Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For | Hacker News Reader

Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

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We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.

I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

They’ll be begging for it when they recreate the very piracy problem they were fleeing, but far worse.

Yeah. This time I'm not living the high seas.

We seen what licensing ala Netflix and Spotify means artists.

*leaving

Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.

You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.

Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.

I think this is going to have unintended consequences if it goes through: funding game development is a very very high risk investment. Adding this type of regulation adds further cost and complication, which makes it an even less attractive investment. Which will result in less monetary and creative risk taken.

Even just open sourcing part of project is expensive. Legal and technical.

This argument is always pretty weak. All regulation adds cost and complication for companies. If that alone was a good reason to not add regulation, then taken to the logical conclusion, there should be no regulation on companies.

Regulation needs to be seen as a trade-off, for example: We get better behaving companies, and the cost is less risk taken. Then the question becomes "is the benefit worth the cost?"

The argument should be stronger since the vast majority of regulation is as you say, the cost is not worth the benefit.

All regulation by default is anticompetitive and also comes with the risk of intended consequences, and thus must prove that they provide sufficient benefit. They are "guilty until proven innocent".

e.g., rather than trying to "just do something" about games, maybe we should revisit copyright law as a whole, instead of slapping a bandaid on a festering wound caused by the first bandaid

How is all regulation anti competitive?

Is it anti competitive that your product does what you say it does and is safe? Isn't that just levelling the playing field by allowing consumers to make rational choices?

What about regulation designed to make sure there is competition? Is that anticompetitive???

I thought this was more "let people run the code themselves if they can figure it out" not "open sourcing". There's no appetite to force a company that reuses and improves their game engine on every new title to open source it, even an older version.

That alone would be an improvement from the status quo, but the SKG movement does go one stop further in wanting publishers to be required to leave the game in a working (local) state of they design it to be dependent on central services they then shut down.

This could be as easy as releasing the tools they used for development when developing the game.

That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

Most game studios are similar, in reusing and improving a whole development architecture and systems across many titles. I would not agree with making them release that, even an older version. That's a big competitive moat for some studios.

I think if a community group wants to PAY to operate a server, that's quite reasonable. And then you still end up with a fight about how much to charge. But I don't think handing over server code is the right move.

I don't think that's what working state means here. It's not a full snapshot or even necessarily multiplayer support. It means minimum functional, which to me is just barely enough to see the assets used in the game. Not necessarily networking, matchmaking, online services, or the relevant tooling. Developers have already proposed making helpers that would introduce an effective switch to do this.

Also what you said about releasing the code and letting the community figure it out was explicitly an example SKG said was okay, from memory.

I think you're right from what I remember reading about them. But I think in practice it costs significant engineering time to package up what they are asking for. For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.

It just requires game engines to develop a tool to make this much easier to do. The rule won't apply retroactively, so it just means different design choices from the start.

> For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.

Alright, you lost me here. All of the games that do not follow what this law would suggest are AAA (or scams, essentially). The smaller studios always have some acceptable end-of-life plan from my experience.

I'm not sure AAA studios are as large, or as profitable, as you think. The studio itself is often small, large publishers just own many of them.

Small like 30 people? I don't think so. Genuinely small studios are able to preserve their games for the long-term, so there is no excuse.

AAA gaming isn't something that needs to be protected. Anything of sufficient magnitude and budget should be made responsibly or not at all. If a game is unable to exist without screwing over the user in a very legal sense, it has no right to exist. The requests of SKG are not only sensible, they impose a serious legal ambiguity in the current system that needs to be corrected one way or the other.

AAA was always an untenable monster that brought obscene risk; this was clear even in the mid-2010s and the industry is rapidly moving away from that model for good reason. The user-base clearly does not look kindly on AAA anymore either. That's why they are not profitable anymore. The SKG requirements would make very little impact overall compared to this.

I got my start at a game studio in 2001, after they were bought by Microsoft (and their game went from Mac to Xbox, if you get my drift). They're "big" now, but they regularly lay off large portions of their staff, because game development is boom and bust.

I don't think what you say in your first paragraph follows. Are you really, really interested in learning more about why, with an open mind?

Absolutely! Happy to learn from an industry veteran; hard to argue with that pedigree (part of why I like HN). I figured you might have been, but wanted to push back a little because I think it is important.

Here is my impression. 2001 feels like it was still within a golden era of game development; "AAA" games of that time would have been made by smaller studios still, and budgets could be very large, but not catastrophically so. The industry was still expanding. Post-GFC, once graphics scaled, demands seemed to scale, and costs blew out. Games had to reduce risk as a consequence, become more consolidated, more live-service. But the model was never sustainable at that scale. The tech improved so that costs for basic games went down, but big-budget AAA live service costs went to the moon. Volatility skyrocketed, leading to rapid hiring-firing phases. Now it is at its most extreme and the AAA side of the industry is in crisis. Demands for long-term support could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but it always seems like that back was going to break eventually anyway. What I hope is happening is that talent is falling into the hands of smaller publishers, but that might not be true. What I do think is that the nature of development may need to change so that studios are able to facilitate these requirements while remaining profitable. Some have shown it can be done, anyway.

That's my impression from a semi-outsider perspective. Happy to be corrected though.

First, thank you so much, I so appreciate when somebody cares what someone else has to say!

Second, I think you're right. The games industry is in really bad shape right now. That's part of why I'm so concerned about putting new requirements on studios. If they have to pay someone to package up software to preserve it like this, that's one less person to generate them revenue, and that means someone gets laid off.

Whether their back breaks or not is not binary. It's measured in careers, and time. Most studios aren't profitable at all, or they're very temporarily profitable after each release. That's why publishers buy them, to keep them afloat during the time when they are losing money, and that's an investment with an expected return from those good times.

If you tell a studio they suddenly have to keep something going when it was already a financial failure, there's no way they can plan for that. They did that planning years ago.

Thanks for continuing the discussion! It's not often an outsider would get to speak with someone with your experience.

I definitely agree that it is not tenable in any studio to have a full time staff member dedicated to packaging software to be in line with this legislation. The solution has to be similar to a toggle in the engine code itself at the very earliest design phases. That means there has to be sufficient advanced notice and can only apply to future titles. There is hope that an inexpensive industry of third parties may arise to easily handle this aspect upfront with new software, but it would be great if there was a tangible demo of this.

Good point about publishers providing the cash to get the studios through the bad times. I think where this falls apart now is in the modern big-budget live service model itself, since these projects are expected to be so long term, so expensive, and gain so much income, that their lack of success now seems to end up in a studio turning the lights out altogether. Concord comes to mind here. Bungie's reliance on the new Marathon is not something I would wish upon any studio either. These kinds of game development strategies do not seem to be healthy for the industry anymore, and some diversification is really needed. These comments here are not really an SKG thing, it just feels like a far bigger issue from the dev side right now. I hate that devs are constantly losing their jobs in the current market, and I think gamers do too. I just can't see the status quo as sustainable. I guess that's why I treated the "back breaking" as binary, but it is true that there is a whole range of suffering inbetween.

A studio should never be forced to keep something going when it is deemed a financial failure. Again, it has to be an upfront design decision during the early planning years so that the end of life version is mostly a compilation target. Latest version goes out, no more updates, no more servers to run. There were more specific solutions discussed by other devs in a video on Ross Scott's channel, but that's the general idea. Does this seem even remotely possible from your viewpoint? Maybe not on current projects, but for projects five to ten years in the future?

If it is too hard to implement in this way for the team, the legislation may force to accept that the nature of the project may be so inherently risky with the current staff resources that it should not come to fruition until new software developments have made it less risky. But you are right that it might just end up as one less person with an actual dev job at the studio, which isn't great in the current economy. Either way, I think many users feel their hands have been forced by the publishers as I understand.

I generally agree that you could require something like this for titles in the future. I think defining future is difficult, the engines everyone is using exist today, and often are just improving overtime, it's very rare for a studio to start from scratch.

But I'm still unsure that there's a good reason to require this. Basically we are saying that if a hobbyist really wants to operate and maintain something, they should be allowed to after some amount of time if the studio stops. It's a chink in the armor of copyright law, really - if a rights holder decides not to continue to license a film or TV show or book for publication, we let them.

I think it's a good idea to figure out who pays for this outside of the studio - I want studios to take risks, honestly the bigger the better, because that's how really interesting ideas get made. I recommended an auction in another thread about this, having a reserve and required auction at shutdown might be a good idea.

> Basically we are saying that if a hobbyist really wants to operate and maintain something, they should be allowed to after some amount of time if the studio stops.

I don't believe that is the problem as defined by SKG. I think the issue is less about empowering users to make use of the property afterwards (although that is nice), and more about the legal ambiguity in the process where products are removed from users without effective prior notice (from purchase date). Games without subscription fees are traded as effective goods by commerce law, but publishers operate as though they are services without a defined end-date through a EULA. IANAL, but my understanding is that whole concept is not legally tested. A one-time purchase should include a contract where the terms for revocation (ideally none, but we can't have nice things) are agreed upon and cannot change at the discretion of one party. You cannot have a license that essentially says "we can do whatever we want at any time". That has never been okay in the history of commerce. A subscription is different, since you know exactly how temporary it is at any particular time. Of course, both a defined lifetime or a subscription are tactics that have been tried and were not as popular with users, so companies resorted to effective trickery while users looked the other way for a time. The social contract is changing as users are watching games they loved die. So overall, the better solution for every party now is a minimal EOL. This isn't a precise threshold and it isn't an expectation that the game would continue to function as normal. It's a minimal effort taken to ensure that the customer still has something left to play around with which is in the spirit of the intended customer agreement; in the California bill, either patching for reasonable offline play (the command-line switch), providing server binaries (I can see this as more of a problem more often), or refunding (no-one wants this).

> if a rights holder decides not to continue to license a film or TV show or book for publication, we let them.

We let them, provided they don't rip the product we buy out of our hands. That's not new for games, but is only now happening for movies. It's unacceptable in every domain. It's like a user being told they can rent a movie, but it isn't clear how long for, so the movie can be requested back after only 5 minutes or could be after 5 years. It is fundamentally unfair. That comparison is quite real too, since some have bought a game, only to find it to be shutting down soon. That feels like theft. Sony removing movies from users libraries and from their computer feels like theft. I would argue it is theft, but that is part of the legal battle here.

> I want studios to take risks, honestly the bigger the better, because that's how really interesting ideas get made

I agree that creative risks should be taken, and also that bad economic strategies should not be rewarded. That's the natural course, and it seems that is happening right now just as one would expect. Many AAA studios are not taking many creative risks according to users (it's almost in the definition of AAA at this point), but are making poor economic decisions by not handling volatility with diversification. It's a recipe for disaster and the developers suffer most it seems.

> having a reserve and required auction at shutdown might be a good idea

I think that's fine, but I'm not sure whether it addresses the legal issues if the new rights holders do not uphold the original understanding of the purchase.

Fortunately, Stop Killing Games isn't looking to mandate any one solution to this problem.

There are many possible ways to enable game preservation and SKG is pushing for game studios to pick one and implement it, instead of not doing anything and letting games die when they become unprofitable.

Practically speaking, I think the best way to do something like this is to enforce an auction when a studio shuts down an online game. That way the people that care get to vote with their dollars, rather than costing the studio.

Doesn't seem fair to the people who have already paid for a product that will stop working.

I'm not sure I get this. A game costs about the same as watching a few movies - the cost per hour of entertainment is vanishingly low. For these long running games, the cost per hour of entertainment is down to pennies for these users. The same users who are still playing years later are also the ones who have gotten the most value for that same number of dollars already.

Do you genuinely believe that property rights diminish as the utility derived from property increases?

That's how copyright and patent law both work, yes. That's why we have expiry. And we all know the current expiry system is arbitrary (and capricious).

Copyright and patent law aren't relevant to this discussion. We're talking about goods that are purchased and then later rendered unusable by the seller.

I disagree. We're talking about goods purchased, and separately services without a paid support contract, and this is all about copyright law.

There's nothing illegal about selling a game where the servers only work for a week, if you say the servers are only going to work for a week unless you pay more.

The question is, what's reasonable if you don't say anything at all? Forever? A year? Five years? And that's not a trivial question.

If copyright law lasted two years, there would be nothing stopping someone from reverse engineering the service under one of these games after two years and running it themselves (barring serious cryptographic blockers).

Furthermore, the developer would have planned for that expiry of their IP protection. There's a loss to the game studio if they give away their intellectual property while it is still protected.

The only reason this is difficult at all is because of copyright law, and I suspect patent law as well but I think that's murkier.

If you start looking at this through that structure, I think it will make a lot more sense to you why each entity involved takes the actions they do.

> That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

I don't get why you think that makes it harder? Right up until the final version of the game their developers were somehow making changes and testing their changes. It's not like the game grew on its own. What were they using to test those changes? Release that. Job done.

> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).

The most relevant example of this for the games industry is probably Steam’s refund policy. They allow you to refund a game if you bought it less than 2 weeks ago and have less than 2 hours playtime recorded.

This is their policy for all users, but was a direct result of an Australian consumer watchdog lawsuit [0].

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...

Counter-example to this would be 3rd-party app stores on iOS, which are only enabled in the EU, Japan and more recently in Brazil (maybe I'm missing some).

Legislation in one market didn't impact the state of things in the others, and some countries get screwed over.

We already have a pretty resilient solution called piracy.

I’d go with a simple proposal: if you use the word “buy” the seller is required to refund buyers if the seller’s action removes access (unlike, say, losing access to a CD or DVD after the disc is scratched).

The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.

I agree, the "buy" on a streamable product implies that as long as the company is solvent and they have the same overall streamable products available, then your "purchase" should always be upheld.

In a an ideal world, if you bought the title then you'd have the ability to download it locally. I understand the licensing is a main driver of taking titles down, but these agreements are completely opaque to the customer at the time of purchase.

Include "add" and other potential weasel words

I’d take it farther. If you knew, or a reasonable person should have known, that this sort of thing might happen (for example, because you signed a time-limited licensing agreement), then you’ve lied for financial gain. The legal term for that is “fraud” and it’s a criminal act. Prosecute it.

California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.

The law is changing (very, very slowly):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48754782

We need consumer boycotts, not legislation. I find it hilarious that people would continue to buy (or license) content from a trash company like Sony after they were caught literally installing rootkits on customer computers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

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

> We need consumer boycotts, not legislation.

We need both. 'Buyer Beware' and 'The invisible hand' are necessary but insufficient to correct corporate bad behavior.

Yes, let's boycott sony and go to... sega?

There's only 3 major companies at this point in the home entertainment system market. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Microsoft has indicated they want to get out.

When so few companies have so much control over a market boycott becomes pointless as you are basically saying "You need to give up a product you like and there is no real alternative".

That means we need regulation, legislation, and enforcement.

We need better antitrust enforcement and tweaks to to give it more teeth. We should be seeing more corporate breakups.

Memory is in the same boat. There's only 3 major companies producing most of the RAM and they've repeatedly colluded to raise prices.

> I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.

Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.

Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.

All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.

I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Release:QmUWtV7fG1K9pM5TQSf5c38v...

There’s only one party fighting for things like this and they are in the minority. Funny how people that cry about politics on hacker news don’t understand how it directly affects them until their digital media is no longer their property. Sad that’s what it takes.

The list of legislation we need is getting very big very fast, but our Congress is dysfunctional and the president only cares about the SAVE act. Even when we've had a functional Congress, most protections like these are written in favor of corporations and/or weakened by the next administration.

Never buy, never subscribe, obtain by other means, until things change.

Starve 'em!

> and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price.

Wouldn't this incentivize people to buy the game, play it and once they are done with it get banned to get a full refund?

Maybe not a major problem since almost no centralised multiplayer games are one-time purchases.

> These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this.

I don't think it is reasonable to bundle those ideas together.

Companies renegading on their promise of perpetual access is not the same thing as a right to resell at all

Right to resell is just going to warp game prices in a way that is bad for everyone

After all how do new games compete with used games in that setup? Given the way engagement with games works there will basically always be spare copies

Key sales already happen at below new game value at nearly all times and that is unused games

> they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought

Also not the same thing at all, bad behavior removing access and no refund is normal

> that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price

Ah yes cheating in an MMO results in a full refund of all money paid that wouldn't be abused by anyone

I quite like the idea of what Nintendo Switch 2 is doing and hopefully could take on with some guarantee. The new Switch 2 cartridge, I am buying the Key to access the media. Storing and transferring media cost is going down every single year. You can pass the physical media to anyone. And they will still be able to access it. And the copy of that data should be legally yours and be protected by law they can't remove it.

It should be illegal to have others purchase what you as a company only licensed and therefore aren’t legally allowed to sell.

Agree... if they want to sell it, parent company must agree on forever licenses for each user. Regardless of reselling license getting cancelled.

They make it up as they go along. Their 2005 Audio-CD EULA includes provisions purporting to require the immediate deletion of all copies if a user files for personal bankruptcy

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2005/12/summary-claims-against...

When the debtor files bankruptcy ownership immediately moves to the bankruptcy estate. This supposed obligation to delete might be disclosable on the executory contracts schedule.

Plenty of people purchase digital movie rentals from Apple, Youtube, etcetera because they know they will watch it once, and the lower price in exchange for a temporary license is acceptable to them. I don't think banning this is pro-consumer.

It should, however, be illegal to tell your customers that they are purchasing/buying media without explicit "Rent" language (which implies a non-expiring license) when you do not yourself have the right to grant non-expiring licenses.

They often have two tiers, a rental tier and a purchase tier. If you purchase the assumption is it will be available forever.

Seems like a bad assumption at this point even if it goes against expectations. We've seen on multiple occasions now from different companies where a digital purchase wasn't forever. This is no way an endorsement of the behavior, but if that's your assumption then the quip "you know what happens when you assume" wins again.

So the default assumption should be that big companies are actively trying to defraud you?

The difference between "rent" and "purchase" has always been very clear: with the former you have to give it back, with the latter you own it forever. It is only very recently that this kind of steal-back has even become possible at all, as it can only be done with digital content delivery to an entirely-closed platform.

"You should assume that words have the opposite meaning and that big companies can steal from you with impunity" is a world I don't think I want to live in.

Whether you want to or not, that's pretty much where we live now. A default position of "every company is trying to defraud me" is not a bad position to take. As you find out a company is less of a criminal, then you can relax your position, but if you go in relaxed and need to tighten up, you've probably already been screwed out of something.

The "rent" vs "purchase" has never been different than it is now. Yes, purchase is a very deceiving word by design. The thing bringing it to the forefront is that they never were able to rip that physical product sold to you in the way they can with the digital product. That seems to have made people pay attention to the legalese that has always been there.

It’s not a bad assumption to the average person because words have meanings, and in this context they go back decades.

> Plenty of people purchase digital movie rentals from Apple, Youtube, etcetera because they know they will watch it once, and the lower price in exchange for a temporary license is acceptable to them. I don't think banning this is pro-consumer.

Many of these services offer cheaper rental options. When you go for the more expensive "buy" option, the assumption that you are actually buying it to keep should hold true.

I bet there’s a class action coming.

And Sony made it easy for them too by using this verbiage: “previously purchased content”

Because they were purchases, not rentals. Under no circumstances would a customer reasonably assume that their purchase would be revoked for reasons completely outside of their control.

What's funny is that Sony has done this before![0] I've had a personal boycott against Sony products due to this.

  "The feature was controversially removed by Sony since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010.[2] A class action lawsuit was filed against Sony on behalf of users, but was dismissed with prejudice in 2011 by a federal judge. The judge stated: "As a legal matter, ... plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable."[3] However, this decision was overturned in a 2014 appellate court decision[4] finding that plaintiffs had indeed made clear and sufficiently substantial claims. Ultimately, in 2016, Sony settled with users who had installed Linux or had purchased a PlayStation 3 based upon the availability of OtherOS."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

Yep. I had tons of Sony games across the first three Playstation consoles. I was a grad student with a PS3 at the time and I actually used Yellow Dog Linux on it as a computer to write papers when my laptop broke. Then the update came and I chose to ignore it, but that meant I couldn't play online games. Soon new games required a firmware update (still remember putting in the Dark Souls disc and being stunned I wasn't allowed to play it!).

And with games it's just getting worse (Sony announced they won't make discs starting 2028; the Switch 2 takes carts but very, very few games release on a cart). If you care about control over the games you purchased, if you care about going back and playing older games, then the only choice is to use platforms that are DRM free. (Or, well, non-legal means.)

Kinda. On Steam I can still play games I bought 18 years ago.

Still walled garden, but they act way better.

True, but Steam still controls Steam and they can change their terms whenever they want. But for now it's ok, at least. And their hardware is happily open: I've played a bunch of games I got on GOG, DRM-free, on my Steam Deck, for example.

I don't disagree with you, but open hardware DOES make a difference, in the worst case scenario I can turn the hardware into a GOG machine, or into a PC. Also if they ever lock my library, I am turning to piracy (I have 1000+ games)

Agreed, for sure. Open hardware is the only way forward honestly. As someone who has traditionally played mostly on consoles, it does make me sad, partially because consoles are so much less finicky. But the control is worth it (and work on things like Proton has made playing older games so much smoother).

Now if the RAM companies make it so you won't ever be able to afford your own hardware and every game company pushes cloud-only gaming... Well, we aren't there yet thankfully, but I fear it'll happen.

SteamOS got me to migrate from a Nintendo.

There's a lot that I love about it, but "choose which of these thousand settings permutations to get the game to look good without crashing" is a major chore.

One nice thing about Valve/Steam leading with hardware is that it gives console-esque performance targets. If you know your device is a bit better than a Steam Deck, you can probably start at the Steam Deck preset and adjust accordingly.

They're always good until they aren't. They can only be trusted if they don't have a way to be bad. Steam could lock down tomorrow and you couldn't do anything about it.

Valve is in a funny position now. They lived long enough to see every one of Sony and XBOX's moats dry up by being pro-consumer where possible, but with Steam as the leader of a fungible game distribution market it may no longer make good business sense to continue to act so benevolently.

We've reached a sort of gaming singularity where nearly every video game can be run on any hardware you choose or be streamed over the network to a thin client. PlayStation and XBOX consoles are basically dedicated gaming PCs that can only run Sony or Microsoft's version of Steam. DirectX is losing ground too thanks to Proton and Vulkan, so Microsoft won't have the last laugh there either. If Valve controls the store you purchase games from, the software which runs the games, and the operating system running the software, they are an ODM contract away from becoming Sony's PlayStation division, and look where they are now.

Steam still has to deal with Epic being willing to throw billions at trying to dethrone Steam, and Gog being alive and well and being in the perfect position to say "we told you all along that you shouldn't have to trust Steam, buy your DRM free games here". Also every big publisher wanting to pull their own games to their own storefront and only being forced to crawl back because gamers refuse to leave Steam

And even if they somehow arrived in a market position where being less benevolent would make more money: Valve isn't publicly traded, nobody is forcing them to make the most profitable move. As long as Gabe and the other owners prefer being benevolent they can continue doing it

(not that they are all around benevolent. "consistent" and "usually choosing the side of the customer over the side of the publisher" is maybe the better framing)

> As long as Gabe and the other owners prefer being benevolent they can continue doing i

I think Gabe prefers hanging out on his yacht nowadays looking at fish, his son is the one running Valve?

One point in Steam's favor (not to suggest that Valve is above reproach) is that it doesn't impose any DRM. If games have DRM, that's the publisher's decision.

Valve does make its own DRM, and they could certainly find reason to improve its efficacy and roll back their current policy without upsetting the applecart

> DirectX is losing ground too thanks to Proton and Vulkan

[citation needed]

My understanding is that Proton is effectively a distribution of WINE + DXVK, which does for DirectX what WINE does for Win32. Valve is even on record saying "make one good copy of your game and trust our compatibility tools to port to other platforms" which is effectively saying "use DirectX if you want - Proton will run it just as well."

I think I could have bolstered this point by claiming "Windows and DirectX are losing ground", but I stand by my argument that Microsoft's gatekeeper status is eroding thanks to the growth [1] of Proton and Vulkan. Now native Vulkan implementations are not growing the way Proton is, but one could argue that Valve has done more to grow Vulkan support than Google's Stadia team ever did by removing the onus to write for it from game developers. Either way you slice it, Microsoft is now competing with Valve for OS installs. _____________

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Survey-May-2026]

Till Gabe dies and valve is bought out by private equity

Imagine if Gabe went the Yvon Chouinard way? (founder of Patagonia refused to IPO, never sold controlling stake, recently left the entire company to an environmental conservation trust - certified LEGEND)

Gabe seems like the kinda guy who is in the Game for the love of games.

It would be a legendary legacy indeed to commit Valve and it's profits to a trust which defends digital rights and freedom.

Gabe's son is apparently the one steering the ship now. He's hanging out on his yacht looking at fish.

I’m wondering what happens when Gabe dies?

It's been discussed a long time. Nobody knows, but apparently he had been preparing his son for it. Don't quote me on that, it's what I heard

That's still a terribly small bus factor.

Indeed the danger is there, but their hardware is open, so there is always the option to switch.

Also piracy will go rampant if Steam stops being a good actor.

That being said, what alternatives you have? GOG lacks support for Linux, Sony cares doesn't care for you, Nintendo likes to s** all over you and their most passionate fans, Microsoft killed itself.

There is just no other option

Nintendo outright ships incomplete games on carts sometimes, requiring a day 1 patch to have the game in a non-buggy state (one of the recent pokemon games was like this)

And "gamers" refuse to listen to reason and assume physical copy = they can play it for eternity, when in reality, in 5 or 10 years when a server is inevitably shut down, they're forced to pirate. Nintendo does not allow offline patches.

I joined the class action lawsuit and got a small check a decade later. My proof that I had OtherOS ended up being timestamped whinging on the ars technica forums. My ps3 stopped working shortly after receiving the check due to bad solder, which was I guess fitting.

I got my $10 too. I remember laughing at the amount when I got the check. Thankfully after the OtherOS issue people worked to crack open the PS3, so by the time I got that check I had long since installed custom firmware on it.

> the Switch 2 takes carts

I believe the switch 2 carts don't contain the actual game, just a license key. The game is downloaded on first run.

Many Switch 2 carts contain the entire game. A larger portion just act as a license key.

I boycot Sony since they blocked my PSN account, which got hacked due to them! Purchases I made are not available, ... I really took a disliking before when they refused to fix my Vaio laptop, ... this was the last drop!

Good, but only laws will keep them on check. If I boycotted all companies that have done something wrong, I would boycott all of them. I keep that option for the worst offenders. Laws and regulations is what keeps companies in check.

I am considering to still psuh them to re-instate my account (EU law), but they will stop the PS3 store too. Double ff-edff news from them, as that was the a generation with many downloadable content.

You don't own anything.

> In November 2018 final payouts for members of the class were sent in the amount of $10.07.

Gosh this is ridiculous

Likewise, I've avoided all Sony products since the rootkit scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

I don't know why they didn't imprison some executives over that.

It's worse than simply depriving consumers of their rights/games/music, but actively and knowingly installing malware on their computers.

If buying is not owning, piracy is not theft.

Piracy was never theft.

It was a copyright violation. Which, I don't give one fuck about.

Yeah. Copyright monopolists equate copyright infringement to literal high seas piracy because it's the only way they can make any impact. Nobody would give a fuck otherwise.

And the OTHER copyright monopolists (Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, X) proved the rules don't apply to them with copyright.

And then Anthropic publically bellyaches that "WAHHHH CHINESE ARE STEALING OUR STOLEN DATA WAH". Lemee get that worlds tiniest violin for that sonata!

These days if you're following the rules, you're a rube and a stooge. And you will be taken advantage of again and again and again.

Yeah. It's so disgusting.

One would think dozens of SWAT officers would rappel down helicopters and storm the mansions of these big tech CEOs. Unpayable trillion dollar fines, actual prison time. Instead the AI companies reached some absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

Sounds like good fodder for a videogame though...

The fact that lawyers dreamt up the notion of "Imaginary Property" called it "Intellectual Property" and built a business around the scam for themselves, and other people take it seriously is some of the most compelling evidence that humans suck.

In the digital age where the cost of copying itself is functionally zero, we're supposed to pay people over and over again for a thing created once is like the human race taking advantage of itself.

I get making money for labor, novelty, and producing things but repeated payments thereafter would feel like a scam to any reasonable alien.

'Copyright' is humans at their most greedy and selfish.

I like how succinct this is.

A buddy of mine is pretty insistent on physical media, wherever possible, and honestly, at this point, he's been proven right again and again.

Sad that most executable code (games, software, etc) these days is digital only and requires drm calls to a license server to install. I will not pirate executable code.

Reminds me of an American guy who I met in the UK around 2005 when I was doing my PhD (he was doing his 2nd PhD!!!). He refused to open a "cloud" email account (Google, Hotmail, etc). At the time when I asked why, he mentioned something that has stuck with me for all these years:

"It's not about what they are doing NOW with the data, but what they could do in the future" . Back then I thought he was a bit paranoid. These days... not so much.

So, regarding owning/buying stuff, im glad I have a collection of CDs and ibe bought most of my games in physical There are some which are actually hard to get in pirate sites.

Studio Canal directly got paid for each individual purchase. It isn't all on Sony, Studio Canal sold a product then took it away.

They're both to blame. Studio Canal insisted on a licensing agreement that works this way, and Sony agreed to it to sell their content.

For Sony, the correct move here would have been to not list Studio Canal titles in the first place, and put out a very public statement saying that they aren't being listed until Studio Canal agrees to make purchased licenses perpetual as they should be.

> Both to blame

IANAL but I think the US law approach is to rely on chaining, so the #1 blame is on Sony until Sony proves it isn't.

1. Consumers who were damaged sue Sony for damages.

2. If Sony loses, Sony sues Studio Canal for damages.

3. If Studio Canal loses... ?

Correct. In theory, Sony should have warranted that they have the rights to sell the thing the way they sold it. If they didn't have the rights to sell a movie perpetually, then that's on them.

They don't need the rights to sell a movie perpetually, just the rights to sell perpetual movies.

> Studio Canal sold a product then took it away

If that's the case, why isn't Sony suing Studio Canal? The proper license for Sony to get is one which doesn't allow Studio Canal to take it away after sale in any way. So did Studio Canal somehow hack into Sony HQ to violate that license, or did Sony simply screw over its customers by not getting the proper license in the first place?

Not wishing to let them off the hook, but consumers did not enter into a contract with Studio Canal, so it's somewhat irrelevant to the actual issue. Sony willingly entered into a contract with Studio Canal and then "sold" items to consumers that they could reasonably foresee would be time limited without making that clear to the purchasers.

I'd like to see Sony executives put in prison for fraud for this.

Ever since Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. started offering "free" online storage for photos, ever since streaming started to be popular, I have ALWAYS extolled the virtues of µSD card slots in phones and owning your own media (i.e., purchasing CDs and DVDs). Many people would give me a hard time about this, calling me a Luddite, but I will never lose access to my photos, music, or movies ... unless it is the end of the world as we know it, which I happily have on R.E.M.'s Eponymous album.

Why would anyone call you a luddite for advocating for MicroSDs? Of course the reason SD were pushed away (at least for Apple) was to offer cloud backup as the only option with no alternatives.

Of course the reason SD were pushed away (at least for Apple) was to offer cloud backup as the only option with no alternatives.

Except that no part of what you claim is true:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

Does anyone actually do this? I’m looking to reduce my reliance on iCloud but I’ve kept my backups there so far as it always seemed onerous to have to plug in and trigger the backup manually. And easy to forget, too.

> Does anyone actually do this?

Yep. I've been using an iPhone since 2012, so about 14 years. I do a local backup to my Macbook and then perform upgrades via USB, I don't do over the air upgrades. I also don't sync my photo albums into iCloud. I do have iCloud backups enabled also. It's not even a concern about privacy, per se, it's a question of whether or not I actually control my data if its not in my possession. More copies is good for resiliency.

I regularly back up the photos on my phone (which is admittedly not an iphone, but also does not have a microsd slot) to a local file server in my house. I don't need a microsd slot to control my data.

The iPhone has never had a microsd slot, many years before icloud existed.

I just wish it was possible to buy decent ųSD cards. Even really expensive ones sold in reputable stores die all the time. Sure they work just fine if your goal is to write photos into it, never delete anything and get a new one once it fills up, but anything more write heavy typically kills my SD cards within months. SSDs last decades.

I wish library of things had tape writers and readers. Magnetic tape storage is quite cost effective for data backups and archiving.

I have been using the same µSD card since 2016 with no issues.

Watch ... it'll fail on me later today. :-D

The one in my dash cam has been going for a year or two now. I pull video off it fairly regularly. It's the branded rove 4k one.

Maybe that one is specifically made to work for that application. Are you confident that you could go out and buy a replacement SD card in a general electronics store and get something which would be as robust?

The one in my dash cam is a SanDisk you can buy anywhere. It's got a good two years on it, works fine. Same in the Pi-hole, it was so long ago that I don't remember when I put that card in. More than three or four years, I'm pretty sure.

In fact, though I don't use a lot of SD cards, I don't recall having one go bad. I'm sure it's happened, but obviously not often enough for me to remember.

An SD card should only ever be treated as a local cache for data you can replace or will soon move to more permanent storage. Even if you had the best card in the world you could still lose or have your phone stolen.

Highly recommend setting up your own photo hosting and backup. People love Immich, but ente.io is also great! Much better than trusting your photos to a single microSD card which may die at any moment.

Nothing really wrong with being a Luddite. The Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-progress. Rather, they opposed deployment of technology in the workplace which they believed would reduce their pay, reduce the quality of their output, and make it easier to exploit vulnerable people such as children. They were, basically, doing the same thing as software engineers who argue that AI mandates are making their lives worse and making the quality of their employers' software worse.

From my experience with SD cards in mobile phone when I worked in a Telco, most customers didn't actually know how to use them. Because in many cases plugging in the SD card didn't magically increase the base storage of the device, they actually needed to know how to store things on it.

But that's a separate issue altogether

But in reality MicroSD card are easily to lose. And setting up an NAS is still a bag of hurt. Not to mention the lack of ZFS / BTrFS on cheaper model, and no ECC RAM your data will likely be corrupted half way through the decade.

We still don't have an easy solution to this problem.

The honest product description would be: "You are purchasing a revocable license to stream this content at our discretion, for an unspecified period, subject to change without notice."

Nobody would buy that. So they say "buy" instead, and courts have largely let them get away with it. Until legislation actually forces the word "buy" to mean ownership, this will keep happening.

I disagree. People would still buy that.

There's a dangerous path where the companies are required to describe these transactions as "rentals", but that wont actually solve anything. If we require clearer advertising, we're going to end up with a world where everything is very clearly a rental, and there simply is no option to purchase. People will still buy the $40 "rentals" because it's their favorite movie and they want to watch it multiple times, and it's Friday night and they want to watch it right now.

I think people understand the situation when they "purchase" digital media. They know it might not last forever. They do it anyway. They don't like it though. They would prefer genuine ownership, but it's not an option.

We either need to outlaw these long term rentals, or break up monopolies until companies that are actually offering genuine purchases arise. Or we could do both.

We need to regulate more than just the wording on the "purchase" page. This isn't just a problem of wording.

I think it’d be helpful as a price anchoring tool: people think rentals are worth less and accept greater restrictions because they’re paying less. I don’t think you’d see nearly as many people paying $40 for a time-limited rental and that downward pressure would be healthy.

> I think people understand the situation when they "purchase" digital media. They know it might not last forever.

I don’t think this is true at all because 1) truly nothing is forever, i.e., even physical media degrades over time or gets lost, stolen, etc., and 2) the customer is absolutely led to believe that “purchase” means ownership similar to having a physical copy, as long as that service provider exists. Otherwise it’s clearly a rental.

I've heard there's a service called PirateBay that offers movies free of DRM. Maybe people considering being Sony customers in the future should give it a try.

That's copyright infringement. They do not have the rights to distribute the movies.

But you can actually purchase them at 100% discount. And you can own as long as you want. Seems a much better deal.

You're right, we should strive for compliance with copyrights and distribution licenses in our personal lives.

It is the best way to support artists and the industry.

I'm not going to click "purchase," I'm just not going to. Sorry... not sorry! :^)

Neither does Sony (anymore), apparently. They still sold them.

and redefined the terms of "sold" in their contract to mean "rent, with a one-time fee"

it is more immoral to sell something you can't legally "sell" (permanently and irrevocably transfer ownership of a product), than to pirate that content (which has no level of expected payment)

Sony sold them while they still had the license with a clause that they could remove them at any time.

> with a clause that they could remove them at any time.

Then they did not sell them.

That's not selling, that's renting

Yep. That's the argument.

People don't like that though. We should change the laws so that is illegal. We can just make laws we want--we're allowed to do that.

they don't host or distribute movies, they distribute torrents/magnets.. the speakeasy might be illegal, but telling people where to find one is not.

Let me just say, I fuckin love piracy, but it's more like a speakeasy that piped booze in from everyone's house into the bar instead of just keeping the bottles above the bar. Booze all the same though

I dislike the term "pirate" when used to describe unauthorized reproductions of a work. I prefer neutral terms like "archivist". Calling someone a pirate reduces the conversation to pejorative labeling, i.e. a dysphemism. When we turn a blind eye to that, or worse we embrace it, we lose the opportunity to have a balanced/adult discussion about what is and should be legal.

Why do you think we all go there

The Pirate Bay is considered one of the worst pirate sites now. Of course, if you can find what you want, then you can, but any piracy community will recommend against it due to nonexistent moderation (eg. against viruses), poor navigation, and lack of uploads due to them not issuing new uploader accounts for several years now.

> The Pirate Bay is considered one of the worst pirate sites now

I'm curious. What are the best sites nowadays? Still torrents, right?

I used to be in the know but switched to legit things a while back so I wouldn't have to explain how dad is getting Bluey episodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1337x

- Type the name of the media you are after into the search bar.

- Click search.

- Close the tab tab that opens to opera.com

- Click search again

- Close the starfleetacommand.com tab

- Click search again

- Close the jerkmaate.net tab

- Find your media.

- Click the magnet link

- Close the livetruematch.com tab

The site is garbage.

Ublock Origin (at least on Firefox, RIP Chromium users) makes all these problems go away instantly.

I just tested with chrome + ubo lite, and it worked perfectly fine with no ads.

People keep complaining about it, so I'd like to ask again... what websites aren't getting ads blocked by ubo lite? Everywhere I go, I haven't actually noticed any degradation in blocking capability.

The only Real Way (TM) to experience internet these days

I use Ublock on Brave (chromium). Ublock is supposed to be unnecessary with brave alone, but I use it all the time to delete annoying UI elements mostly permanently.

Why anyone still uses vanilla Chrome for personal use is beyond me while brave exists and is actively maintained. It's essentially youtube premium for free even on mobile.

Well first of all, uBlock is a version that was sold to advertising companies many years ago, which is why uBlock Origin was created.

uBlock Origin is the one that Google blocked on Chrome by redesigning how extensions work, creating a big fuss. You could try uBlock Origin Lite but, well, it's called Lite for a reason, as it can't block as much stuff. Or you could switch to a browser that supports adblock extensions, which is Firefox.

I meant ublock origin. I use firefox and brave pretty interchangeably. Firefox is better in some ways but utterly infuriating in others.

Fun fact: internet speed tests have been reliably faster in firefox for years for whatever reason. And the volume boost extension I use there doesn't work in fullscreen on brave for some reason, which is mostly why I watch videos predominantly in firefox.

Don't you know it's always the smallest unstyled "Download" button that is the real one? The big green one has always redirected to spyware bullshit

The Pirate Bay is also like that. Get uBlock Origin.

May I recommend the excellent “top 10” list maintained by torrenfreak and updated yearly: https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/

>top sites

>no RuTracker

lol

Yts for movies

IPT is far and away the best torrent tracker, but it's private and you need an invite (or pay a few bucks)

IPT has a very bad reputation because it arbitrarily shakes down users for money (suddenly demanded to pay and banned if you don't) and attacks its competitors with DDoS, malware uploads, peer leaks, etc

It still works fine, look for the little green? Skull next to the uploader. You can also import torrent sites into qbitorrent and search within it.

check out fmhy - a guide to all kinds of interesting sites you might be interested in :)

Usenet, with radarr as your user interface. Yes, you'll have to pay (on top of what you pay for Internet access) for Usenet access, but it's cheaper than paying for multiple streaming services

miss demonoid

Not the first time and not going to be the last. Unless you can download it to hardware you completely own and can make a backup, it's not really yours. Online purchases I can get on with, like Bandcamp are pretty good. I bought the new Globular album on CD and it took 10 days to get to me from the UK. I also had access to high quality downloads. That works, these other models do not.

Bandcamp rules. I do still subscribe to Apple Music for cheap streaming, but for albums I really like, I'll spend the $8 on bandcamp for the high quality album download. Better support for the artist, and protection against license-pulling BS like this.

Even if you have a back up copy of a DRM file and they have turned off the authenticating services, that digital file is of now use to you until someone comes up with a way of decrypting it. This is what Microsoft did with their music service.

When MS ended Plays fer Sure sales two years after they started, and no DRM-free alternative (well, MS said you could burn to CD at a crap bitrate), that's when I learned to operate sails and a rudder. I tried to play nice, but I could see where this was going.

I still make digital purchases, but at the first sign of friction, at the first indication that I'm gonna get screwed somehow, I leave port and off to the open waters. Fuck 'em, I played by the rules until I discovered that I was the only one doing so.

2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48718967

4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346

4 years ago ( so it's not the first time studioCanal has done this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32010317

It's interesting that (in one regard) Sony is getting a PR win with the "StudioCanal has done this" narrative.

Another perspective: In accordance with the licensing system that Sony and their lobbyists helped establish, Sony's licensing agreement with StudioCanal came up for renewal. Sony decided that they didn't want to pay StudioCanal's perfectly reasonable() asking price.

this is StudioCanal's perspective.

I think it is quite tricky to argue that StudioCanal did anything wrong.

Sony isn't a naive child, they've got whole armies of lawyers analyzing the deals they sign. If Sony knowingly signs a horrible deal (such as a Netflix-like "you can show this bunch of content to users and let them download it for X years") which due to their desire to sell movies leads to them inevitably getting screwed over on their (now-mandatory) contract renewal, that's on them.

Either Sony should've insisted on a contract which included a right to sell perpetual sublicenses, or they shouldn't have "sold" those inherently-temporary movies to end users. It really is that simple.

They're not getting a PR win, I am redirecting people's attention to StudioCanal because I think hating on Sony is lazy, and also because having worked in the movie business I think I have some more insight into the licensing end of things.

StudioCanal wants to make as much money, like any publisher, but we don't know how much they wanted for this deal or how that compares to pricing for other IP. Movies are not fungible, really, and StudioCanal has a lot of classics. Like Disney, they keep the price up by rotating out of streaming licensing windows regularly; for example if your copy of terminator II disappeared from your Playstation you might be doubly upset to note it's also vanished from Netflix (or is just about to, I don't remember the exact dates).

Also, I think it's an misrepresentation (though surely unintentional) to talk about Sony's unwillingness to pay in the present tense. These movies were originally licensed/bought years ago, and Sony shut down movie sales on the Playstation store in 2021. I presume this was because they couldn't make the economics work, but it's possible that there was some antitrust angle since Sony produces films and antitrust in the US has historically frowned on film companies controlling both production and distribution. The DOJ repealed the 1948 'Paramount Decrees' in 2020 which might also have been a factor in Sony's decision-making.

This is why I recently purchased a NAS and have started storing all my movies and TV shows on it. Especially classics that I will want to watch with my kids when they are older. It's a bit of a PITA to rip dvds, but my thought is that if a movie or show isn't worth the time it takes to rip and transferring to the NAS, then it's probably not worth a watch at all.

Would live to hear an attorney’s opinion on this - why isn’t this considered to be something like “constructive theft” just like constructive abandonment or constructive dismissal? Sony deceived millions of customers by implying that purchasing something meant permanent ownership (as permanent as digital media can be), then through legal trickery and without consent, essentially “took” away their digital property. I wonder if legal concepts such as “constructive larceny” or “theft by conversion” could be applied here, or if this would be considered destruction of property?

And with more and more content being distributed digitally, and even Sony announcing that physical disks won't be a thing from 2028 [0], the days of media ownership are gone. The only way to "own" content is it being DRM free (rare) or piracy. And ironically, DRMs justify the existence of piracy.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...

Related discussions:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48718967

There’s still a good amount of outrage to be farmed from this, looks like.

No refund?

I have a similar grief with YouTube movies although in that one, they don't play UHD. Some do like Valerian plays at least in 1080P, most movies are capped to 480P unless you have an "approved device" eg. something probably riddled with ads.

1080p or higher is pretty common on the high seas, even for titles like cartoons, which in my opinion is overkill.

They do have Cowboy Bebop in 1080P on YouTube which looks amazing, I bought it

I don't partake in downloading anymore but I do go to streaming sites

A long time ago I worked in the video codec area and was shown then that the most difficult videos to compress (i.e. with the most compressed bytes resulting in the file) were cartoons, because of the sharp edges, etc.

Not sure if it is still the case today with the latest generations of ultra-advanced codecs.

Strong disagree. When I saw Spirited Away on 1080p, it blew my mind.

And Coraline is just amazing, although it's not a cartoon...

That's why I pirate content and will continue to pirate content. I'm not hurting artists. I go to shows and premiers and book signings. I'm perfectly fine with stealing from publishing cartels.

> I'm not hurting artists

I guess residuals are a made up thing.

The communication on this could be better. I feel like I’ve heard that artists often get pretty much nothing.

At some point, being more honest about what artists get paid will probably help the middlemen more than harm them.

Basically, yeah. A company like Spotify pays fractions of a cent per stream. If you're not a Taylor Swift, residuals are essentially a rounding error. Going to tours, concerts, or signings makes the artist far more money. We've reached a point where Spotify has become nothing more than a well-disguised advertising platform for concerts.

Ok cool, can I cherry pick now? TV actors in expansive TV series' with residuals in their contract. It can be a significant part of their income.

If residuals are too good, they just pull your show from distribution (see: Westworld via HBO).

It used to be that streaming services were an excellent option even over torrenting because of the ease of access and use.

Now we're not even getting to retain what we buy, this is not a streaming service, these were sold to users individually.

We've gone full circle where I honestly believe pirating is a far better offering.

The root of the problem is these ridiculous content licensing agreements, it should be very very obvious to the customer when they're buying that "Hey, you will own this until X date when our content licensing agreement is finished"

Not hidden by design in some dense ToS.

You've already paid for it. Just download it from somewhere else with a clean conscience.

Bonus points if you do this while retaining the original copy.

You paid for it, but you never bought it. So you would still not have a clean conscience.

If you paid for it, then not a single person in the world can ever accuse you of "stealing" from creators, or of failing to support them.

They named the price, and the price was paid. The licensing and rent seeking shenanigans of corporations and their lawyers are utterly irrelevant.

Practically infinite number of persons in law enforcement and blackmail businesses absolutely would accuse you.

I meant normal people, not the enforcers of monopolistic laws that were bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists.

Having a clean conscience depends on one's internal moral values, not from what the rest of the world accuses of. If one's moral compass would feel the need to having paid for it to feel satisfied, it would also need to having bought it.

Copyright is an absurd monopoly, tolerated because it is among the least bad ways to to compensate creators for their work.

Therefore, if you have compensated creators, you are morally in the clear, objectively, no matter what else you do.

They should at least make an effort to let you sync them into MoviesAnywhere which is supposed to solve the "I have this on iTunes, but not Android TV" problem by unlocking it across platforms if you sync your accounts. They should really let you permanently keep movies on defunct platforms as part of your standard MoviesAnywhere movie collection.

Movies Anywhere works by aggregating the active digital access licenses you have participating partner services. The problem here is Sony won't be able to give any active digital access licenses for these movies to users after September 1st, let alone one which allows them to transfer that through Movies Anywhere.

It's typical "you own nothing" logic to the point the companies selling you that also don't even own it.

Sure, but its also run and operated by the rights holders, which they never even needed to do.

It's more "streaming/delivery operators which also have some of their own licensed content":

- Disney -> Disney+/Hulu

- Universal/NBC -> Peacock

- Warner Bros. -> Max

- Lionsgate -> Lionsgate+

- Sony Pictures -> The Sony services relevant to the article (note: the Sony services sell more than just Sony Pictures content)

They never needed to, but it actually makes them more money because a revenue share model through Movies Anywhere makes sense. StudioCanal does not sell streaming/delivery services directly to consumers, a revenue share model between streaming providers would not make them more money, and Sony would have no influence on StudioCanal doing so anyways.

The announcement only seems to have been sent to users in the UK and MoviesAnywhere is a US only service. Also StudioCanal are ultimately the rightsholder who would need to join MoviesAnywhere, and they are not members.

(I am a bit surprised they didn't bung Google and StudioCanal a bit of money to move them to Google Play to avoid the bad publicity though.)

Sony literally distributed a rootkit in the guise of DRM for Audio CDs back when piracy meant CD-R distribution.

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

Anyone remotely surprised at their history of utter contempt for the end-user need only remind themselves of SVP Steve Heckler's remarks to conference attendee's in 2000

"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."

https://web.archive.org/web/20090318115847/http://www.nyfair...

The remarks of Stewart Baker of the DHS admonishing Sony are as relevant today as they were then; namely that "it's your intellectual property - it's not your computer."

https://web.archive.org/web/20051229031842/http://www.mp3new...

I haven't bought a single Sony product since then. I used to have a Sony walkman, clock radio, buy classical Sony CDs (or their sub brands), etc, nearly got an original PlayStation.

I wrote a letter to them after the rootkit fiasco saying they've lost a consumer for life. Didn't get a real response. Wrote to them last anti DRM day. Didn't get a response.

Really, this is the only power one has in capitalism -- don't buy their products.

Same for me. I have boycotted Sony since the rootkit fiasco.

I’m also still angry that, even though intentionally hacking a computer system is a criminal offence, not a single Sony employee was prosecuted or even arrested. Sony committed a crime on a massive scale that any individual would have been convicted of and spent years in jail for. They did it knowingly and for financial gain. They should be behind bars.

Should mention today Sony also announced the end of physical releases for their consoles, and the closure of the PS3 and PSVita stores.

A friend of mine owned the first Ipod, and diligently ripped all his cd's and cut and pasted them too his device. I asked if he had backups, and he said he had the cd's. I told him too make a copy, just in case the Apple mafia came too delete his stuff. He didn't, and then after a move he lost or scratched many of his CD's. His only backup WAS the ripped MP3's. A few years later Apple deleted all of his music claiming he hadn't purchased them. He didn't even know how to download music. Every single MP3 he had he ripped himself...

Reminds me of 1984, not the book itself, but the time when Amazon deleted it from everyone's Kindle because of some sort of copyright issue. I think that's when most of us first realized that the digital media being purchased doesn't really belong to you.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-ki...

It is in times like these that I start getting messages from friend and family that asks:

> What's the name of that website?

I tell them to use yandex, they will find plenty of such websites...

gitflic.ru is the Russian Github that permits speech that the DMCA doesn't.

And yes, bypassing DRM is banned speech in the USA, punishable by criminal law. And there's no actual requirement of a company to claim DRM and defeat methods. The law is set up so they can claim basically anything, and its 100% backed by criminal law.

1FA is kinda a joke, cause saying inane shit like "Hitler was a good guy" is perfectly fine, but "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" (HD-DVD private key) is criminally banned speech.

its funny how Russia became the champion for free speech as long as it doesnt impact them

This might have repercussions in the UK. There are supreme court where T&C have been invalidated due to not being advertised well enough. The more onerous the clause is, the more burden is laid on the seller to make sure the customer understands that.

I doubt most of the people who "bought" the film understood that they weren't buying it and it could be taken away from theme at any time.

I'm surprised movies haven't yet moved to DRM free on purchases the way music did on iTunes back in 2009. With movie files being so large and people having streaming services integrated in their TV's I can't imagine there is all that much incentive for people to share them anyway. The only thing it does is help prevent situations like this.

It kinda sucks seeing the PlayStation turn to trash after so many good memories with PS1/PS2. I guess nothing lasts forever.

It is legitimately impossible to purchase certain movies, especially classic, in any format due to regional blocks.

Simple example: "The Things of Life", a classic French movie from 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_of_Life

No way to get it in the US. No physical media, no streaming. It is on Apple TV ... in France.

You can torrent it.

Utterly brokem model.

Music is the same btw, Apple Music and Spotify geoblock music. Workaround is to add to your library when traveling in EU. Insane.

And for some non-geoblocked music, if you want to actually purchase the song as MP3, there's no way unless you have a Mac or Windows PC to install iTunes (too bad for Linux users).

https://uk.7digital.com/ has a lot of songs available in MP3 format, but not as many as on iTunes.

If you're open to physical media you can probably request it through your library, or similarly buy the dvd from ebay or something.

If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.

Wait, people trusted a corporation and got screwed?!? Why, that's...unheard of!(My wife, bless her, has "purchased" dozens of movies on amazon. I warned her that when the amazon wind changes, she may regret those purchases. I got the look.)

I understand where you are going with this, but it also feels incorrect to me to blame people innocently "buying" media from a $corporation.

What are people to do if they want to stay on the non-pirate/legal side of this but also prevent being royally F-ed?

There's no overlap. Just pirate.

You can just not watch a movie. No one needs movies.

Nobody said otherwise.

I suppose you could "buy" and also get a copy off of thepiratebay.org - you already paid for the license. It is teeechnically illegal because the "purchase" agreement very likely doesn't allow backups, but come on. (Also, the uploading part of torrenting is usually separately illegal)

Or when the account gets compromised. I recently lost my amazon account and with it, all of my kindle purchases. Fortunately, I was able to turn on the airplane mode on my kindle just in time and preserve the books which were already downloaded. Guess I have to jail break it some day.

We’re all familiar with all the ways this sucks, of course, so I’ll discuss something else:

The fact that someone like Sony can’t negotiate a contract that provides perpetual re-download rights to customers is embarrassing. I doubt that would have cost any money. No movie studio would have objected to the idea that the original buyer gets to keep the non-transferable media forever.

I guess they just didn’t think of it? What law school did these Sony lawyers go to, anyway?

Does Sony just not even care about their brand image at all? This was entirely avoidable.

These vague licensing complications seem to be unnecessary "own goals" the industry keep scoring on itself over and over.

Rights to distribute via digital download are separate from rights to stream, which are separate from rights to broadcast, which are separate from DVD rights, and then multiply that by every rights holder and "region" out there. Good grief! Why do they deliberately make it so complicated?

> can’t

....or won't.

Of course they could have negotiated that. They didn’t just forget. They choose to not pay whatever additional cost Studio Canal would have wanted for a perpetual license.

Knowing that, they turned around and deceived people into buying something by false representation. Sony are crooks and have been crooks for a long time.

I agree with you, but my main speculation is that a perpetual license would not have actually cost extra. It is at least possible that this happened via incompetence rather than malice, especially at a big corporation like Sony.

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

This is one reason why piracy is legitimate and important

Piracy remains the best way to consume films at home. If you don't have it on your hard drive in an open format, you don't own it.

I really hope this leads to a class action that sets precedence, but I won't hold my breath or even consider whether that's even possible.

Class actions are usually not very effective. Each affected individual will receive $0.03 and the company will pay 0.5% of the money it made from this maneuver. What actually works is the opposite, mass small claims lawsuits for refunds, because that way the cost of handling those cases is much higher for the company than for the individual.

I am fine with "renting" a streaming movie, as an analogue to analog - going to Blockbuster and renting a movie.

But I not for a single second trusted "buying" digital goods, and I was quickly proved right. The first digital purchases getting yanked story must have been close to 20 years ago at this point.

I still buy CD's and books and game discs when the digital DRM-free equivalent cannot be had.

> But I not for a single second trusted "buying" digital goods, and I was quickly proved right. The first digital purchases getting yanked story must have been close to 20 years ago at this point.

More like 30 years but your terminology is slightly off: I have music I bought in the 90s which still works fine because they sold it as MP3s without DRM and I was able to make my own backups. There’s nothing wrong with digital goods as a concept but we should be consistent in how we talk about it: if it involves an outside service, it’s a rental no matter how the seller describes it. If you can make your own copy and survive a corporate bankruptcy or merger, then it’s a real purchase.

You are right, I whiffed and forgot about the 90's music services.

I try and get around this by purchasing a DVD / Blu-Ray and ripping it down to my media server, but not always successful ripping them. It would be nice if you bought a digital movie, you could click download instead. Then you wouldn't lose it when their licensing agreements change / end.

In similar fashon in year 2009 Amazon deleted books from Kindle. One of them was 1984 from George Orwell.

We even have novel writing machines now!

I feel zero guilt to pirate movies.

I recall when Google nearly did the same for all the people with Google Workspace legacy free edition accounts. They had no idea how many people they were going to massively upset but they did see sense (which itself is remarkable!)

Relevant from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697335 ("The case for physical media ownership").

This would be perfectly fine if they provided a refund, adjusted for inflation. I'm quite surprised that they haven't, it seems so obviously necessary to me.

https://fmhy.net is the most comprehensive piracy guide ever creates with over 30k links.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346

Incredible timing with the news they are discontinuing disks in 2028.

You will own nothing.

And you'll be happy. It will be mandatory and enforced.

I keep seeing people whinge about disks, but I dont see the benefit. Most people dont even have the hardware to read a disk...

How is this any different from downloading a file off the internet? Maybe its fun to juggle a bunch of disks?

Right I should also add I'm mostly talking about PC here.

Rights management in a physical media world = I have the media in my hand (caveats for some DRM systems)

Rights management for digital media = companies remotely deleting paid content from my account & keeping my money / songs disappearing out of my streaming playlist / etc

I'm done with sony, forever. Cameras, consoles, whatever, I'm just done. Goodbye!

Piracy is back, and stronger than ever. After all this bullshit happening with services, I will not be buying a movie from any service like sony, amazon, or youtube. Maybe a DVD or Blu-ray here and there, but no digital ownership.

What did those movies cost? More like a movie ticket or more like a Blu-ray?

Ending the production of physical discs too. Ripe for disruption.

No legal disruption is possible - these are the terms content holders insist on. Illegal disruption already happened and you already have access to it, but you're not using it because you don't want to break the law.

Vinyl records remain collectible and have increased in demand. Physical media is still desirable, and rotting optical discs are probably not the final physical format for future video game titles. Corporatist regulatory environments have allowed the consumers to be led to subscriptions to thrive. I am confident that there are legal avenues to address consumer demands to own.

Yohohoho.

Going to bring Binks' Brew.

Excellent time to get a Jellyfin instance setup!

When a corporation makes playing by the rules harder than pirating, especially after "selling" you a movie, then people are going to pirate.

Corporations bring it on themselves by acting poorly and just being greedy and giving the consumer no quarter as they movies they "purchased" are removed without refund.

Pirating is easy. Why should I deal with thieves that sell you something then steal it back from you when, with a broadband connection, I can have a 4k Blue Ray rip downloadewd and imported into a media server and watchable in less than 10 minutes?

Now they are trying to argue that all unnofficial servers running minecraft are illegial, and they are going to start going after the minecrafters. Good luck with THAT.

Fuck that nonsense.

> Pirating is easy...

That reasoning is why companies would prefer it be more difficult.

Your purchase has been literally deleted.

isn't it simply destruction of property?

You will own nothing and be happy. Buying anything digitally now-a-days is the same as renting as far as they are concerned.

That "thank you" at the end is particularly classy. Thank you for getting fucked and giving us your money.

Perhaps a taboo take but I for one appreciate that Sony is justifying and incentivizing piracy.

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