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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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