They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it.
My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as:
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Inevitably people will ask what that means. That will lead to a FAQ on the company's site somewhere, and various videos on the social media explaining it periodically with lots of comments. That will be a good thing.
Corporate marketing teams will eventually settle on something better sounding but technically legal, something like "Premier Anytime Access" for specific movies (versus "Bronze 24-hr Access"), or similar.
It's the same as if someone sold you a toaster with a remote self-destruct feature, and then invoked the self-destruct. They owe you a new toaster.
- If the license terms include a section on termination, and termination is done in accordance with the license terms, it's fine legally.
- Licenses can be transferable but that doesn't make them non-terminable.
I could be wrong, though.
It's pretty crappy that we got to the point that overly simple actions (like clicking on buttons or breaking stickers on packages) can be considered accepting license terms. Is that really a "meeting of the minds"?
The problem isn't it being illegal.
But they instead bank on most people not having the means (money/time) or will to sue them over this. Especially given that the actual "damages" you can effectively sue for often relatively small for most users (likely <15€ per movie, so for most account <100€ per person "per situation where you could sue").
And if there is an exception (someones losing hundreds of movies or class action law suite) settling is likely still cheaper for Sony.
This is the problem with many laws the cost of breaching them is often too small (but only IFF you are a huge company with their own lawyer department etc.).
If management would be personally liable with _mandatory prison sentences_ for the CEO/Company Owners if it seems the law was knowingly breached because penalties are cheaper then benefits (or repeated offenses etc.) things probably would look quite different.
Other approaches to counter this includes things like penalties of base+%of yearly revenue, %yearly Profite etc. The problem here is this approaches are often a mix of unfair (e.g. same revenue with large profit margin is penalized way less) and/or can be fudged/circumvented (e.g. if based on profit, but even if based on revenue it can be partially circumvented in some situations. So I think making executive personally liable might be the only way to fix this.
Full House: Angelina Jolie reboot (Starring Angelina Jolie baby clones)
Because yes, it is copying. Nothing gets taken away. But when a pirate took a ship and it's gold away, it was gone.
Hence why you don't get tried for theft when you commit digital piracy. Which, as absurd as it might sound, sometimes (/in some cases) would be better to be tried for due to very unbalanced laws.
But also it should be pretty obvious that this isn't what people mean when they say "if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing" and a intentionally misinterpretation of statements based by nitpicking formulations is neither contributing anything meaningful nor is it appreciated (in most situations).
It's never been legal to copy a book, film, or music album and sell the copies, for example, because the licence doesn't allow it. Hence freeware, shareware, and copyleft licences.
It only mattered that if you sell it you lose it, i.e. you can't buy 1 sell (or gift) 10.
Similarly in analog times this where not unilaterally cancelled licenses. Which are effectively nothing more then time limited licenses where you just don't know how long. (1: un
In law areas outside of copyright this kind of license cancellation terms are often seen as predatory, fraudulent and abusive practices. And _sometimes outright illegal no matter how well you communicated what the license/contract does_ before it was acquired (in some countries).
(1: unilateral cancellable without a brach of license/contract from you side and some other special edge cases to be more precise)
Which is the crux of the problem, not that it isn't attached to physical media, but that it can be cancelled in a mostly despotic manner and you (often) can't make (relevant) backups or similar to protect the availability of the medium either.
What I'm getting at is that people are getting the shape of the problem wrong (it was never ownership vs licensing), so the solution has to be different too. E.g. Bluray AACS revocation provides the technical means through which licences for physical media can be revoked just like purely downloadable stuff can.
The license isn't what takes away your permission to redistribute copies; copyright law does that by default. The license is only reminding you that it's not lifting that default, not granting you that permission.
Copying is neither here or there. There is an understanding that when you buy a book, you own the physical thing.
If I sell you a toaster and then remotely cause it to self-destruct, I owe you a new toaster.
Grandparent referenced "if buying isn't owning then copying isn't stealing". I would say that "if buying isn't owning, then stealing isn't stealing".
If a toaster is offered to sale to the public which the seller can remotely destroy at any time, and not pay anyone a cent, and the law upholds that, then it's morally fine to just walk out of their store with that toaster without paying.
Yes, physical media being de facto irrevocable is the important part, but even that has caveats (such as Bluray AACS revocations).
Behind a system of rights there is always a philosophy, which either postulates rights, or certain primary rights, as being somehow inherent or "inalienable", or else somehow justifies the establishment of rights without circular reasoning ("we need these rights so we can have nice things").
This is true. (It's true in every other industry as well.)
But the opposite side of that coin is that if you want people to spend the considerable amounts of time and money required to create new works that are actually any good then you need to have some viable model for compensating them that makes it worthwhile for them to do that. Whatever else you can say for it - copyright has been far more effective than any other model ever tried at the scale of human society in achieving that.
It's true that copyright makes a few people very rich. Some of those people certainly are artists. The "almost nothing" that Beyoncé has made from her music career reportedly paid for the private jet she bought Jay-Z as a gift a few years ago for example. Taylor Swift is reportedly now a multibillionaire. There's a reasonable argument that big name musicians have often worked on very successful concert tours and so not all of their income has necessarily required copyright. That argument doesn't really work when you look at bestselling authors or A-list TV and movie stars whose copyright-backed residuals and royalties keep them very well funded though.
Of course many of the other parties who make a lot of money from copyright are intermediaries like book publishers and record labels. The value of their contributions is increasingly questionable in the modern world and the measures they have taken to protect their revenue streams have sometimes been similarly questionable. I won't be sympathetic if copyright reforms render their business models obsolete and shift power back into the hands of the people doing the actual creative work with those providing services like distribution and advertising becoming subservient rather than the other way around as has often been the case historically.
Intellectual property creates compensation without a corresponding benefit to the public.
Edit: to add to this, the existence of copyright today does not show it has been effective for creating innovation. You need a counterfactual for that, which you did not provide.
That argument works if you're talking about something like a patronage model where most or all of the compensation for the creative activity comes from a single source. But it makes no sense at all for creative work that has a small value to each consumer in a large market. Copyright allows the cost of production to be amortised over a large market.
Intellectual property creates compensation without a corresponding benefit to the public.
No - because numerous members of the public benefit multiple times every day from the amortisation effect I described above.
You need a counterfactual for that, which you did not provide.
I'm not sure I really do. We can see clearly how finances flow in creative industries supported by copyright work. We can see the scale of both individual works and the cumulative production supported by copyright. And it doesn't take great insight to see that if everyone were allowed to copy and redistribute any work as soon as they had access to it then the whole model would collapse - again for the same reasons as above.
In any case if you'd like counterfactuals then I'll cite pre-copyright history, community-driven initiatives like FOSS and Creative Commons, and artists who have offered their work on a "pay what you think it's worth" basis. In each of those cases there have been some excellent works produced and enjoyed by many people - and the number of those excellent works is barely noise compared to the scale of production in modern creative industries supported by copyright.