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Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how Sony isn’t simply defrauding their (funimation’s) customers. How does a merger change this? I could maybe understand a digital library being disappeared after a bankruptcy but it appears funimation was doing okay and they just screwed their customers to make extra margin. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be sued.

It’s not as though funimation advertised these leases as leases, they called them forever purchases lol. It’s outrageous these companies don’t advertise a period of time your purchase is good for and purchase insurance to ensure availability. They trick their customers with the fraudulent lie that they’re buying something and then screw them because they paid a lump sum up front and made themselves easy marks.

I’ve paid for Crunchyroll before but fuck doing that ever again when anime piracy sites like aniwave provide in many ways a better experience.

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The license agreements and ToS for all of this has various "we can terminate this in any way we want at any time we want for any reason we want" clauses, which is effectively a magical bulletproof solution in many countries.

And customers are free to refuse to engage with companies that have such clauses in their terms-of-service.

Do companies that do not have such clauses and provide comparable services exist? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage even in theory.

If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage in practice.

The only freedom that customers (=citizens) have is to engage into a cartel (=state) to impose their collective interests (=democratic choice) on companies by force (=law).

Companies are then free to refuse to engage with states which have such customer-protective clauses in their laws.

> Do companies that do not have such clauses and provide comparable services exist? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage even in theory.

Yes, and you can found more of them, too.

> If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are?

Yes.

Care to elaborate? Honest question because I'd genuinely like to know

There are plenty of companies that sell you physical media. Even analog format like vinyl and cassettes.

GoG (good old games) sells you games without DRM. There are others like that, too. Some companies, like id, open source many of their works.

You can buy DRM free music and videos.

There is not any significant DRM free digital movie marketplace, and the reality is that movies aren't fungible: if I want to watch Strange World or Doctor Who, I'm not going to just instead watch an indie arthouse film that happens to be available without DRM

Media is as (un-) fungible as always. Your complaint sounds a bit like complaining that you can't buy an iPhone that runs Windows. Bundling is a thing in the economy. You can't buy a Porsche with a Tesla engine either.

You can still buy movies on DVDs, which still can't be disabled remotely. DVDs are very digital.

Yes, you can complain that there's no 'significant' movie marketplace without DRM. But you have to complain to and about your fellow consumers: their patronage ultimately decides which suppliers become 'significant'.

They are also free to vote for a government that will protect their rights against egregious and plainly deceptive marketing practices, so they don't each have to do that stuff individually. Companies act as a collective enterprise, so can citizens.

Yes, citizens can form companies and clubs and cooperatives.

The thing is, company can put literally anything they want in their ToS, they can say we're free to break your legs for any reason whatsoever at any point of our choosing, that won't make it legal. Courts frequently rule based on the customer's and market expectation vs what ToS say all the time, and the consumer wins more often than not.

contracts that have contradictory clauses, might generally find those clauses to be nulled out by the courts.

in this case using the term "buy" and in their ToS use the terms license / termination, might find the front and center "buy" term causes the license / termination terms to be nulled out, as the concept of "buy" doesn't fit with the concept of "license" and "termination".

What's wrong with Crunchyroll?

I just recently noticed that new Sony TVs come with a dedicated Crunchyroll button and wondered whether this streaming service is worth it? It seems like you don't think it is, correct?

There's probably nothing wrong with Crunchyroll if you're into the content it provides. The article is about Sony removing the digital copies that buyers of Funimation DVDs/Blurays purchased together with their physical media - and the article argues that some may have discarded the physical media because they have (had) convenient access to the digital copies (hint: don't do that!). But yeah, this is another instance where people who forked out their hard-earned money for legal copies of media are screwed and might be tempted to think "why didn't I simply download a pirated copy?".

Thanks for the explanation, yeah, being in that situation must be terrible.

I'm surprised that these companies are not feeling the effects of the ill will that is caused by these kinds of decisions.

It’s really a baffling move by Sony which seems to be unaware that they have the most to lose from consumers losing confidence in and sympathy for official anime content distribution.

Sony’s Crunchyroll is advertised as “supporting anime creators”, when you are trying to persuade people to pay for anime on moral grounds, and often do so successfully, it seems like a stupendously bad idea to put people in the position where supporting Crunchyroll means financially benefiting a company that just defrauded their customers. The PR win of making sure people didn’t lose access to their content would have been well worth it.

If you want to support anime creators AND consumers, buy merch, don’t give Sony your money. Don’t be a sucker getting guilt tripped by an evil corporation. At least with merch you actually own something.

This is the same company that recently deleted huge swaths of TV shows that people had purchased from their library because they didn't want to pay to renew the license. That one got enough people pissed enough that they walked it back, but this is just how Sony operates.

Owned by Sony.

Crunchyroll is the most bizarre streaming service I’ve tried. None of the anime had original audio tracks. One Punch Man was available only with a French dub. A Korean anime had many audio tracks to choose from... but none of them were Korean. What the hell?

Cancelled the trial after several minutes.

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