a blockchain would mean enabling a secondary marketplace. Why would any big media company ever want to allow that?

Why would any big media company ever want to allow that?

Not even "big media companies". Why would even say, an indie game developer, want to have a secondary marketplace where there games are sold?

Why would a consumer want a game, that they can't even resell? Imagine the same applied to phones, cars, houses, etc?

Should the governments (=laws and regulations) be protecting a few media houses or millions of consumers?

> Why would a consumer want a game, that they can't even resell?

Because it's less valuable than one that could be resold, and thus should be obtainable more cheaply.

What goes unsaid in all these threads is that people don't just want "ownership", they want it for the same price that they're currently getting whatever it is they're getting today. The inability to resell or lend something is priced in; the market has established that people will pay $x for a license to access something that they can't lend or resell.

Gabe Newell once said "piracy is not a pricing issue, it’s a service issue", but it's not, it's a value issue. The reason content providers don't provide the service people want is because they know no one would pay the price at which they would consider offering it, so they don't bother.

> The inability to resell or lend something is priced in

Why are the physical versions of games the exact same price as the digital version? Shouldn't the digital version be much cheaper because you can't copy, lend, or resell it?

Ditto for all forms of media

The digital version is also substantially more convenient than the physical version.

> copy

Crucially, most retail physical media is not copyable (by most people). If it were, the market landscape would look very different.

Probably due to pricing parity agreed upon by physical retailers. You're right in that they should be cheaper, but Walmart/Gamestop et al. were smart enough to negotiate that early on in digital distribution. For the same reason, many early Steam releases was not beholden to this and thus cheaper.

Nowadays, there's enough market capture that they can simply charge the same amount due to greed, though. But there are early reasons for that.

Digital ownership seems like a wonderful use case for blockchain technology, and it baffles me that there hasn't been a DRM company yet that's jumped on this idea.

Why would any content creator (outside of those specifically pushing it on idealogical grounds) want to lose control over the distribution of their content by using blockchain and cloud storage technologies?

Because it's actually not. The issue isn't the record keeping, they license because they can.

I hear about this all the time, but how is the hard side that is content delivery solved? It is really not about ownership, but delivery or then unlocking the local copy? Which gets pretty messy with enforcement and so on...

This is why I download fitgirl repacks. I bought an eBook 10 years ago and it disappeared. Moral, Legal or not, I personally favor consistency and predictability.

Piracy justifies capitalism. However I feel bad for small indie games.

Nothing is forever. PirateBay died how many times now? Less than Limewire, that's for sure.

even fitgirl repacks will die one day. be it a legal issue, lack of interet from the pirates providing content, or a change in ownership crashing the site to the group. Change is the only constant

Let's sketch a "law" for digital goods. This law is entirely about how digital products are labeled and advertised.

If the seller uses "ownership" words like "own", "buy", or "purchase", then the product must be usable _indefinitely_. If at any time it becomes not usable, e.g. due to a server shutting down, a full refund must be provided to everyone who "purchased" the product. Also, there must be some way to lend the product; it's OK if this lending deprives the original owner of the product while it is lent.

One way to satisfy the "ownership" clause is to sell the product without DRM. Another alternative would be to sell it with DRM initially, but remove the DRM when you want to shut down your hosting servers. An online-only multiplayer game that requires a central server cannot feasibly be sold by "ownership", because the seller would eventually lose all their money when they shut down the server.

So the next option is "rental", where the seller can use the word "rent" along with a clear time period like "for 1 year" or "through 2024". The product must be usable through this time period, or you get a full refund. No requirements about it being lendable to friends.

I imagine almost all companies would pick the second option. This is fine! Consumers still get two benefits: (i) clear labeling, including knowing how long they can expect to use the thing for, and (ii) a full refund in case the content gets removed before that time period.

As for getting banned from an online game: this is completely allowed via the "rental" option. The company just needs to give the player a full refund.

Labeling and advertising is definitely a good angle to ensure that customers aren't hit by surprises:

I would also require a standardized disclosure box that must be included in the promotional materials. The disclosure box could contain information such as ownership period and so on, and consumers will get used to reading that box before purchasing digital goods.

Rental period. If there us ownership, I want to be able to put it in my will and pass it to my heirs

Yup. There's lots of law already in existence that gets toward this, e.g. "title" and "possession."

With torrents, you always have possession, even without title.

With, e.g. Playstation, for a while "title" gave you "possession" (as it should) and then it didn't, breaking the whole thing.

Agreed, imagine if you bought a car and the purchase agreement stipulated having to store that car in the manufacturer's garage, and after six months of minor incremental changes performed during downtime the car was nothing like the product you actually bought, the product you wanted to begin with.

If Sony sold something they are not licensed to sell, that’s fraud.

This is where the US Federal Gov should step in. But the pols are too busy counting donations (bribes) from these companies.

If I buy digital content, I should be able to download it on removal media and use it off-line (esp. in the case with movies/music). I should be able to sell it (which is still legal). But these companies want you to "rent" instead of own.

So I never buy digital anything. No wonder many people head to pirate bay because of the rights they loose.

I hope the US Gov (and other govs) wake up to this, but as always donations (bribes) trumps people's rights all the time. (no pun intended).

> This is where the US Federal Gov should step in. But the pols are too busy counting donations (bribes) from these companies.

Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-u-s-really-less-corr...

>Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.

Are we reading the same article?

>ANG: So if we compare it to the standard index, the similarity that we see is that the United States, overall, total corruption is much lower than in China, and that’s totally expected. But what the U.C.I. is able to add is that it unbundles this total score into four categories, and by doing so, we can see more nuance and we can see that first of all, in both countries, the United States is much lower on petty theft, grand theft, and speed money than in China. But they have roughly the same amount of access money.

From the 2nd paragraph at top:

> ANG: I think it’s more complicated in this country. Corruption in China is still of an illegal form. But corruption in this country has become so legalized and institutionalized, it’s hard to say that it’s “corrupt.” Some people would be really offended by the word.

The government should forbid the labeling of “buy” or “purchase” of anything that can be revoked after the sale.

If it can be revoked, then it should be labeled “rent”, with the appropriate time frame. Even if it means businesses have to label it “rent - until an unknown time in the future when we go out of business or drop the license or decide to ban you”.

And it is not like they would not know the first possible date when the license ends. This should be at the sale page and displayed prominently.

"Rent" is the wrong word. But so is "buy"

"Licence" a product

I'd go with "Rent Indefinitely"

"Indefinitely" is a vague term. I'm serious - if we really want the FTC or some other more appropriate agency to step in and force a change in terminology, we must have something that is very clear and precise. Otherwise it would never survive a legal challenge.

Why is it a problem that it's a vague term? It's defining a vague clause in the contract. You get certain rights until such time as the company decides you don't get them anymore.

Look it up in the dictionary. In some interpretations, "rent indefinitely" has effectively the same meaning as buy. In others, it could mean what you described.

Such transactions would now mean different things to different people. That's not an improvement, and it is unlikely that the federal judiciary would agree that the federal government has the authority to force corporations to make such a change.

How is it the wrong word? Renting means to pay to receive temporary use of something.

Rent usually has an explicit end (like a home lease is for a year or two, sometimes with an auto-renew clause).

I posted in a sibling, but I'd do something like "buy" (actually buy, can download, use offline), license (implied forever, but streaming and revokable), and "rent" (streaming, explicit time period). Not set on those phrases, but something like that framework makes more sense that what we have today.

"rent" is the most common mental model that most accurately describes the transaction.

It may not have 100% fidelity, but people understand what renting means instinctively.

A different term, even "licensing", loses that impact (which is precisely why different language is preferred by the contract holders, to hide the true intent).

Selling leasing/licensing rights is fundamental to many industries and the government itself in many cases.

There's already regulation we can use to combat what digital "ownership" is: bait and switch.

This is for the non technical, non professional customer who is sitting at home on their TV deciding to “rent” a movie. When presented with two options, Buy or Rent, the former is obviously incorrect if it can be yanked away. Both options are rent, with different durations.

Right.

Bait and switch: a scam to mislead buyers, whereby a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell (emphasis mine)

The "digital good" is the bait. It makes you think you are purchasing ownership like you would with a physical book, or dvd, or game. The bait is effective because it tries to tie itself to the legitimate form and tries to create a false equivalency of buying a physical copy (in some cases, claiming to be "superior" because its greener or whatnot).

The solution would be for companies to be explicit in what is actually happening: you are purchasing an indefinite lease on the content subject to terms and exceptions. But I imagine they don't want to do that because it would cause a dent in their business.

I agree completely. Also in practice there is almost no such thing as a perpetual license as companies can go bankrupt or just revoke your license whenever they want. They should make the exact nature of the agreement known visibly before you spend any money.

Eventually prices would have to drop to reflect that you are merely temporarily licensed things. A digital game is not going to be perceived as a $60 value when it is more obviously a temporary license regardless of the length. If a physical copy of a game is valued at $60 that can be sold then a digital temporary license is going to have to be less. In my opinion a lot less.

I’m fine with digital products being a license, but then they’re a universal license. Meaning that if I bought the license to play Mortal Kombat via Steam, I should be allowed to freely download it on Xbox and PlayStation too.

Right now companies gives us all the disadvantages of both a product and a license.

I'm fine with licenses too. I just think it should be made more obvious to the user and the price should reflect it's non-perpetual nature.

> ... "and the price should reflect it's non-perpetual nature." (emphasis, mine)

This is one thing that bugs the hell outta me for some game publishers. They used to sell a given ("AAA" or whatever) game for like $60, and you got a disc you could use "forever" (as long as the disc lasted, and compatibility with system updates held out), a fancy manual, slick packaging, and sometimes even a poster or other extra goodie. These days, some (many?) of those companies sell a digital download, hosted by Steam's delivery servers, and often nothing else at all, for the same or sometimes even higher price as physical media. For many of these games, reliance on remote DRM services mean that game can disappear any random time in the future for <reasons>. I generally refuse to support them in doing that, so those companies will only ever see my purchase during a sale that brings the price more in line with the reality. I'd rather spend my money with the publishers / developers that value their customers a bit more than as a "fleshy cash machine".

Yeah, like we should put them in a public digital ledger of some sort... oh wait.

Where does that conclusion come from? It doesn't seem relevant.

Why do we need a database for this?

Not that it’s perfect, far from it, but Movies Anywhere is a baby step in the right direction for at least Movies (on some services).

Idk, porting isn't free, especially good ports. It seems less likely for eg a successful indie game to contract out a port, if all existing owners have to get it for free.

It would be very user-friendly and am quite happy to have also gotten some mobile versions on Humble bundle

> I’m fine with digital products being a license, but then they’re a universal license. Meaning that if I bought the license to play Mortal Kombat via Steam, I should be allowed to freely download it on Xbox and PlayStation too.

Eh, I don't think that's fair to the companies paying for the bandwidth and storage costs for those games. They typically take a cut for purchasing on their respective storefronts that cover those costs, so either you pay per MB downloaded or a monthly subscription for access to the library (but not the licenses themselves)

So companies burn it onto a DVD and stick it in the post. Customer pays for post + blank DVD.

Seems like an easy workaround. Steam sold “Mortal Kombat Alpha”, but PlayStation sells “Mortal Kombat Beta”. Many electronics use a similar strategy to prevent price matching between stores where each market gets a specific SKU.

Maybe in the US, but the EU would come in with the steel chair rather quick.

I'd be happy if we started with forcing them to allow the PC version run on any PC. It's bullshit that only some games run on the NVidia cloud (forgot the name) cause the publishers sued them. I bought the game. I can run the game wherever I want.

(Same for other digital products)

> Eventually prices would have to drop to reflect that you are merely temporarily licensed things.

I understand that you think that would be fair. I also agree that that would be fair, but I’m not so optimistic about it happening.

The cost of digital content has much more to do with how much faff it is to pirate said content and how desireable the content is preceived to be.

Sorr if this is too depressing, but the whole thing is a bit of “I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.” from the content producers as far as I can see. But! Hope you will be right.

There is literally nothing in possibility of bankruptcy that conflicts with a perpetual license - honoring the license is neither some goodwill that a company may voluntarily abandon if it's in financial hardship, nor something that bankruptcy courts will void.

The relevant consumer rights laws should simply assert that if you sell a license, then it's irrevocable, no matter what your fine print says.

And also there's nothing inherently wrong with temporarily licensed things as long as you make it clear up front. If you're offering a three-year license, that's just as valid as a monthly subscription, but you shouldn't be permitted to sell a license for the period of "as long as I wish".

I would also accept "license" in place of "rent" for long enough periods to time.

Buy = forever (can download and use offline)

License = Implied forever, but streaming only and revokable

Rent = Streaming only, time period made explicit (day, week, whatever)

Nah. License is just a weasel word here. Save that for the lawyers. Consumers can buy or rent. There's no in between.

That's probably preferable, but would increase the cost to the consumer, as Sony (or whoever) would need to negotiate permanent deals with Disney (or whoever) instead of the current system.

I'm sort of mostly ok with paying $15 for a semi-permanent license to a movie. I'm not ok with paying $40 for a true permanent purchase. Big guess on those prices, as I mostly just stream whatever is available today, so I'm not the target audience either way, I suppose.

> I'm sort of mostly ok with paying $15 for a semi-permanent license to a movie.

Everyone is until the content goes away.

Increase cost compared to what? You can't compare it to current rental systems, you have to compare it to Blu-ray etc. If the cost of buying a digital copy is significantly higher than Blu-ray then people will just stick with Blu-ray.

If they don't want to issue such deals at all then that's fine too, but they just can't use the words "buy" or "purchase" at all and can only say "rent".

Makes sense for objects, but I think they're classifying these goods as services. Would you call it "renting" a massage, because if something happens and they have to stop part-way though you don't get the full massage as expected?

Perhaps the "buy" option should have an implied lifetime of ownership, and anything less they have to pay you back (keeping all those sales $ in escrow would sure be a pain)

A massage is a nonsensical comparison, since it cannot be used more than once.

Anything other than rent is an unnecessary complication.

I'm pretty sure if I pay for a massage and it has to be interrupted early for reasons that aren't my fault, I can reasonably expect to get a refund or replacement.

"Implied forever but revocable" sounds like false advertising.

Yeah, not the best language, was just trying to get a point across, not draft language for laws or regulations.

If I buy digital content...

You can do all that when you buy digital content. The problem is that most stores aren't selling you the content - they're selling you a non-perpetual license to access the content while it's available from the store you bought it from. That's what needs to change. People need to actually buy the content and not rent it.

> most stores aren't selling you the content

Yes they are, the stores are just not delivering on what they're selling.

> People need to actually buy the content

People are buying the content, then discovering that they no longer have it.

This is actually the sort of thing that a properly-functioning consumer defense bureau would go after.

I'll allow Steam's platform a little room here, but not too much. They've been reliable since 2003, with the promise of backing up games to play offline if the service goes the way of Athenian gods.

However, to your point, I'll easily find my way to (insert a random pirate site - non-disclosed) download something that I own just because it's ONLY available exclusively through a platform like EA Play or Ubisoft. GOG's Galaxy platform is what I wish all gaming platforms to be. I'm getting too old to care about such nuisances, but would like to think that preservation of any game (rather written: any software) culminates into preservation of DRM-free archives.

I love and stand by Steam, but all that needs to happen is that Gabe Newell retires, or the company is purchased. Once that happens, kiss it all goodbye. (And probably also kiss awesome Linux compatibility goodbye as well.)

Upside is, they'll probably make halflife3 when any of that happens

Do you think a good game is likely to be made under those circumstances?

I hope by the time he's ready to retire, there'll be an AI replica ready to take his place.

brought to you by GabeN-vidia

I think there's zero chance they can make a halflife 3 that'd live up to the hype and actually feel like halflife, and that's likely why they haven't made it.

It's a similar situation to what happened to the fallout series. Bethesda took a stab at it, but, if you loved fallout 1 and 2, nothing they made really felt like fallout, even if they were good games.

Not quite on the level of duke nukem forever, mainly because apogee was mismanaged at it's very core, and valve, well, hard to say that it's not managed well.

The thing is, making a good game is not really necessary here. They could make a mediocre halflife3, get slaughtered in the reviews, and still make a ton of profit, Gaben just won't do it because he doesn't want to go out like that. Understandable, but, it's mostly his fault that he's in this situation. If they released 3 a couple years after the episodes, they could have continued that incremental release pattern more or less indefinitely, it's just that at the time they were focused on other things (that turned out to be more profitable) and by the time they got back to making games again, it was too late, too much hype to live up to, so on the shelf it goes.

> Gaben just won't do it because he doesn't want to go out like that.

I just don't think he cares. half life 3 can sell 100m copies at $70 a pop (so, 7 billion dollars in raw revenue before various fees) and it still wouldn't touch Steam, which has estimated 9 billion dollar revenue in 2022 alone. Maybe it'd make even more as a service game or by integrating steam marketplace stuff like TF2/Counterstrike, but the number of games that make steam level revenues year after year can be counted on one hand.

For some reference, Fortnite hit 6b in 2022 and 26b in 6 years leading up to 2022. very strong average of 4.3b, but fortnite's game team is twice* the number of employees Valve has in the entire studio. A lot of labor needed to maintain one of the highest earning games out there, and Steam still comes out on top in raw revenue.

(I can't find exact Valve numbers, but LinkedIn still lists them with "200-500" employees. And since Epic has at least half of its 4000 staff on Fortnite...)

> GOG's Galaxy platform is what I wish all gaming platforms to be.

A DRM medium that claims to be DRM free? That's a weird thing to want.

Plenty of games that GOG sells will refuse to run, or disable features, if Galaxy isn't running in the background.

Could give examples?

Disabling features is reasonable if they require the service to operate.

The only feature that requires Galaxy to operate is registering Galaxy achievements.

Galaxy is adding almost zero value for players. And we keep getting games that won't run unless it's running. (Or -- forgive me if I overspoke -- games that will run but won't let you save the game.)

The cost-benefit balance is very clearly far into the negatives. Why would you want another platform to implement something similar?

Achievements are a value add. Galaxy offers other social features, as well, which are value adds. Cloud saves are also a value add.

And again, disabling those features is reasonable.

I, honstly, was not aware of that. A GOG game that refuses to run without require drM is anathema to its only distinction from any other service.

Can you provide an example of a game that refuses to run without GOG Galaxy in the background?

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...

> Beat Hazard 2 - online DRM. The game can't be started at all without being online. It is fully DRM-ed!

> Fishing: North Atlantic - Scallops Expansion. - does not work without Galaxy. In other words: this DLC is COMPLETELY DRM-ED! (Update 08/2022: GOG said that it was fixed, but it's only partially. The DLC can be installed and played offline, but it still requires Galaxy running in the background to be recognized as installed.)

> King of Seas - Possibly a bug, but it isn't possible to save the game without Galaxy.

> Spellforce 3 - Skirmishes against the AI require an online connection.

> Tempest - crashes when started without Galaxy since the last update. Possibly a bug, but so far GOG's only solution is 'Use Galaxy'.

> Two Point Hospital - part of the single-player content is gated through online connectivity. I.e. one has to register online and be online to unlock. Plus: core gameplay mechanics (staff handling, diagnostics) are bugged in offline mode.

> Northgard - solo mode required Galaxy. But according to GOG and the devs, that was a bug and as of 02.04.2021 the solo mode is DRM-free again. ... However, it was still not possible to select opponents for skirmishes in offline mode. You need to be online to select an opponent for offline skirmish mode. But as of 05.06.2022 solo mode now doesn't require Galaxy to select opponents anymore. Northgard is finally DRM-free again.

> Absolver - Boss re-matches are locked behind an online requirement. Boss loot too. As well as some techniques that can be used in offline play but can only be learned online. Absolver also installs the invasive EAC anti-cheat software even for single player and won't start without it.

> A list of multiplayer games with DRM will get very, very long.

> just assume that all multiplayer games, that aren't on the 'DRM-free multiplayer list', are DRM-ed.

I am done with steam because its forcing me to update my computer from windows 7, which I am not going to do.

They have given you ample warning and did not stop you from downloading any games you purchased.

who cares about the warning if its extremely inconvenient. Tell you what, I'm going to format your computer on Jan 1. You have plenty of warning so no big woop.

There is no world in which supporting an operating system for 14 years, 8 years past the support of the vendor, can be described as “extremely inconvenient”. Again, they are not deleting anything off of your computer so your snark about wiping my machine is disingenuous and irrelevant.

> "Again, they are not deleting anything off of your computer so your snark about wiping my machine is disingenuous and irrelevant."

The games I purchased no longer work.

>who cares about the warning if its extremely inconvenient.

1. you're not mandated to use Windows 10/11. you can use Mac or Linux

2. Windows 7 got its last security update almost 4 years ago. This isn't even about Steam at this point; more and more software will be incompatible and you're more and more vulnerable to breaches as you use that OS. You should probably change to something receiving updates. I don't particular care what.

>Tell you what, I'm going to format your computer on Jan 1.

I didn't know now being able to get security updates from a 3rd party application equated to formating your hard drive. Should probably fix that since you're 4 years out of date with Windows 7.

But you are not buying ANY digital content, read the damn TOS! you only lease digital content not buy...

Do you not think companies were smart enough to plan for this??

It’s for this reason that I only rent on Amazon. ˜$2-$5 feels pretty reasonable to me, and I know I’m not owning it. I generally don’t buy any content with DRM in it, since I know I haven’t really purchased it. It doesn’t seem like consumers are very interested actual digital ownership, and smartphones tend to push the boundary even further here. It’s not impossible to put your own digital files on a smart phone and view them, but it seems significantly more difficult and annoying than doing the same on a personal computer. I believe smart phones and embedded devices (smart TVs, Rokus, etc) are doing a lot to set the “rental-only” expectation with consumers. Many consumers may have never experienced a real digital alternative to “rental-only."

> It’s not impossible to put your own digital files on a smart phone and view them, but it seems significantly more difficult and annoying than doing the same on a personal computer.

Plex. It's an app. And you don't even have to put the files on the phone... you just stream to the phone from hardware at home. Problem's already been solved on the technology end of it.

I'm not saying that _I_ can't manage to do it. But I want it to be as easy as it is on a computer. Plug in a USB, navigate the file system. Drop the files where I want. I don't want to set up a streaming server in my house just because smart phones are terrible.

are you kidding? the government LOVES this. Now they can also tell companies to block your content and all of your purchases with the flick of a switch. Say something the US government doesnt like, and all of those youtube movie purchases are gone with 1 ban.

And these companies wonder why so many continue to pirate.

Pirated copies do not get erased due to the whims of the copyright owner.

I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common. I pirate when I literally can't give anyone my money, or after something like this happens. Before is just trying to justify not compensating the creators. I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I think supporting them is important, or we’ll end up with media made for the masses, that do pay.

edit: there be pirates in these waters!

edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.

Ahhh while I've never had specifically purchased media disappear like this, movies that I want to rewatch do often migrate around from streaming service to streaming service, which is fine if you subscribe to all of them but is really a hassle when you start watching something on Netflix and then when you come back to it a month later discover it's not available anymore.

Sure, but that's not related. There's no concept of ownership with the library of a streaming service. I think that's well understood by the general public.

Sure it's well understood that it's a service fail and poor quality service leads to piracy.

You are aware services like that rose to prominence precisely because people decided to sacrifice ownership for rentals, right?

You didn't pay $10 for perpetual ownership of IASIP. You paid $10 for a month of access to Netflix or whatever service hosted that show. I still buy physical media or digital downloads of any work I want to keep for more than a month because I value it for those cases.

In the past people still would rent more than they owned. They just traded having to visit a store with a selection limited by physical space for an instantly available digital service.

But you'd never show up to a Hollywood Video looking to rent Terminator 2 and get told that it's a Blockbuster exclusive rental. There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter.

Netflix Streaming gave bigger selection and instant access. You could get 15 minutes into a movie, realize it sucks, and you didn't have to drive back to the video store for a different one.

Nowadays the selection on any streaming service feels like 1/3 of what a VHS rental place would have. Sure there's more actual quantity, but it's like the $1 rental bin. Currently, if you pick X popular movie and Y streaming service, odds are you cannot watch it on that streaming service.

>There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter.

I mean, it sounds like they simply learned their lesson. Or got more budget to publish such stuff. Same tactics but now more effective after giving what the audience actually wants.

Its certainly an interesting phenomenon. Hosting brick and mortar is crazy expensive so it makes sense to delegate that. Hosting servers is cheaper and way more scalable (mostly dealing with country laws instead of every single nuldijg regulation code), so it's no surprise studios want to self-distribute now that the barrier lowered.

> You can't claim it's common.

cough kindle... cough

Are you aware of any cases where they didn't refund [1]?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

What good is that? If I buy a book or a movie I want to own it forever not until the company decides to take it back regardless of giving a refund…

I don't think that's the point. If the industry is going to regularly make me go through incessant cycles of purchasing, getting refunded, rebuying (for the same price?) then I'm going to pirate the content. What an absolutely absurd expectation.

I thought the point was ownership and how flimsy ownership lead to Piracy. Not a personal rant on how your bad customer service experience justifies your decision to pirate.

I don't care if people "steal" from billion dollar corporations. But let's not mince words and pretend it's some Robin Hood act of altruism. The companies already took that piracy into account on their budget book anyway; they won't change their ways over this.

That whole Gabe Newell quote about "piracy is a service issue" goes both ways. Piracy isn't always convinent and plenty of people don't wanna set up plex servers and search torrents and organize their library to get "the best experience". They just want to turn on device and play/watch/read seemlessly

What? Unilaterally refunding a purchase I made years ago isn't "bad customer service". It's just a company being shitty and not caring. I am the party that acted in good faith and purchased the content! What are you even talking about?

Companies don't like refunding either in all fairness. And your phrasing makes it sound like this happens to you regularly.

I don't think "refund" is the best use of word here. That's usually a customer returning a product. And a company with bad refund policies tends to have bad customer service.

So from your perspective it would be oke if randomly thieves enter your home, "take" some stuff from you and leaving behind a calling card so you can arrange to get paid for it.

This metaphor breaks down because you don't own the servers hosting the stuff in question. It's not your house to begin with.

And it's not my point at all in that comment. I'm just saying most 'thieves' aren't trying to prove they are good people by stealing like how piracy arguments oh so often go here. Nor trying to pretend they are archivist saving artifacts from disappearing off the face of the earth. They are either greedy, desperate to survive, and in a few rare cases a pathological disorder.

It's premium entertainment, and people either want to consume a product but dont/can't pay. It's that simple. and I'm not saying that from a judgmental POV either. I've done it quite a bit as a grade schooler.

The entire point is indeed that you can't own it. You saying it's not comparable because you don't own the servers is non-sensical. It's not like you can choose not use the servers. Well you can. You have to pirate it.

There's plenty (most of the) comments talking about ownership, I have nothing more to add on that topic. It's only tangentially related to my main point in that it's an argument used to defend piracy. And it's IMO a futile argument because people can't agree what "ownership" is.

For me, I try to find drm free copies of games when possible, or physical media when that fails. That's enough for me to feel "ownership".

----

I simply wanted to talk about the internet attitude towards piracy in this thread. I've done it but I never boasted around about slaying some corrupt corporation by ripping an ISO off a disc, or simply finding a torrent.

No, I did it to either not pay for a game or to mod games with no native mod support. I'm not a good person to begin with and I don't pretend I'm a good person by pirating.

"We broke into your house last night and took that book off the shelf. But we left 20 bucks on the counter so it's ok!"

In the case in that link, the publisher was not legitimate. Amazon (literally) sold a pirated copy. They refunded, allowing you to buy a non-pirated copy. The alternative would be to swap it out for a copy from a legitimate publisher, but I assume there are laws around swapping goods out from under people.

Yes. When the old online Dominion lost the license to the Dominion card game, they didn't refund buyers with cash; they refunded the buyers with some kind of digital dollars to spend on their other unattractive products. So essentially every dollar spent on Dominion expansions was lost. Really soured me on the idea of purchasing online board games.

Is it common? I only know of the ironic removal of 1984, and that was in 2009. I've got 500+ books in my kindle library and am not aware of it ever happening to me.

And to be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if it has happened again since, but I've never heard of any, so I agree with the GP comment's assertion that it isn't common.

I don't know if it's common, but I've seen enough of it that I don't trust companies with their practice. Also it goes both ways: Remember when Apple forced a U2 album on iTunes users ?

They didn’t “force” anything, they made it available to download if you wanted.

https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...

If you haven't used Apple ecosystem stuff you may not realize, but there are many ways in which this album surfaces, such as simply pressing Play on your Apple Watch (without having specified any song)... I've accidentally played U2's music so many times since Apple "gifted" it to me, despite having zero interest in hearing that music at that time.

Nope. It was right there in my music collection where it doesn't belong.

> I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common

I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?

What he should have written is "I've never experienced it in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media, am not acquainted with anyone who has even though most people I know purchase digital media, and it is only been reported a handful of times".

Unless it happens a lot but doesn't get any publicity, which seems pretty unlikely as there are too many widely read forums where people it happened to would report it, and too many publications like Ars, Tech Dirt, The Register, Torrent Freak, and many others that would jump on any such story, we must indeed conclude that it is not common.

The important question is not if it is common but rather will it become common?

Discovery is part of Warner, which is currently being run by someone who will kill content for the tax write offs. He killed "Final Space" for a tax write off, cancelling future season and pulling existing seasons from streaming and sale. And last year they killed a movie, "Acme vs. Coyote", that they had completed and scheduled for release because they decided they'd rather write it off.

Because of that right now I would not buy any streaming content from Warner. In the specific case of Discovery it looks like they are just pulling it from other platforms so that it can be exclusive to services they own, like Max and Discovery+.

That probably means it is safe for now to buy Warner owned content through Warner owned platforms, but I'd worry that in the future they will decide to write it off and it will leave their own platforms too.

I can Google a car crash down to an exact street in my area with no problem. I'd need to Google pretty hard to fine another instance of a store delisting a video game and retroactively removing it from the buyer's library.

I can only recall it happening once before on steam, and it was due to malware on the now delisted game.

I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.

This is really common with any games that need to license a ton of things in order to exist. The contract for using a wrestler's wrestler's likeness usually has a time limit. As well as the songs they use for their intro/outro.

Racing games have this issue too if they use real car brands. You can't buy the previous Forza games or some old Codemasters racing games anymore because of expired licensing.

At least on Steam they're still available for download if you previously purchased them. No clue what the experience is in console or other PC stores.

From a user's perspective that is incredibly hostile. They push digital goods as more convenient than physical media but don't make it clear that you lose the right to download it after a certain time. That functionality is sold as a benefit but the limited time isn't made clear.

> I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved.

I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.

I suspect you haven't checked. Or this means you only play big name (EA, Ubisoft, etc) games and only watch/read big studio content (Disney, etc). That's fine, but it's trivial to find lists of failed production houses, especially with games [1], with Embracer and Volition shutting down this year (as more examples significant to me). And, you might be surprised at the long list of movie studios [2].

[1] https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-meta...

[2] https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#b...

Almost all PC games that utilized Games For Windows Live stopped working (new installs and reinstalls could no longer be performed) when Microsoft shut down the service, and AFAIK there are still a couple games that never updated to remove the reliance on GFWL DRM and can only be played by pirating.

That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E...

That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.

As I said, pirating after is one thing. Justifying the pirating with a possible future event that may not happen is another.

Justifying insurance with a possible future event that may not happen is another.

Sure but it's very much a minority point of view.

If the work to crack a game isn't done early on, it can become infinitely harder to do that work later, especially if there's a multiplayer component that needs to be reverse engineered. Being proactive about cracking, emulation, and piracy is the pro-social and pro-preservation of our culture/technology/heritage move here.

Cracking the game early is completely tangential to you supporting the developers of the thing you enjoy. I've bought games and then immediately downloaded the pirated version before. If you don't support the things you like, you're going to end up with the things that everyone else likes.

Luckily Dark Souls got re-released on Steam without Windows Live. Until that point my purchased physical copy was unusable. Well, it's still unusable but at least the CD key got me a working version.

You can still download and use gfwl to play the games. At least I could play lost planet 2 the last time I checked.

Multiplayer on the other hand...

>lost planet 2

Only because Capcom had to put in extra dev work to make it work again after the GFWL shutdown: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/qq3sq9/capcom_has...

If you buy a defective game on PSN and then get a refund, your entire PSN account is nuked. If you buy a game on Steam and the devs push malware in an update and you get a refund, your entire Steam account is nuked. An example of a defective game you can currently buy on PSN is Kingdom: Two Crowns. An example of a game whose developer pushed malware in an update automatically downloaded by Steam is Street Fighter V.

In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.

This sound more like an argument for companies needing to be punished for retaliating against refunds and chargebacks, more than an argument for piracy.

How else do you punish them if not by affecting their revenue?

You can't punish them for something they haven't done, by pirating before they do it. There will be no correlation, so no feedback mechanism, in that scenario. What do you see as the signal they should pick up on? How will they differentiate it from "they pirate no matter what we do"? These are genuine questions.

Government regulation I guess.

But i feel "punish" is the wrong lens to look at this. It's hard for the individual to punish a corporation. Ultimately the goal is to maximize your own purchase so the best way to achieve that is to find a better product. Then that merchant grows based on their ability to serve the customer. In my experience, most companies tend to be punished not by people or competition, but by their own folly.

And if there really is no merchant serving your product for your price, that's a much larger discussion to have.

I wouldn't say Street Fighter 5 put out an update with malware. It did put out an update that opened up a kernel level vulnerability to unprivileged programs which is extremely bad and worth requesting a refund for. But I wouldn't say Intel sold me malware because my CPU was susceptible to spectre and meltdown.

Your account is nuked if you make your credit card issuer perform a chargeback, not if you request a refund and are granted one. I have refunded at least 10 titles on Steam, and my account is still there.

It's not new that you do not own DRM uncumbered files. It's true that it was expected that you'll lose access due to drm server disappearing not pure deletion ...

Glad you asked. Steam stole my Dungeon Siege content. I doubt there is any language in their TOS that lets them do what they did to people who bought DS which came with the expansion Legends of Aranna, only to remove the expansion from libraries after some kind of licensing dispute. Zero refund.

There's a guide to enable the dlc again.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...

I pirate loads. But if it's a small studio I always buy the BluRay in addition. If it's an excellent film or show but it's made by a large studio, I check to see if it's available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, and if not, I buy the BluRay. Thought process being that it's the job of the streaming service to compensate the creators at that point (which a large point of the writer's strike was to ensure that they do.) If it's something I'm certain I'll only watch once, I just keep the pirated copy. It would be nice if there were some kind of, "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," Venmo-like service. Maybe every studio could just put up a Twitch stream that I could donate some bits to.

But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.

> "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee,"

For me, this is a rental.

That seems pretty reasonable. Is RedBox still a thing? Can I rent a DVD and give it right back the next minute? Are there better methods to rent movies these days? I guess Amazon Prime exists.

Gosh, but you wouldn't download a car even if you could, would you?

Once metal 3d printing is affordable in the home, I'm absolutely downloading a car.

Carbon fiber might even be possible before metal, for at least the structural frame. Probably wouldn't pass a single NHTSA test, but imagine how cool it would be if you could assemble your vehicle this way, with a CAD system doing the heavy math calculations, then go to a junk yard and get your suspension, axles, motors, etc. Plug the motor into an rPi that is your (whatever they call automotive computers, ECU?). Not sure how you'd do the interior or exterior, and the SRS would never work right. But you could theoretically get most of the way there, to a dune buggy.

downloading a car is easy. Getting it registered at the DMV is the hard part. Very easy attack vector unless this is just going to be a street racing car.

I might.

What percentage of people who pirate do you think do it for ideological reasons, rather than just liking free stuff?

Is this a tangential question? The OP suggests that there’s a utility to piracy beyond ideological reasons and just getting stuff for free. In other words, the categories you posed are not mutually exclusive.

People may start out doing it because it’s free, but likely keep doing it for ideological reasons after they’ve seen so many paying customers get screwed over.

I’ll pay for digital music on iTunes, which is DRM free, but won’t buy movies there, as the DRM means it’s only good as long as Apple decides to keep it going. As we move from people maintaining media libraries to streaming, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those digital copies become worthless.

I can't speak for anybody else but this really resonates with me.

I think there's another component though. The megacorps that provide streaming video are so far removed from the actual creators, it almost feels like the right thing to do is to avoid lining their pockets with more profit. This is a stark contrast to music, where you have small groups of people you actively want to support.

Given the friction to paying for the music you want is so low and the relationship is more "personal" it just has a different feel.

Would be interesting to compare a production patreon VS a distribution voluntarily payment.

iTunes DRM used to be abysmal. There was a time when the music was not DRM-free. Not only that, you were limited to the number of copies of CDs you could burn your music to, and you were limited to 5 devices (computers running iTunes, iPods, et al).

Deletion of previously licensed content will likely entice at least a few.

Almost everyone I know who pirates at this point does so for one of two reasons:

* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.

* content was not able to be purchased.

I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.

Or stupid region restrictions.

Example: I signed up for crunchyroll after I learned a show I wanted to watch was there.

Then after I paid, found out that on my country, it is not available.

Or when I bought a ton of books in fictionwise, then Barnes e noble bought them and restricted downloads only to people from USA. Funnily I only bought from that site because was the only site that sold to my country.

Or just no availability. I want to watch an HBO show. Not available in my country. Make it available and get my money.

Wow you have a completely different experience from me. 100% of the pirates I know are pirating entertainment products that they usually wouldn’t otherwise buy. Not, like, getting back at some company who wronged them. Interesting lesson on different cultural groups I guess!

This! A lot of young people pirate media to save money. But then when they grow up and start working, they /still/ keep pirating because now they are used to getting their hands on quality media that they like, rather than consuming whatever "curated content" the algorithm deems fit to make available. Usually these people are also subscribed to regular services, but still find it a far better experience to pirate stuff.

EDIT: Fixed typo "grow up".

I disagree with this. I pirated everything when I was a teenager/in college because I didn’t have money. Now the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video. If it’s not on any of those FIVE subscription services, I’m pirating shamelessly and vindictively.

Pirating music isn’t worth my time with Spotify Premium.

I'm just out of uni and still don't have a lot of money, so still pirating. However-

>the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video.

You maintain 5 subscriptions and still have to pirate every now and again? I just watch whatever I want on plex+radarr/sonarr. That sounds exhausting.

I don't think I'll want to follow in your footsteps. Maybe I'll take out subscriptions for the things I really like, but I'm probably going to keep using pirated content for my actual consumption - its just a better experience at this point.

There’s a balance I think many of us try to strike because we find pirating “everything” to be cumbersome, but at the same time we recognize that pirating is unavoidable as there are some TV shows and movies that aren’t on any subscription service it seems, nevermind the 4 or 5 we happen to have.

You can of course just “download everything” with sonarr and radarr, but then you’re maintaining a server at home with X hard drives to store all the content.

But yeah don’t pay for subscription services if you don’t want to.

That's fair. My server setup is very small (pi with a harddrive) so I'm deleting stuff I don't watch anymore after it's seeded. And it is a hassle to set up. However I've also found now that it is setup, it takes basically no effort to maintain it, and I'd want the pi for other stuff anyway.

No. I started paying for movies and music the moment I could afford them which was relatively early into my adult, independent life. I still pirate content but it's because of regional restrictions, content being removed from my streaming service or otherwise unavailable in digital form.

>I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone,

Ive head

- beats paying, or too expensive - because I can lol - because fuck [insert company here] - because Plex is more convenient - because I want to apply an english subtitle/patch to it - because mods

none of my friends were banned from PSN/Netflix/Amazon/etc. It's just cheaper or more convinient for them.

granted, these were mostly for games, and there has yet to be a "Netflix for games" as of now.

It's impossible to say, but studies have shown that the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on their preferred media, so an unwillingness to spend money doesn't seem to be the biggest reason.

I don’t know what percentage it is, but people in my age range (40-50) that I know who pirate tend to do so for fear of losing the media they love. I don’t even have time to watch 1% of what I have downloaded on my storage drives, but when I want to watch Mrs. Doubtfire in 25 years I want to make damn sure I can watch the original. I have little faith that whatever conglomerate owns that IP in a quarter century is going to make it easy for me to do so. Or make it even possible.

I will pirate things I pay for, since there's simply no other way to actually own a copy. One prime example is the latest Star Trek show. The ads on Paramount are absolutely intolerable, despite paying for the service. So we continue to pay and watch ad-free pirated copies.

The exception for me is old stuff. I have exactly zero qualms about not paying for a forty year old movie. Half the actors are dead anyway. The film studio doesn't need or deserve my money for something nobody alive had anything to do with.

I do blanket pirate music, though. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy music without 99.999% of the money going to a label or a studio. Apart from bandcamp and other indie stores, but those typically aren't my jam in the first place. If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.

Oh, and I will gleefully pirate textbooks, of course. Also research papers and most nonfiction in general. Audiobooks and fiction are a hard no unless unavailable or older than I am. Everyone should pirate textbooks always, it's only just.

So yeah, mostly for ideological reasons and the incomparable convenience.

Why do you pay for Paramount+ Essential (the one with ads) and then pirate stuff that’s available through it, rather than A) not pay for Paramount+ at all and just pirate or B) pay for the more expensive Paramount+ plan and not pirate?

Because even paying for the ad free service, you don't get a copy to play offline. Most of the time the performance I get from Paramount streaming is awful. Everything just works better when I stream from the server on my local network.

I also don't have to worry about my favorite shows disappearing from the service on a whim. The files on my server will always be available to me.

So… why pay for Paramount+ at all?

> If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.

I've had artists send me mp3 in the morning after I gave them cash at a concert the night before. :-)

The “theft” happens on both sides.

I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient. Why? Pirating content is inconvenient. Popcorn Time was as close as it got to “convenient” but that was quickly shut down/abandoned.

>I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient.

yup, and the cost there is instead put on the artist. Who don't make any reasonable money but need to do it "for exposure".

I'm not surprised movies and games didn't follow. game devs and actors don't get paid tiny residuals, but instead are paid upfront.

I pirate because it has become impossible to purchase stuff. So in fact the only way to experience it on my terms is to pirate.

Personally I do it because I travel a lot. I also have Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV and Prime that I never bother looking at. Every new country I go to different movies and different shows are unavailable.

In one country show X is available on service Y - in another it’s available on service Z, in another it’s not available at all.

However, they are always available on Torrentleech and The Pirate Bay.

What percentage globally? I have no idea. I'm not a pollster but I'd hate to try to design a poll that could figure that out. It seems like the sort of thing people will lie about.

When I was young, I pirated because I was broke.

When I got a job and grew older, I would continue to pirate, because it was annoying to shuffle through a DVD collection or for the game the disk to put into the drive bay for a game that was already installed on the computer's hard disk. I regularly downloaded no-cd cracks for games I had legally bought, and if I'm going to be fucking around with shady executables from disreputable corners of the internet anyway, I might as well save myself a car trip to the mall.

When Netflix streaming became ubiquitous and Steam became good, I stopped pirating, because it was more convenient to do media legally than it was to pirate them.

Now that Netflix has been Balkanized into a dozen competing services, all of which are shitty, I pirate TV/movies again, because it is more convenient to always know what site to go to to acquire media. I subscribe to Amazon prime for the free shipping, but even for media which is available on Amazon Prime, I still pirate it because -- wait for it -- the DRM doesn't work.

I still buy games on Steam because it's easy and convenient. If Ubisoft and EA get their way and cut into Steam's market share and make it so there are too few games available to play on Steam, or games that I've already paid for start becoming un-bought from my library, or Steam starts becoming unusable due to onerous DRM, I'll start pirating again.

Music is more complicated. In the '90s I ripped all my CDs into MP3s, and burned them onto data CDs which I put into a big ass CD changer in the trunk of my car. Later on, I could fit all of them on a DVD in the head unit. Later on, I could put them all on a USB thumb stick which I plugged into the console. As time went on, I realized I wasn't engaging with my music in any meaningful way. I'd turn it on and hit random and literally never think about what I was listening to. So I've picked up vinyl specifically because it's less convenient. I have to actually think about what music I want to listen to, and then actively make a decision.

So do I pirate movies and TV because I like free stuff? Not really. I probably spent in the ballpark of $50 on games a month, maybe $200 on music per month. I have the money to pay for video media. But the last thing I watched was the Legend of Vox Machina, which is produced by Amazon Studios specifically for Amazon Prime Video, which I already pay for, and I pirated it anyway because it's more convenient.

So do I pirate movies and TV for ideological reasons? Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, Hollywood is kinda gross, but so is the video games industry and the music industry.

Sorry for rambling. I guess my point is that it's incorrect to set this up as a dichotomy between getting free shit and sticking it to the man. For me at least, it's neither of those things.

At 50 I pirate because of convenience. Before it was because I could not stand the ads, today it is because I will not go through hoops to get something in country X just because I am in France.

I have ample money and subscribe to netflix, amazon prime and something else I forgot (I hardly watch tv).

I never pirate music anymore - Spotify is perfect. I have a family subscription.

I subscribe to Youtube because I like the content free from ads.

Netflix is getting worse and worse so someday I will stop the subscription and get the content via BitTorrent

I subscribe to prime video and another streaming service, that basically cover all my streaming needs. However, sometimes their DRM means I cannot screen share on discord or parsec or whatever and watch with my friend. So, I pirate it.

Or just out of convenience?

If purchase is not ownership then piracy is not stealing.

Simple as.

Fascinating perspective. I wonder if such an argumentation could stand on legal grounds.

I doubt it. The laws are written by corporations to protect corporate interests and you may find industry sympathizers all over the place (see https://www.wired.com/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/ and https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/riaa-lobbyist-be...)

Your mistake is imagining that piracy gets legally persecuted for more than one in a million cases.

Sure, they make an example of some poor guy every now and then and they cross their fingers hoping that this scary PR turns people away from piracy, yeah. Which is wishful thinking and they know it.

99.9999% of everyone pirating though? They are never going to be persecuted.

Turns out, if you ask people to pay and can't even withhold a fair bargain from your side -- as in, don't delete stuff from people's libraries -- they stop caring about the legality of it all. Especially with the extra context that this legality is a table that's severely tilted in the favor of the vendors and is not consumer-friendly.

The truth that the copyright holders don't like is this: people, even very technically illiterate people, are not as stupid so as to pay ownership but get rented goods license in return. It ain't happening. They coasted on the public's indifference for a long time but it's visible that the public's perception is changing.

>Your mistake is imagining that piracy gets legally persecuted for more than one in a million cases.

that 1 in a million tends to be the one person serving the million, though. That's why they don't waste time chasing the customers like the war on drugs. Go right after the dealer and throw the book at them.

>Turns out, if you ask people to pay and can't even withhold a fair bargain from your side -- as in, don't delete stuff from people's libraries -- they stop caring about the legality of it all.

Good thing most people still pay in that case. The other part of that metaphor is that 999,999 people may pirate, but 5m or so are still making that product profitable. anti-piracy isnt just about making pirates relent, but to shut down future pirates in later products.

>They coasted on the public's indifference for a long time but it's visible that the public's perception is changing.

could have fooled me. If we're being realistic, I doubt this will affect more than 10k people. How many people really used a play station store to buy a digital movie? And remember that PS shut down their movies side 2.5 years ago.

> could have fooled me. If we're being realistic, I doubt this will affect more than 10k people.

Could have fooled me x2 -- we both can pull numbers out of our bottoms. ;)

The part you seem to be downplaying is this: there are things that can't be directly measured. Public resentment is one of them. It's one of those variables that grows and grows until at one point an eruption happens. Include that in your analysis, history has proven that this factor does exist.

> Good thing most people still pay in that case. The other part of that metaphor is that 999,999 people may pirate, but 5m or so are still making that product profitable. anti-piracy isnt just about making pirates relent, but to shut down future pirates in later products.

Obviously, yes. It's a scaremongering tactic. I'll admit they are succeeding, one after another trackers fall down with a tempo that the pirate community does not seem to be able to sustain; they bring some other trackers back up and that seems to be enough for them for now, if I read TorrentFreak's articles well that is.

So back to the original topic: what stands in court is only a short-term factor. Again, looking at the pirate scene and the steadily declining revenue from streaming and the slow and steady grow of piracy (again), I'd say part of the people had enough. Start persecuting more aggressively and things might escalate in unpredictable ways.

How will this unfold? Beats me, and you, but I am interested in following the battle.

The only legal grounds that really matter are that (in the US) an IP address cannot be used to identify an individual.

https://www.technologylawdispatch.com/2011/05/privacy-data-p...

If there's no owner, there is no one to steal from.

I suppose I’d have sympathy if someone previously purchased content, lost it due to this action, and then pirated a copy to continue being able to watch it.

I don’t have much sympathy for people who see these headlines and use it as a blanket justification to pirate anything and everything.

I don't pirate, but I would understand the position of acquiring any object - physical or digital - preferably from the place that won't try to take it back later. Pirated files do not carry the risks that purchased files carry. Risks that range from the files being deleted later, to data breaches exposing PII.

that's okay, the pirates don't need your sympathy. Our TV library didn't just get deleted.

i really don't try to justify my piracy much anymore. i like free shit and it's easy. but things like this really make it hard to feel guilty.

You're much better off getting a copy of everything you buy digitally before some company remotes into your devices and steals your legally purchased media. You might find certain content much more difficult to find if you wait.

I don't even pirate and I do sympathise and excuse completely.

It's perfectly rational to me to decide to avoid getting burned in the first place, and actually a bit less rational to knowingly allow it, then wait for it to happen, and only then do something about it.

I don't sympathize. But I don't damn them either.

I especially don't sympathize for those who feel they need to profess loud and proud and act like Robin Hood for pirating. No you're not. Limousine liberalism at its finest. Acting like their actions are going to topple the empire instead of being seen as an ant grabbing some tiny crumb off the kitchen floor.

You can't even claim some technical boasting. You downloaded a file off the internet based on the work someone else did to upload said file, on a website that did the work of hosting. La dee da. It's not the 90's anymore; I'm not going to praise someone for doing a basic internet function in 2023.

So you expect people not to take lessons from such occurrences and not attempt to avoid getting burned in the first place?

Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.

That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.

Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

I've found Amazon Video to be fairly consistent. I don't buy many movies, nor rewatch them often, but they have done well by me. But the video game companies are fond of planned obsolescence and have happily abandoned their customers for decades. Buying a video from Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony is just asking to have it disappear when they build their next "Store."

Amazon is no safer in this respect.

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490#:~:text=Ava....

"Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming."

I think every service that doesn't allow you to download the video in MP4 will have something like this. Amazon just seems to not have exercised this option on me yet.

I can't say the same for the Playstation store. In the future I would love to have a digital collection of DVDs and BluRay backed up to Glacier or something.

On you, yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912

Sadly, for video content there's not likely to be any physical ownership within a few years.

At this point, I'd say ever. Not sure what you think will happen within a few years that will change.

Right now there's bluray still, but my understanding is that that's likely to go away too in a few years.

why? There are still DVDs being sold of new movies.

It's definitely a niche instead of the default at this point, but I don't see Blu-Rays going away entirely for at least a decade.

It could be longer, but for example Best Buy is stopping stocking bluray in the US. I believe manufacturers are stopping making players too. If streaming can further close the quality gap then it's hard to imagine it'll last a decade.

> Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.

The Xbox store has been great for me. And their backwards compatibility is amazing; I've bought and played Xbox 360 Lego games with my son on the Xbox One.

> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)

I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.

(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)

This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.

Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.

it's actually a reasonably cost-effective way to collect music by going to used book stores and buying used CDs, then ripping them and serving them to yourself with something like Navidrome so that you have the convenience of streaming w/ the physical disk on a shelf somewhere

I can't stand the stupid streaming "But not on THIS service" model of movie watching, so this is how I do movies. $5 on ebay gets you pretty much any DVD you want, $100 or so for a box set of some television show, and ripping DVDs is literally one click. I've wanted to switch to BluRays lately, because HD, and they are barely more expensive than DVDs on ebay, but ripping blurays is NOT trivial.

Standard Blu Rays? Are you sure about that? I started ripping my blus at the beginning of the year and don't remember it being more difficult than buying any random Blu ray drive, downloading MakeMKV and clicking the start button.

Now, I'll 100% agree about 4K Blu rays. I got lucky in that I bought one of the handful of drives that supports ripping 4k disks (since its encryption keys were leaked?) but even after that it required finding and flashing custom firmware that was a hassle. But I got it working which is cool.

> The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements

Isn't the same happening with video games? I've seen video games remove some music from their soundtracks as their limited-time licenses lapsed.

It's not just video games and music. Adobe Lightroom 6 was sold with a perpetual license, but its mapping and object detection libraries did not have a perpetual license, so even though you can run Adobe Lightroom 6 with your perpetual license today, those features no longer work unless you fiddle with your system clock.

Buying discs doesn't protect you anymore. Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.

I have a physical copy of Overwatch 1. When Overwatch 2 came out, it was an "upgrade" to Overwatch 1, and they simultaneously killed all Overwatch 1 servers. Nobody can play Overwatch 1 anymore.

Maybe Nintendo Switch is the way. It seems physical copies only protect you on platforms where offline use is standard.

I'm talking about single player games. Multiplayer used to be fun but now they're all IAP fests so I ignore them and have no opinion on them.

Edit: and duh. When you buy a game that's only played online you're dependent on the servers staying up. It's logical.

There are other kinds of games though.

>I'm talking about single player games.

This means nothing, there have been piles of single player games that have required a connection check before working. Sim City 4 was an example of this.

And, even buying it and not having that check doesn't mean that it won't be updated to require a server (you have an actual disk to reinstall right, because the original installer may disappear too).

SimCity (2013), not SimCity 4. SimCity 4 was the last beloved SimCity game, released in 2003.

You're talking about EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar titles there. Case closed.

Incidentally, if you must get something from those 3, they're forbidden to require an account on at least the PlayStation. Not sure about XBox.

do they need to list every single player game that has a day one patch not included on a physical disc? I guess we haven't gotten so far in game patching that some retro gamers buy a new copy of a game and can't update to 1.0.0 now.

The companies I listed require an account with them, not day one patches.

Both affect the ability to play a game out of the box, should servers be down.

Only multiplayer online games. For single player, especially on consoles that still have a bit of QA left, you can live with 1.0.0.

And look on the bright side. If you're stuck on 1.0.0 you're missing the microtransactions they introduced in 1.0.1 after the reviewers finished publishing their reviews.

Edit: why do I get the feeling most of the people disagreeing with me only play PC games from the big 4-5 names? In which case I completely agree with them.

You can still play Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament (1999) online, because third-party game servers used to be the normal way online games worked. Hell, Team Fortress 2 is only playable on third-party servers, as the official servers are full of cheaters.

Many modern games that have only a single-player mode are still intentionally dependent on the servers staying up, and games that have both single-player and online modes will prevent you from playing the offline mode if they can't connect to the servers.

> Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.

This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.

Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.

There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".

Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

>While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.

not necessarily. The prevalence of day one patches means certain single player games may legitimately not work properly because they expect users to at least home in once to get the content they couldn't ship on disc. But they rely on those last minute content to not have major bugs.

The problem is that so many games ship with day-1 updates since they ship on disc buggy and in some cases unplayable. If you need to play the game on a different console that hasn't downloaded the updates and the servers have been shut down then you're doomed to a worse experience.

Piracy (and a PC) is the only option at that point.

To me, this pretty much makes the physical disc a hardware dongle proof of purchase type of item more than a source of code for the game.

Funnily enough the Nintendo Switch actually fixes this. Consoles can share updates peer-to-peer, and it's actually super nifty for local multiplayer groups.

I'm really surprised by that, but that's neat. The next step would be allowing users to export the (probably signed and encrypted) update packages onto their own media for backup on their own terms.

I used to be in the physical disk camp until during a move my ps4 and media collection was stolen. Bought a new ps4, deactivated the stolen ps4 from the account, activated the new ps4 and was able to download all the digital games. The disk games I had to repurchase which in many cases I never bothered. There were only a handful of games that were worth it. No system is perfect...

Yes, but in this case whoever stole your stuff wasn't the person that sold it to you :)

On the other hand they did replace what was stolen from me unlike the vendors of physical versions...

Why is this my problem? Personally, I think companies should simply not lie about what they're offering for my money.

To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if this Playstation move ends in a lawsuit.

>For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital.

the streaming wars more or less solved that problem already. No one is even pretending to sell you content on Netflix, D+, Hulu, Paramount, etc. And that is what's reigning surpreme.

>hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

in theory, sure. They can take control of your accounts. I'm guessing a kid that far off is about as likely to log into my old PSN as they are to hunt down an ancient PS3/4 to play an old disc though.

This is why I'm uncomfortable with paying for digital things that don't come in files and can't be used offline.

Yeah, I've bought a lot of software that gave me a digital download with no DRM/bullshit. I've bought a comedy central special this way too, as well as dozens of albums and books. It's a perfectly agreeable arrangement, but some companies don't want to sell me a clean no-bullshit product and so I won't buy anything from them at all.

The Rossman quote is very apt. If the "purchase" of a file won't give me ownership of the file, then pirating the file isn't theft.

I don’t completely agree with Rossman here. You are buying the streaming right and not the file. What I agree on though is that they don’t make that clear to their customers.

They use terminology such as "purchase" to intentionally lead you to believe that it is a purchase and not renting. Also when they do make it more obvious that it is a license they make you think it is a perpetual license rather than temporary.

This is similar to buying a DVD. You don't buy the right to the video playing on your TV; only the right to play it on your TV from this exact physical disc. If the disc breaks, you have to buy it again.

This has, AFAIK, been ruled not to be the case. You have the right to back up DVDs you legally bought for precisely this reason.

Well, that might depend on where you live. But point being that if your backups also break, you don't have the right to watch the thing any more.

It is possible for your disk and backups to break, or to be stolen, etc. But it’s just an unfortunate thing that can happen to anything you own. It’s different from the corporation taking away the rights of millions of people just because a licence ran out.

That is different. I was making the point that with physical media you don't have an unlimited right to watch forever either.

So am I fine if I stream it from a pirate site rather than downloading it?

> are buying the streaming right and not the file. What I agree on though is that they don’t make that clear to their customers.

No. It’s not a matter of not being clear enough.

If it’s not clear enough, maybe 10-20% of customers would be confused.

I’d bet anything that if we did a survey 80+ percent of users would think that the platform wouldn’t be able to unilaterally revoke their content.

It goes beyond “not clear” and straight into fraud and false advertising.

Ok fine, I bought the streaming rights. Why do they get to take them away from me randomly and arbitrarily?

That's why physical media is slowly fading. Users are shifting to "buying" digitally and companies will axe physical media the first chance they get.

Ironic and predictable that the more they shift to the model that's designed to screw the customers, more customers will pirate media.

> more customers will pirate media.

This seems improbable. Copying media (I've never hijacked a ship at sea) is a skilled activity. Those not constantly practicing the skill, soon lose it. It's not as if you can just ask somewhere how to do it... never mind the bad advice you'd get ("Just go to this shithole website with 1900 popups, postage-stamp sized streaming, and malware!"), but places like Reddit and other social media shut down any such conversations in a hurry. They're onboard with the status quo.

If someone who understood torrenting stopped 10 years ago, but feels compelled to start today, what can they do? Kickass is dead, Rarbg is dead. EZtv long gone. A half dozen others. Many of the private trackers are gone, but even those that aren't you'll find your accounts all deactivated.

And, the latest generation is just completely clueless when it comes to technology in general. "How can I torrent this, I can only use my phone! Isn't there something that works with my smartphone!?!?!" They don't own the hardware, are unwilling to invest in having it but even more than the money hit of that they're just completely disinterested in it.

The pro-copyright jackoffs might not have won yet, but victory's in sight and they're mostly patient (at least when they're not binging on cocaine).

Firstly, I generally agree. There is a barrier to piracy. Personally, I don't think it's a lot to overcome, when someone wants to.

There are a number of torrent sites still active and when they go down, others will appear. That's how it's happened historically.

Usenet is still alive and well.

Pirate streaming sites are still out there.

Torrentfreaks is a great source for sites, etc.

There are a lot of ways for media to be pirated. Operating a vpn and torrent, while not part of most people's skillsets, the tech has advanced to the point where it's not difficult.

There was a tech barrier, but advancements in tech, make VPN as easy as, install WindScribe. Register an account. Click a button. VPN connect active. (Note: I'm not advocating WS, they are a random VPN provider I used as an example)

If you're not using the haugene/transmission docker image, you're doing the VPN wrong. There was a period of like 3-5 years on reddit where every other post in some of these subs was "my vpn shut down but the torrents kept torrenting and now I'm getting nasty letters from my ISP, why didn't the killswitch work!?!?!"

That's because a killswitch is a dumb idea. It's bad software written badly for a consumer operating system, but the job you were asking it to do was as critical as any control process some esoteric barebones RTOS wouldn't have been perfectly trusted to do.

I don't say this because I'm some genius... I'm saying that I'm the dumbass who learned these things slowly, over years, by fucking it up over and over.

> Pirate streaming sites are still out there.

This may be in the same universe as "piracy", but even so the light from real "piracy" will never reach it, it is that far away.

I use a seedbox and SFTP transfer to my home, so moot, in my case, at least. The VPN was just an example of the lowered technical requirements to enter the space.

Seedboxes are even easier, albeit less well known.

The point is when there is a will, there will always be a way. As things progress, more and more people will start looking into other options, like piracy and the barrier is lower than it was in the Usenet days, for example.

Maybe some people won't. But those that were able to navigate pirate sites in the early 2000s will be easily able to catch up on what somewhat trustworthy sites are used today. I'd wager that it's even a nicer experience now that say in 2010 were internet connections are fast enough to download a movie in a few minutes and all versions of Windows now come with a good built in antivirus program.

The ones that are clueless when it comes to technology will either have to learn about the stuff, or ask a friend to do it. The same thing happened 10 years ago, maybe not with smartphones but copying a movie into a flash drive to watch in one of those fangled new TVs that could play media from an USB mass storage device was certainly a thing.

Asking for a friend, what is the best way to sail in 2023? I’m fairly tech savvy but I only know of 1337x and TPB. I’m also wary of any private trackers because they block using VPNs.

Public trackers are pretty awful at the moment. I like PSA alot, but they're only doing new releases, even that not very comprehensive, and some shows only in 720p (this last one's bizarre imo).

I've slowly over the years lost whatever toehold I had on private trackers, but even when I had that it was just impossible to expand it. Until this last year whenever it was, I was happy enough with Rarbg. The night before it dying, I remember thinking to myself "I am so fucked if they go out". I think I might have been the one that jinxed it.

> I’m also wary of any private trackers because they block using VPNs.

Yeh, that policy's not great. It's only 50/50 that they do that so they can snitch on you if they get raided.

How good is software like radarr/sonarr/etc? I’m not super familiar with them but they sound kinda like trackers of trackers, and somehow are developed in the open on GitHub so I feel like they should be fairly trustworthy.

> How good is software like radarr/sonarr/etc?

It's usable. Was a learning curve, and though it's been awhile it seems like I spent more time getting it configured than it should have taken.

> and somehow are developed in the open on GitHub so I feel like they should be fairly trustworthy.

They're like 5 steps down the "contributory infringement" hierarchy. Though that probably wouldn't help them in sued, because the punishment for facing a lawsuit comes as soon as it is filed, rather than after judgement.

RuTracker is the way to go if you're not keen on playing the private tracker game. Good selection and well seeded, especially for content that doesn't tend to have good retention on other public trackers (e.g. FLACs, high bitrate encodes/remuxes etc.)

Torretfreak is a great site to check on Sailing the Seas in general. They also do annual roundups of public trackers. It's a place to start.

Physical Media has its own DRM BS, hampering conversion to newer media formats for devices that are still sold and supported, but I digress.

And they wonder why piracy will never go away.. lol

If I do not end up with an offline-playable artifact in a standard format with no DRM, it needs to be priced as one-off consumption, like a movie ticket. Because duration aside, that's what it is.

"Cloud" service economics cannot work for "sales" of content, that only works for subscription models. The vendor has ongoing costs related to a one-time sale; of course they're going to screw you out of it no matter what lies they tell you.

I mostly buy physical media, although BandCamp got a fair amount of my money before it was eviscerated. The first sale doctrine still exists, as much as rentiers hate it.

If a ticket can be as low as $5-10, I'd gladly pay $3 for years old movies to watch it once or during a limited period of time (72 hours access?). It's rare for me to rewatch the same movie twice in one month. I have the same expectations for games, If I pay for the digital version, I pay for the experience of playing it once or twice, I'm not expecting a lifetime support.

Where I draw the line is for applications, music and books. Because their uses are perpetual. So no DRMs for anything. I'm not asking you to support new hardware (if I purchase an exe file, a wma album or a mobi book, that's what I'm stuck at), but no shutting down access because you need me to pay for the latest version. I should be able to pop up a VM and consume or use what I purchased.

Saas is another story, but that because it's their servers, not my computer.

Again, Stallman was right about the dangers of ownership of "digitally purchased" content like VOD, e-books etc. Of course, there's ways to de-drm content on some platforms, which technically violates DMCA, but having the content locally without DRM (that requires phoning home/encryption) is key.

The DMCA should be reformed to allow de-drming content owned by you. This mostly applies to digital content and cases such as: your account being banned, licensing issues resulting in content being removed, buy in x country which later gets blocked etc. However, cases like making copies to store off-site in case of a fire, natural disaster, robbery or on digital storage (NAS, cloud etc.) should be allowed especially for people who pay. I thought it'll happen though. Perhaps a federal law entailing consumers for refunds for such cases such as Sony's recent actions should be created.

That reform can happen administratively. DMCA 1201(a)(1) empowers the Copyright Office to create new 1201 exceptions for specific acts of breaking DRM. As far as I'm aware, nobody's specifically brought up just format-shifting to the Office[0], but there's already favorable precedent for format-shifting media you own being legal (e.g. RIAA v. Diamond). Furthermore, DMCA 1201 is specifically written to avoid creating new copyright restrictions beyond "don't break DRM to infringe copyright". Breaking DRM to make a fair use is perfectly legal. If a judge so chose they could decide that format-shifting is not only legal, but that breaking DRM to do it is fine, too.

This will never actually happen, however, because getting individual plaintiffs into court to sue them for ripping their own DVDs is hideously expensive. You would never actually see someone sued under DMCA 1201 for merely ripping their own media. The only people who actually need to worry about violating this half of DMCA 1201 are large corporations' software licensing departments. So this reform would be useless and this argument is purely academic.

There's, of course, another half of DMCA 1201 that is far more insidious, and is the real reason why DRM seems unbreakable. Subsection (a)(2) forbids the production of DRM breaking tools, and this section has no exceptions whatsoever. This is what actually makes DRM ironclad - otherwise, companies would sell DRM breaking tools for people to use for legal purposes, and then everyone would use them to pirate everything. Everything but the most insidious, consumer-hostile, backstabby DRM[1] would be completely devoid of value.

What might work would be a mandate to provide lawful access to decryption tools or unencrypted copies of a work for any case that the Copyright Office would otherwise say is legal to break DRM for. If the DRM vendor doesn't comply, then subsection (a)(2) no longer applies to their system and it's legal to sell the tools to break it. So they either have to come up with a way to format-shift works that you purchased, or I can just sell a decryption tool and their shit gets pirated 12 ways to Sunday.

[0] To be clear, bunnie keeps asking for a rather wide 1201 exception that keeps getting denied every three years, I'm not sure if that counts.

[1] see also: any Apple ][ game

I see two solutions, there may be more:

1) Sony refunds the price. This is the least that should happen.

2) Else, the purchase should be honored by Discovery and it should provide an alternate means for users to access this content by transferring the purchase OR provide download for use without restriction.

In parallel, there should be a class action filed.

Stallman is right once again that electric content/IP such as ebooks, movies, etc. are a bad idea.

Electronic content/IP has upsides including convenience and environmental (less raw material, less waste and no shipping)

Ownership could do with better regulation but ownership is an issue with physical goods...

If they have DRM.

If they don’t, the only issue is making sure you have backed up your stuff.

Always download the FLAC version off Bandcamp

... and back them up.

> Stallman is right once again that electric content/IP such as ebooks, movies, etc. are a bad idea

He also melodromatically states on his personal page that Netflix is a threat to freedom (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html).

Ironically, the documentary, Revolution OS, that he stars in, is not free https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/revolution-os

Free as in doesn't cost anything and free as in freedom are not even remotely the same.

And in this case, both!

"If paying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing." - Louis Rossmann

My favorite variation is the, "well yes, you did buy seat heaters in your car, the hardware is there, the software is there and you over paid for all of it, including taxes. Now, that'll be $10 per month for us to enable it".

That's no different than IBM selling a mainframe with more processors and storage than you've paid to access.

You're correct. There is no material difference.

Except that the IBM one is B2B, preceded by negotiations.

But then, what is important is what the customers were told they are buying. And while IBM didn't sell anything they didn't deliver (on the mainframe business), the cars are sold through 3rd parties famous for being sleazy, so I'd bet their customers experience was all over the place.

I understand this, but when there is a charge for viewing then piracy is stealing.

My issue with this is the use of the word "buy". If DRM can remove my access, and I don't have perpetual ownership and control of that DRM, then it isn't buying and shouldn't be labelled as such. I can then make an informed choice "rent" vs "watch-as-many-times-as-the-drm-provider-lets-me". It should have the side effect of encouraging there to be a _real_ "buy" option

>“but when there is a charge for viewing then piracy is stealing.”

No, it's not. When you steal something, you get something from someone who lose that thing, which isn't the case with digital piracy.

Ok, point taken. Not "stealing", but still not paying the price of access. Making a movie or tv show etc. isn't free of cost, and if you want to watch it then it has a value

So anti-piracy people should change their message. Calling people that pirate stuff thieves is rude; most of them opt for piracy because can't pay, doesn't care too much to pay or is averse of industry praxis such this Sony's clusterfuck.

I guess "stealing" is done by "thieves" but i didn't mean to be so harsh, next time i'll be more careful with my words. Whilst copying bits has negligible cost, the _original_ cost of production has to be borne by someone, do the people paying to watch pay more to cover those that don't pay? The price of access is part of the license, another example would being crediting sources when using cc by-sa material. Sony's actions here don't engender any sympathy, but with piracy i'm more concerned with the writers and artists etc..

What I _meant_ to emphasise was that the button shouldn't be labelled "buy" if someone else can take it away. Not allowing this label this would help steer people away from situations like Sony just created, and help encourage DRM-free options.

When it comes to Sony, even buying physical media in a store sucks. I'll never forget that Sony deliberately used music CDs to infect people's computers with malware.

What?

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

Buying physical media isn't even the safeguard it was before. Now games require a patch before they're usuable, or the game can be blocked from running until the console itself is patched to the latest version. We're in a new era where consoles are fully connected platforms and the OEMs use them as gatekeeping tools to control the ecosystem.

Is this actually true? I don’t think I’ve ever been fully blocked from anything because you can always just turn off the internet and then boot the game to bypass these things (Switch for example). The only way then is the game itself would have to block you (conceivable but I don’t recall seeing it). Some specific examples would be helpful.

Switch is very good about this actually. My son's Switch hasn't connected to wifi since he got it, and still runs swimmingly. PS and XBox, however, are very different beasts. Often, when a new system update comes out, certain features are blocked until the update is installed. Similarly, you can buy a new game on a physical disc, and find that it requires a minimum OS version, forcing you, once again, to go online just to play the darn game.

Ah good to know. I also forgot the obvious case where a game’s disc only contains a subset of the content on it and a download is required for the rest. It’s not really a day one patch but just the game is too large to fit on a disc.

Plenty of games on the Nintendo Switch are limited to the latest few versions of their firmware, unable to boot unless updated. This list appears a bit outdated, but its a good start:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/list-games-required-firmware-ver...

Consumer protection hot-take: It should be illegal for revocable or conditional licenses (time limited, region or geo-locked, tied to off-prem DRM servers, etc) to be marketed as being "sold". The term "rental" (and whatever that does to the end user's perception of price-to-value) should be required in those cases.

Or better yet, if they want to argue that piracy is theft, how about they instead consider that charging someone money for something and then taking that something away from them is one hundred times more a theft than piracy will ever be.

Is forcefully deleting files you bought on your machine also theft? Practically Sony is taking your property against your will.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, let's throw manager that made this decision in prison.

That's what would happen to me if I sold you a piece of software and then used a backdoor to delete data of your computer

18 years later and still waiting for the management/programmers behind Sony's trojan rootkit to face criminal charges for hundreds of thousands if not millions of violations of the CFAA.

Most people don’t know what a rootkit is!

It's not a backdoor. if anything you're the one renting Sony's server space.

But i do wonder if and when this kind of practice will be challenged legally. Rentals are one thing but I thought they let buyers download content they delist precisely to prevent these kinds of questions.

Hot take: consumers will do nothing and this will keep getting worse and worse.

I saw a headline today that more car brands are moving forward with electronic paywalls for features.

The dream of open computing from the 90's and 00's era of open web and P2P is dead. That was a glorious but brief moment that greed has all but overtaken.

Apple normalized turning consumer devices into fiefdoms we don't own. The manufacturer can completely control the post-sales experience.

> Apple normalized turning consumer devices into fiefdoms we don't own

They did it insidiously too: by having the best ecosystem, privacy and (arguably) security for 2 or 3 decades straight.

If only their devices were less pleasant to use, out of the box, their fiefdom would have failed and there’d be no copycats.

Credit where credit is due, Apple sold (and is still selling) digital music DRM free. If I recall, they were the first legit store to offer that, which allowed/forced Amazon and others to follow suit.

I imagine they were able to pull this off because the iPod gave them a lot of leverage with the studios, and those studios were also desperate to curb piracy. If only they could have gotten the same deal with movie and television studios…

Apple's the only one that's allowed to DRM a platform.

Can't have unauthorized, untaxed bytes running freely on the platform.

Apple will lay waste to every other industry and force them to behave. They just don't apply the same rules to themselves.

It’s not like Apple sells hardware that you have to pay for softupdates to unlock functionality (except for updated WiFi that one time over a decade ago, but that was a GAAP accounting issue, IIRC).

I’m not a fan of how unserviceable the hardware is (especially coming from the days of PowerBooks and the first decade of MacBooks we hear everything was user upgradable/replacable. But I am a fan of having a silent, super fast computer with all day battery.

As far as I know, the copycats copied the worst parts of Apple without realizing they need to make pleasant to use, secure, private systems first.

You are right but I hope you are wrong. Also can add crypto the list.

The 90s was the height of OS patent lawsuits and crypto export restrictions.

Computing is more open then it ever has been.

> The dream of open computing from the 90's and 00's era of open web and P2P is dead. That was a glorious but brief moment that greed has all but overtaken.

It’s not completely dead, there’s still the Steam Deck.

I love Valve and also bought the Deck, but they kinda screwed over CS:GO players just recently...

> The dream of open computing from the 90's and 00's era of open web and P2P is dead.

Certainly dead. The question is: Was it murdered, or closer to suicide?

That said, it's like having two political parties. With no competition, the power becomes more absolute, and in turn more corrupt.

Paywalls for features is fine as long as they aren’t later revoked. You bought the car with all the information of what features did and didn’t come included. There was no deception.

Shouldn't be surprising at this point. It's deluxe entertainment and and most people clearly don't value ownership. Of course they won't care if some $10 they spent years ago disappears.

And to be frank, Playstation was never known for their movies/TV library. Most people who own a Playstation won't be affected by this. Won't even be aware this happened. You gotta piss off a lot or the exact wrong people for a corporation to suffer consequences, and at the very least the former isn't met.

The problem is "rental" is already taken for things like 3-day or 7-day or whatever rentals. Reusing the term would cause even greater confusion.

"Buy license" or "License" (as a verb, although it's ambiguous in English) is more accurate... but that still doesn't tell you any of the fine print, so I'm not sure it does any good at all. (After all, anyone who cares at all about this stuff already knows it's a license, and doesn't need to be told.)

In a case like this, how the heck are you supposed to know that whether or not your license continues is dependent upon whether or not Sony and Warner Bros. can come to an agreement to renew it?

Rental works just fine there, it’s just a different time period. Media companies don’t want that because they know people immediately understand it’s not worth as much as a permanent license, which is all the more reason to restrict “buy” to things which convey a lifetime grant with the ability to resell it.

It shouldn't be legal to market a "sold" license that can be revoked at the sole discretion of the licensor. Sony can't sell you a license unless Warner Bros. has given them a license to sell you, and if Warner Bros. can pull the license it's not legally a sale. There's no confusion as long as Warner Bros. and Sony are acting in good faith.

A million percent agreed. I seriously do not understand how Sony and Warner Bros. signed a deal like this in the first place.

They don't want to use the term rent because you would then see it for the temporary period it will turn out to be and not be willing to pay what they want you to pay for it.

Lease is already a near perfect term for this. It describes a long term rental and everyone knows what it means.

I've been using this arguments for years when it comes to owning music. Can't understand why anyone would rent from Apple or Spotify.

For many, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal or whatever serves as an addition to, not a substitute for a large music collection. Over the years, I've amassed some 2,200 LPs, 2,500 CDs or so, lots and lots of live recordings on cassette, CD-R or DAT tape - yet still I keep a Spotify account to keep up-to-date on what's being released, checking out artists recently being brought to my attention &c - there's no denying that the '(Almost) all the music in the world for one flat fee' is an attractive proposal when checking out new stuff.

Spotify's artist compensation is laughable, though, so whatever good stuff I find, more often than not I seek out physical media. (Much to my wife's despair...)

Same, I have digital files for albums I care about and an Apple Music subscription, for ease of play (Homepod and Apple TV).

I don't care enough about music to deal with the costs of owning it, relative to the monthly cost of streaming it. If it goes away, it goes away. If it is something I really, really like, then I pay for the mp3 file, but that is rare.

A lot of people simply don’t value ownership of

$10 a month for botomless music discovery options is an unreal bargain.

I'm quite happy with the monthly streaming "lease" from Apple or Spotify.

"Buying" digital files from Apple/Amazon whoever is where I feel like the least value is.

At least for music they've mostly gotten rid of the DRM, so they lose the ability to take your music back.

But at this point buying digital files saves nothing over CD. I feel like you either need to just stick with streaming or if you must purchase buy CD/Vinyl as it's pretty easy to argue it's a better product other than the case of wearing a vinyl record out, which is awfully rare.

My biggest exposure to digital ownership is books, followed by games. I am very very unlikely to care about re-playing games. Books I'm a little more likely to re-read. But paper books take up a lot of space and I'm more likely to have to get rid of them before I get to re-read them.

TV/Movies I just don't care, I watch it once and that's enough, so it's rare I would ever buy them. And even if I have to buy them it's less than going to the theater once.

Because it would cost me a small fortune to “own” the music that I listen to.

It’s not the same thing. With Spotify there’s no expectation of owning the music, I pay my subscription knowing that I pay for an access to a music catalog. Although it sucks, I know some titles can disappear from my playlist from time to time, but at 10 bucks a month I don’t care.

Now if I go to a digital store, select a specific movie or show or song, click « buy » or « purchase » and pay full price (sometimes more!), I have an expectation to own the media indefinitely. Not « as long as the store is licensed to distribute it ».

These stores simply shouldn’t be allowed to use words like « buy », because it’s a blatant lie. Prime Video is pretty clear that you can rent movies at a small price. That’s clear, there’s no expectation of ownership either.

Renting for a discount makes sense.

Buying without a discount only to then lose access is different.

Did they remove it again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492747

I buy DVD's from eBay.

Mainly because the streaming service rarely has the actual thing I want to watch and there's no way I'm going to subscribe to a whole bunch of streaming services.

Do you get your TV from eBay too? DVDs look so terrible on modern screens. 720p is the bare minimum acceptable resolution

They're alright. Just takes a little getting used to. Several shows have also had terrible post-dvd releases, so the DVD version is sometimes superior in other ways. I'm thinking of the cropping done for widescreen in The Simpson and The Wire as well as the notoriously bad Buffy[1] HD release.

[1] https://www.themarysue.com/remastered-buffy-is-a-butt/

I mainly watch YouTube.

At least where I am, the term DVD is sometimes encompassing of BluRay as well.

I love physical media, but too often media companies are refusing to release their shows on any form of physical media to drive subscriptions to streaming services. Disney is notorious for this.

With the recent price hikes I’ve decided to cancel and start buying 4K blu rays. Better quality and then I own a physical copy that won’t get yanked away. Max in particular has troubled me with their decision to withhold classic HBO content because it is apparently cheaper for them (e.g. Westworld).

Unfortunately, this has turned into a full blown collection hobby, so I’m likely not going to save any money. But there’s nothing wrong with a new hobby I guess.

Fortunately the local record store has plenty of cheap used disks.

It should be titled: "Playstation keeps reminding us why Playstation sucks."

Personal experience: I had a huge PS3 games collection, but PS4 came out and Sony no longer was interested in keeping PS3 going (except for re-released). I had no machine outside of used one, and because my library was massive it only gathered dust in shelf.

One day I finally sold it off which brought less than 10% of its purchase value. It barely covered cost of work that I put into cataloging and cleaning boxes. So I swore to never go physical drives.

Today with Steam (where I have 4 digit title count) I don't really care, it's probably easier to pass down my account than 2 containers worth of dusty drives. And even recently I played Braid that I bought almost 15 years ago.

I think it all boils down to the "slippery slope" argument. Sony and Nintendo showed multiple times - through remasters and re-releases - they don't give 2 cents about end-customer as long as they're happy and fed. But not every business is like that.

As far as I know Amazon also took some book of people's Kindles, but still (for many) convenience of not having to build your own library in a small metropolitan apartment.

I like the digital MP3s I own... (not what they mean, probably)

maybe they should call it cloudy ownership?

"Clownership"?

This has to do with licensing agreements with content providers, to which the solution seems to be that there need to be third-party escrow holders that maintain the license purchased by an individual so that Sony/Playstation is no longer responsible or required to pay for continued licensing of that content. This would fall under FCC regulations, and could definitely be brought to their attention via consumer action.

Maybe something like "Movies Anywhere" but for TV series instead of movies?

This wouldn't change anything. If the underlying license for a piece of content linked to your movies anywhere account expired, it would be removed from movies anywhere as well as the original service you bought it from. There's a possibility that maybe because it's an edge case it might end up still in the library of a synced service but that would be more of an unintended coincidence.

Movies Anywhere is hardly a 3rd party though. It's wholly owned by Disney and I suspect it will only last as long as it meshes with their streaming strategy.

Maybe something like "The Pirate Bay" instead of dealing with a fragmented market that's just as bad as 90s cable?

Regulation needed

When it comes to games (at least when the box even contains physical media anymore) I want the physical versions so I can sell them or borrow them to friends. I do not have a PlayStation right now, but I do have an account floating around.

Can I do the digital equivalent yet, or are purchases still permanently tied to your account?

You cannot transfer digital purchases on any platform. Ironically enough you can at least still buy/sell discs on locked-down consoles, but that option has disappeared completely from the PC.

DRM-free music and, less commonly, books?

Reselling rights to books and music you purchased is not legal, even if it is DRM free.

No, and it seems like something that will need to come through legislation unfortunately, imho.

Imagine if books (historically) couldn’t be lent or libraries created. It’s time to tip the scales toward the buy side for a while. I’m sure the most profitable companies in history can stand a few decades of slightly lower profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

On Steam you can kind of borrow to friends by enabling family sharing (which gives them access to your whole library). You have to log in on their computer to enable it, and if they play a game from your library you can't play it at the same time (same as with a physical disk).

I believe some of the consoles also have limited sharing features, or at least had them.

> You have to log in on their computer to enable it, and if they play a game from your library you can't play it at the same time (same as with a physical disk).

If you are family sharing then you cannot play ANY other game if someone else is playing.

If they are playing CS:GO from your library and you try to launch a game in your library you see a notice telling you that the other person will be booted. The player sees similar.

In Switzerland we pay a premium on every bit of storage sold (devices, disks etc.) and have the right to make a private copy. So you are allowed to copy any media you bought or rented. This law also makes it legal to download any media from the internet. But you aren't allowed to distribute it so torrents and upload the media, but you are allowed to give a copy to friends and family.

While it has its problems like why do I pay this on a HDD, SSD, computer or smartphone that I exclusively use for work? It definitely has its upsides as in making a backup copy of your media and circumventing copy protection isn't in some legal gray area or straight up illegal.

Edit: There are attempts to make this law more restrictive and they succeeded in offering products to circumvent copy protection illegal. But you are allowed to use them to exercise the rights above.

Tied to account. Maybe some day consumers will get some stronger rights on digital purchases.

While I 100% agree and support having physical copies, it's very frustrating that doing so (at least with a PS4; no personal experience with other recent consoles) means that you can't play the game without the disc in the system, even if 100% of the data is installed on the internal hard drive. Hell, even if the half that data has been changed by post-release updates.

While I've never had a game, video or book deleted from my library, I feel like I'd be justified (morally, not legally) to pirate it if it were deleted from my library.

I'm still wary of buying digital items, but the availability of pirated versions does give me some comfort

You might not even know for a while if it happens. I didn’t realize Steam stole an expansion pack bundled with game in the original purchase from my library till years later.

Steam is generally pretty good about that stuff. Even if it can't be purchased anymore, most people who bought can still download.

The true pull takedown on steam are very rare and usually they are legally obligated to for some reason.

A platform like Sony should not be allowed to sell content for purchase if it doesn't own the rights to stream it to purchasers in perpetuity.

There should never have been a contract that required renewal with Warner Bros. in the first place.

Sure you can require renewal in order to sell it to new users, and if you don't renew then new users can't buy it.

But the idea that Sony didn't originally have the right to stream it in perpetuity to existing purchasers is absurd.

I don't care what the fine print of the user agreement said -- this is a perfect example of what consumer protection laws are for.

I mean, what's next -- can I rent a house for a year, sell that house to someone and pocket the money, and then at the end of the year they find out it's not their house anymore because I didn't renew my lease...? Because that's basically what Sony has done here.

Sure. it's probably fraud but I wouldn't be shocked if it happened before. But there's a lot more regulation on housing for obvious reasons.

Thing here is that usually you get to keep delisted content you bought. I can still download that Scott pilgrim game on my PS3 that was delisted almost a decade ago.

Companies should be forced to provide a refund in this situation - either Sony or Discovery.

> And Sony isn’t offering any compensation for titles you’ve already bought or a way to transfer those purchases to another store.

This is outrageous.

Without surprise I see no mention of a refund.

I fail to see how their « licensing agreement » is any of the customer’s business. They « sold » something they didn’t have the right to sell, instead of renting it. Sony should be forced by law to renew the licensing with their provider at any price, so that customers keep getting what they paid for. That, or a refund.

Sony does have a stance that we should buy physical media. I don't disagree with this either. They have a large investment in physical media and rightfully so they were one of the originals behind blu-ray technology. Also streaming is typicaly subpar quality to blu-ray while it is still decent.

Somehow I think this one is not Sony's fault entirely.

Time Warner has recently moved towards "unifying all their streaming platforms" which meant that a lot of adjacent services will close/migrate to Discovery+ directly.

I am someone that suffers the fallout of them shutting GCN+ down, which gives me about two weeks to watch around 100 cycling documentaries that the GCN people have put out in the past 3-4 years. Granted I haven't paid for them individually, so it's not as painful as for the Sony customers, but they will be shutting down access to all of them without any backup plan and without a look back.

The people at GCN seem to be as baffled as everyone else about this move. Luckily they still have a good presence on their Youtube channel where they have more accessible content.

You can blame Sony for not securing the rights to keep the content available. If I rent a car and sell it to you, it's my fault when the owner takes it back.

> Time Warner

You mean Warner Bros Discovery

> Somehow I think this one is not Sony's fault entirely.

Sorry but if you allow your platform to sell 3rd party content, you better have some consumer protections built-in in your contract with that 3rd party in case of such a scenario.

>Somehow I think this one is not Sony's fault entirely.

I understand the sentiment of that, but as harsh as this sounds I really don't care. The least bad thing Sony could do right now is refund everybody.

I learned my lesson with Sony back in the Sonic Stage days. They are not to be trusted with digital purchases, period.

At the very least offer store credit.

That's all fine. But Sony should refund the original purchases if they're going to take them away.

That's why I refuse to use Steam.

I don't mind steam, mostly because PCs being more general purpose than consoles.

It's not obvious to me what one has to do with the other here.

Me either.. lol

I think that the idea is that it's potentially more mod-friendly than if all the files resides on a physical support.

I feel like at this point Valve have proven themselves to be good stewards of the Steam platform in this regard. Games aren't retracted and they're very reasonable with refunds.

I assume their contracts for listing on Steam are quite different in order to support this. I'd be interested to hear more about the inside of these sorts of things.

Suppose I trust Valve to be well run for as long as Gabe Newell is around to control the company... how long is that? He's 61 years old, and even if he isn't inclined to ever sell the company he could still kick the bucket with no warning. The man is not exactly a paragon of physical fitness.

I know there is this meme among gamers that if anything ever happens to Valve they will release all the games they distribute from DRM but this doesn't make any sense because, except for Valve's own games, they don't have the legal right to do that; whoever comes into legal possession of Valve wouldn't allow it. The fact that Steam DRM is weak and easy to crack, presently, is a bit more comforting but even so I'm not interested in paying for a product that is even nominally under DRM. So I buy games without DRM, from GOG/etc, or not at all (I don't pirate software, simply because that's too sketchy for me.)

20 years later and accounts can’t even be merged when they have the same owner.

How common is this and why would you do it?

I guess that’s a way to resell games? Buy cheap in a low cost region, sell the entire account to someone in a high cost region for a lot less than they would have paid originally?

That happens all the time, except 99% of the time the accounts are actually stolen.

Good point! Great thing then that merging isn’t supported.

Unless you have two accounts for reasons (like I do) and now want them to be one. Then it’s an unfixable mistake that makes steam an annoyance.

>I feel like at this point Valve have proven themselves to be good stewards of the Steam platform in this regard. Games aren't retracted and they're very reasonable with refunds.

This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.

1 You need to start Steam to play most games

2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems

In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.

The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.

Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.

> You need to start Steam to play most games

Tou don't, the default shortcuts it creates uses an url like format and steam to track down what exact binary you want to run, but if you double click the exe in the directory it works with steam closed. Lots of games (specifically indie games) have no DRM at all, you can freely copy to some other storage and play it later.

>Lots of games (specifically indie games) have no DRM at all, you can freely copy to some other storage and play it later.

I doubt your "lots" claim, it is ambiguous, do you maybe mean a very few ? I found this >Total number of DRM-free games: 1,075 out of 41,147 games in total.

This is my source, if it is wrong let me know https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...

At least Valve games seem to be DRM free

Steam DRM is actually optional for devs, and even if it isn't, it's (allegedly) very easy to get around. If you download your games onto a new PC, you may be able to just copy the files over to the old one and launch them directly. Even if you have to crack the DRM, it's at the very least morally OK.

It's more work, but that's life when using old hardware. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a software provider to support old hardware/OSes forever.

>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a software provider to support old hardware/OSes forever.

I agree, but the hypocrisy is that old games might not work on the new OS that Steam client requires. So if you upgrade to a new machine to play your old game you might not be able to play it.

I hated Steam at first, but purchasing Half-Life 2 on launch day and then being unable to play the single player game you physically had in your hands because the servers you need to login to were overload will do that to you. Overtime they slowly won me over, but I'd like not not have to rely on a company being a good steward of anything.

Until Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus one morning, his children decide to take the company public to make tens of billions, and Disney buys the company to expand into video games to make up for declining theater revenue.

Don't laugh. It's completely possible.

It's pretty much inevitable. I am a big fan of Valve, but fully support anything that reduces their stranglehold on PC gaming. If Epic supported Linux with their store, I'd go to it first when buying games.

But even if I buy a game on EGS today, I can still probably play it on Linux through Steam for free thanks to Valve, so... I'm very conflicted to say the least.

The Steam monopoly[0] is problematic for indie game devs.

You absolutely have to list your games there because many people will refuse to buy your game anywhere else even if you are listed on more player-friendly DRM-free platforms like GOG or itch.io. Yes, I get that players want to use one launcher for everything but with DRM-free, you know what? You don't need launcher! Just download and play!

For the hefty 30 percent cut they take from devs, I would at least expect them to do some basic curation. They allow so many asset flips and general trash games to flood their listing making it very hard for players to find good indie games.

Plus, censorship is a bit of a hit or miss. You see some very sexually explicit titles on steam but then again even relatively harmless stuff can get you flagged. This creates an insecure situation for devs in certain niches and not just erotic. For example Visual Novels can be easily flagged for having a certain art style. Artistic freedom and monopolies never mix well.

[0] (Please no "Actually, it is not a monopoly...". Yes, I am using a broader definition of monopoly on purpose. )

It's not a monopoly, there is no broader definition that would make it so. People just generally prefer using that platform.

If I as a game dev have to list my games on steam due to their overwhelming market dominance, they have a monopoly. Whether people like to use a platform or not is not even relevant for the question of monopolies.

I use the term monopolistic to describe companies that have such a overwhelming market dominance that free market effects barely apply anymore. That is not the legal definition but a more useful definition that is popular in more progressive circles as it can be used to actually describe actual real world companies in the 21st century.

> If I as a game dev have to list my games on steam due to their overwhelming market dominance, they have a monopoly.

You don't have to, and no.

> You see some very sexually explicit titles on steam but then again even relatively harmless stuff can get you flagged. This creates an insecure situation for devs in certain niches and not just erotic. For example Visual Novels can be easily flagged for having a certain art style.

This seems a lot like intentional obfuscation of precisely what that "relatively harmless stuff" or "certain art style" is because you know it's going to sound a whole lot worse if you actually explain it.

I'm fairly pretty sure the actual answer here as to what's likely to get you flagged is: "drawn/animated characters that look like children in explicit or highly suggestive settings", maybe with the lip service of calling them 18 in text, maybe not.

----

That content is in a legally risky area of it's own AFAIK and is a massive political/PR risk in a way that other content is not.

Yeah, no I am talking about games with LGBTQ+ content being flagged by trolls. I am talking about any game portraying high-school student getting automatically flagged. Certainly not whatever messed up stuff your are thinking about.

Obviously any games where children are portrayed by a sexual manner wouldn't and shouldn't be tolerated on any platform but it is silly to say, we can't have children in games at all or that certain art styles should be banned.

Well, except when they updated all versions of GTA IV where they changed all the songs because the licensing expired.

Except they do retract paid for games from libraries without refunds (steal). It’s on smallish scales so the wider public doesn’t know. A specific example is removing Legends of Aranna from people who bought it as part of a bundle with the base game Dungeon Siege.

One of the reasons I do use steam is because it uses the basic windows filesystem and there are cracks available for just about anything. Even if Steam did have a delete-your-files function I could just grab them from my backups and get going.

Now the windows store, that's more worrying. As for the consoles, they have limited storage and I don't think I can ship my files over to the synology for safekeeping. You are relying on 'just redownload it' as your cold storage but that function isn't actually guaranteed to stick around. The diskless consoles are untenable to me compared to any other option.

Of course this was voted down, come on guys. I love Steam as well and buy quite a bit of games on there but you can't act like they're not one-in-the-same.

Just a quick Google will show you others that have had their accounts locked and even apps removed from peoples libraries (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1pzpny/steam_has_now... )

Only gaming launcher that's different would be GOG for their focus on DRM-free...

If I own a game on Steam, and I own many, and it's a game that I tend to come back to, I just pirate a copy and store it on the NAS. If/when the day comes, I still have what I paid for. A game.

I don't really care what the law says. I care that I can be without something I literally paid for, due to corporate sophistry, that I have zero recourse to address. Well, it's addressed now, at least in my personal case.

The other side is I rarely support this model any more. I haven't bought a Steam game in years, because one day, they'll all vanish, just like my money did.

But you can still back-up your games and use them without Steam if the developers did not use the DRM parts of the Steam SDK.

I can still download my Steam library games that have been removed from the Steam store years ago.

currently

What would motivate them to do differently and lead an exodus of their customers to GoG and elsewhere?

Sony and Nintendo only do this because they control the hardware.

Currently the guy who owns the place wants it that way. The next owner may not be the same. There are plenty in that industry that would gladly milk every penny they can out of customers instead of giving them good value.

Gabe understands the bargain he has struck with his customers. That is not necessarily true of the next guy. Take for example Atari. Atari in the early 80s was a powerhouse. Because Nolan Bushnell orchestrated it that way. He basically had dozens of companies making one off batches for 'the next atari console'. It cost him about a quarter million a year. But it locked out any competition he had. When Warner bought them out they said 'thats a dumb expense get rid of it'. Suddenly there were dozens of competitors and a glut of stuff. Some deals are just understood for their side effects not the primary thing. Not all MBA's understand that.

But nothing will motivate someone. Unless they decide to do it. As a customer all I can do is go elsewhere (if there is an elsewhere).

Also as you point out there a plenty of other stores out there but they have not really made the same bargain (other than gog). GoG being the only exception but they positioned themselves as the 'old dos games' place. Even though they have plenty of other stuff.

It will be a sad day when Gabe says 'im out'.

I'm fine with digital content being ephemeral, if it is priced appropriately. I'm talking about $1 per game/movie if there is a possibility that I will lose access to it through no fault of my own, and I don't get access to the files

it seems like console manufacturers could just add a software update that prevents users from playing certain pieces of purchased physical media? the 'always online' paradigm is just as annoying as digital/physical ownership here

I am pretty sure the issue here is Sony purchased some sort of pay-per-stream license and effectively sold the users unlimited streams rather than a perpetual license and gambled that most users would not watch the content all that much and they could make more money. Now they are no longer able or willing to pay to renew their license which makes the content unavailable to the users. I assume they could have licensed it in some way that allowed true perpetual access for the users that purchased it but that would have cost more and they would have made less.

^^ just in case it wasn't clear those are all assumptions of mine

Unfortunately, if they get hit with a class-action lawsuit and the eventual payout is less than the amount of money in profit they made from this deal, Sony would just consider this "the cost of doing business."

I try to buy PlayStation titles on disk as much as possible because I learned this lesson early on. A while back someone took control of my PlayStation Network account and deauthorized my PS3. I reached out to Sony and they said I'd have to wait the standard 6 month period until I could deauthorize the squatter's devices. During that time I lost access to any game I didn't have physically on disk. It showed me how ephemeral digital "ownership" is. I still pay for digital copies of games from time to time but much of my PS2-4 library is physical.

Honestly, stories like this (and similar when streaming services change catalogs) is why I've gone back to DVDs. Nobody has knocked on my door (yet) to get those back.

Han Shot first! I had to find an old VHS to see this with my own eyes.

I've been doing the same; the UHD rescans of classics like 2001 and Casablanca look fantastic. But now I'm even considering keeping my dad's old Betamax collection with the state of things, movies disappear from existence now...

Btw, Panasonic actually makes a UHD player that doesn't include 'apps' and only has ethernet for updates and local streaming; hope restored!

If it has ethernet for updates, they can add cancer at any moment.

You could disable updates, as well as just not plugging it in.

I appreciate the possibility of updates since most things I own that can't be updated have odd bugs that drive me crazy.

FYI, blu-ray discs include executable code to, among other things, update the banlist of encryption keys on your player when you try to play a new movie. Even if you never plug your player in, there's still the very real possibility that putting in a new disc will update your player such that your old discs no longer work due to a key revocation.

Do you know if UHD implemented something similar? Its not the same tech, though doesn't mean they couldn't have added it.

If it is at that point, then the only solution is VHS and rips, short of preventing revocation within a bluray player

Same here. I went out and bought an external optical drive so I can rip my own music/movies off optical media. I don’t like what the future is looking like.

Digital media and the Internet have made copies nearly free. Because of this it no longer makes sense to base profits on charging for copies. Business models need to change. Alternatives like Pay to Release where only previews are available until the customer pool pledges enough to make copies available do not have piracy as an easy failure mode.

This would never take off because you're capping the profit you can make as well as excluding some recovery of costs for an unsuccessful product.

i.e. If you spend $10 million making a movie, and will only release it when customers pledge $50 million, you're eliminating any chance of becoming a billion dollar blockbuster, and also any chance of being unsuccessful but still recouping a million dolars. Heck you could even become a cult classic 20 years later and make more money back.

Also could you image crew moral if there was constantly a high chance that the thing you've spent a year working on goes completely unreleased?

Is Popcorn Time still a thing? I remember it was an overnight success until users got sued because BitTorrent, and the project pressured to eventually shut down.

Could we have a super easy p2p streaming platform that integrates with Tor? I.e. tracker running as onion service and every user being a Tor relay?

I don't know about TOR alternatives, but Stremio + real debrid is amazing, or so I hear.

Its inconvenient as hell but I still opt to buy physical copies of games whenever possible. This way I can play them usually without an internet connection, and resell or trade the game.

I'm that way too.

But I wonder how good the program is on the disk. Everytime I put a disc in the console it downloads a huge file of patches and bugfixes..

I'm afraid nothing will change because Zoomers are inured to this stuff. They expect it and they accept it. They understand they own nothing and they're happy about it.

More last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492747

Many don't realize that when you buy anything digital, you don't "own" it—what you actually buy is a license to access the content, which can be revoked at any time and for any reason. When that happens, you can't really sue them because there must be a clause in the ToS, that you've agreed on, that covers it. For most media, the only way to "own" it digitally is, unfortunately, by piracy.

Let's use "digital rentals" instead of "digital ownership". Ownership is the wrong word.

yeah, people fell hook line and sinker for put 'your everything on the cloud'. Now if someone doesn't like the way you think, all the things you 'purchased' can be blocked'. all 'your' photos, gone.

Buy DRM-free. We need more DRM-free video that can be paid for though.

In my opinion, crap like this is the best argument in favor of sailing the seven seas.

Make NFTs. That way you can claim your copy again from anyone who licenses it out. And if you sell your digital copy the original owner can earn royalties.

Hell you can even make it so its costs $1 to register it to a new device.

Lots of possibilities here.

Or am I wrong?

You wouldn't pirate stuff you bought.

BUY* now!

*Borrow Until Yanked. Terms and conditions apply.

licenses get revoked, drm servers die and rutracker.org still provides

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