Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and the underlying reality.
If they stop believing money has value (so they wouldn't want to come to my house), men with guns will come to their house, force them out of it and change the locks.
This isn't a voluntary system, it's a forcibly imposed one.
You’re assuming there’s going to be large groups of people that believe money still has value. However, there’s nothing inherently different about the first group of people with guns and the second group of people with guns.
If hypothetically there’s a large moon heading to earth so everyone is going to die, everyone is responding to the same situation.
Less extreme situations result in societal collapse, and that’s just one of many options.
Additionally Lobbying shows us the amount of money for corruption is surprisingly low.
Are we taking about abolishing the fiat currency system or bringing back the guillotines ?
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, laws are only as good as they are enforced and it has become obvious that the ruling class is not going to enforce laws against themselves.
The solution here is not something most people are willing to inconvenience themselves over
The laws in this country are primarily written by and for large corporations. They’re not going to meaningfully practically restrain them just because something got passed.
Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.
Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.
Using foreign wars to prosecute domestic agenda is a strategy that predates written history, let alone Vietnam. Rulers have always understood which levers were available to them, this is not a modern discovery. Classical history in particular is full of this sort of thing and worse in a democratic context, which is comforting in the sense of where we stand and concerning in the sense of where things could go.
Machinations were always organized. I'm reading about Louis Brandeis and I'm struck by how familiar the robber baron talking points are; they are exactly the talking points I heard from neoliberals growing up. Time is a flat circle when it comes to antitrust. Also: they tried to coup FDR! They got themselves a strongman figurehead and everything, it just didn't work.
I'd actually give us the advantage today: the information environment is messier and more difficult to control and machine politics is barely starting to form rather than firmly established everywhere at every level.
Demos doesn't have capital. People never had power. Whenever they've thought they won ... they just damaged position of someone powerful for someone even more powerful without even knowing it.
By this logic, in consumerism power comes from consumers, but maybe it's more complicated than that?
If the people decide to elect a comedian with a dustbin on their head, they can do. That apples to Chicago as much as Clacton
The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.
These people work 2 jobs, have a young kid, a demented parent or a bedridden sister that need constant support. If they take the time to give a shit about politics, their dependent dies. You don't seem to know how incredibly stressful and exhausting the life of some people is.
Do something about their situation that gives them the time to participate in real life. Don't blame them for trying to survive with all their might, and not go to council hall twice a week.
In your dire example, the missing component is how older generations socialized organically and effortlessly. They might be caring for their dependent, but the minute they left the house, they experienced social interaction. I certainly feel like modern day is vastly different and creates the isolation you describe.
Meanwhile, their healtchare provider canceled on their parent because they gaslit the family into saying "this isn't covered in out service" and the parent dies. Because they did not give a shit about politics.
This isn't asking for a part time civics duty hobby. Just to stop pretending all politicians are the same and take a few hours to vote. It'll save you a few weeks of battling with UnitedHealthcare over a very treatable issue.
>Do something about their situation that gives them the time to participate in real life.
That also requires votes and calls to the represenatives.
Is it? What’s the most effective boycott you can think of ever achieved?
Completely different circumstances as the protest was very organised and the target far smaller than a multi national company and the reason was far more important than access to a few films
Look at how the firestone tire scandal in 2000 effected their company's bottom line. Or how the click of death effected the fortunes of the owners of Iomega. Reputation actually does matter sometimes.
I did buy a Sony ultrazoom camera recently but that was a secondhand purchase. The hardware is brilliant but as usual the software ranges from barely usable and to totally broken. In theory it is supposed to be able to run a wifi hotspot that lets you transfer images wirelessly but instead of just putting a minimal web server on it they created their own opaque protocol, the only client was Windows only, and you can no longer download it. Had I bought it new in the expectation of being able to unload it wirelessly I would have sent it back for a refund
a) Consumers don't have enough money already, so they're both stressed out and getting fewer things for themselves. These combine to mean that they're less likely to be willing to give up what little luxuries they have left, even if you're just asking them to substitute one media property for another.
b) The companies being targeted are just too damn big. The consolidation that began in the '80s has reached truly ludicrous levels in 2026, meaning that the company can just...ignore drops in profits for months or even years while consumers get worn out.
How much content really is only on Sony’s store, and how much of it would wear you down if you didn’t consume it within X years?
There are truly painful boycotts (try boycotting the only ISP in your area), and boycotts that are an inconvenience. This one is a far cry from losing a luxury or getting worn out.
I mean, sure; it's much more painful to boycott the only ISP around, or the only grocery store within a 30 mile radius, but just because there are things that could be worse doesn't mean that this can't be bad.
They probably boycott the Xbox store just fine, and that one’s also full of “small luxuries” so as best I can tell you make a personal preference based argument, which is different from what you think you’re saying.
Furthermore, Sony is the exclusive source for movies distributed by Sony. If someone wants to watch one of their movies—I don't know which those are offhand—they will need to buy it from Sony (or, at the very best, buy it from some other store and their money still goes to Sony).
In either of these cases, yes, they could choose not to do that. But if you've just gotten home from a hectic shift at your second job, microwaved a ready-meal for yourself and your kid, gotten them to bed, and finally have an hour or two to relax before you have to go to sleep yourself...are you really going to be willing to go out of your way to find some other way to watch the movie you want to watch? And more and more people are finding themselves in these sorts of situations in recent years.
Most broadly, my point is that for any given (major) store, there are people for whom their preferred "small luxuries" come from there, and asking them to give that up in order to try to make a difference that probably won't happen (due to my point (b) above) is likely to be a very hard sell.
And the government is free to ignore all the laws, as witnessed by 2026 in the US.
In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX".
The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Buy or rent it now.", and the buttons on the page for an individual movie are labeled "Buy $X.XX" and "Rent $X.XX".
Movies, on digital marketplaces, have had this kind of distinction for a lot longer than games have.
Paid apps largely failed as a business model though (why would a consumer take a risk on buying a paid app that they can't try before they buy) so most apps that you pay for are free apps with IAP subscriptions... which I guess makes it a little more explicit that you're renting the app, for better or worse.
EG. A mapping app that includes a one time bundle of maps that don’t get updated can be sold as a one time purchase. If you provide continuous updates, which most people expect now, pulling off a one time purchase business model is HARD. The other option is versioned access or time limited support, which is really just a subscription model by a different name. That said I wish versioned access was still a thing. Photoshop CS is still fine for what I want, I’m happy to pay for an upgrade when it makes sense, but a continuing subscription to software that hasn’t substantially changed in a decade sucks.
Strangely, some kindle books actually do meet california criteria of "buy" by allowing a download of the book in .pdf or .epub format.
But when you go to buy them, it still seems to say:
By placing an order, you're purchasing a content license & agreeing to Kindle's Store Terms of Use.It is only later in your library that it quietly says:
Download available in additional formatsLet's not broaden this definition in favor of the vendor.
Of course, customers would also need a way to transfer the content from their existing devices to later-purchased devices. If that is possible now, but becomes impossible later (like if Sony goes bankrupt), then does that ruin the "buy" characterization that seemed legit at the beginning?
Is there something in Apple or Amazon terms which say they can't under any circumstances deprive you of accessing the content you have bought with their "Buy" buttons? I don't see why you are trying to assign a difference between them and Sony here?
We have words like leases, licenses, or renting for a reason and they are not new.
The companies which shifted their business model to renting in the digital age have perpetuated the "buy" buttons to make their customers think the transaction was the same as when they purchased a physical media... but clearly, and it's by far not the first case, these companies will deprive their customers of their "purchase" for many reasons that shouldn't be any concern for someone who actually "bought" something... like the companies suddenly deciding to stop paying for the rights of the thing that they alledgly "sold" to you.
So just as clearly, theses were not actual purchases but just licenses, non-transferable, allegedly "perpetual" but unilaterally revocable at any time with no refund.
I really don't see why you seem to think there is anything hazy about this, or hard to delineate. This law seems to cover the cases in which these companies abuse the language in question, Amazon and Apple are not "selling" you anything digital, you acquire a pretty limited license on all of these services.
One important question, which I don't know the answer to, is whether Sony is nuking stuff from your devices. If not, then they could claim that you bought the thing and can keep using it on your existing devices. If you can move the content from a PS5 to a PS6 in 5 years, then arguably it's fine to say you "bought" it. But if they're wiping the content from your local devices, then you've definitely not bought the thing.
I didn't think I would need to quote more of your message, its essence is that you think these kinds of licenses *can be* "as good as buying" when they demonstrably have never been close to it... and it's by design.
> If these mega companies stick around and continue to offer access to the content, then it is as good as buying it (arguably better if you don't have to store it and can download onto many devices over decades)
But the really don't, they regularly cut access to content they pretend to have "sold" to you with a "buy" button. They have redefined the words "buy" and "purchase" to match an old model of sales where you actually had an irrevocable access to the content. All this law says is that it should be made clear to the end user.
Currently companies hide this to customers in pages-long EULAs and behind misleading "Buy" buttons. It shouldn't be so hard to be honest about their business model... unless maybe they think people would reconsider "buying" all these things if they knew they can be taken away from them so easily, without refunds, often without even warning them.
> or loses access to the relevant rights.
In most cases the companies don't "lose" anything, they decide that continuing to pay the copyright holders for this content is not profitable for them anymore (or fail to negotiate it within their acceptable margins), so they stop paying, and remove the content from their catalog. Without any regard, consultation, or compensation for the customers who paid to access it.
> If you can move the content from a PS5 to a PS6 in 5 years, then arguably it's fine to say you "bought" it. But if they're wiping the content from your local devices, then you've definitely not bought the thing.
Many of these services stream the content to you on-demand and don't even allow local copies... or if they do, they gate the local copy behind online renewable keys limited in time. Sony does this by forcing you to connect your console every few days if you want to be able to continue to play "offline".
And to be honest Sony's case is interesting but not very significant, both Amazon and Apple have been caught removing content (removed books from Kindle, removed songs/albums from iTunes, if my memory serves me well, you can easily google the cases), they got class action lawsuits against them and both settled. More than once. They settle because they know their customers expectation of "buying" is not the one their EULAs guarantees, and they really don't want courts to rule on these EULAs or whether "Buy" is a misleading term. That's why lawmakers have to do it. It's really not a matter up for discussion that these companies will remove content sooner or later, the OP demonstrates so, the previous settled cases too... so unless you provide a framework in which these companies can offer an access that is actually as good as actually buying a physical media, it's just wishful thinking to believe they "can" do it, there is literally no incentive for them to do it and they've designed the current business model this way on purpose, removing all control from their customers.
You cut out a key part of what I said. When people do that, I don't read the rest of their really long replies. Good day.
That's the part I've quoted, because that's the questionable part. You just have no argument to support this idea.
So good day to you too, please, next time take a couple minutes to read the OP to see that your suggestion/idea of how things could work is exactly the opposite of reality, by design, by (among others) the two companies you suggest are acting differently and have both had to settle class-action lawsuits for the same deliberate and anti-consumer behavior.
Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.
No, there is a much better alternative.
No renting of copyrighted works for money. The customer owns a copy or GTFO.
That immediately destroys several useful and viable business models that actually work in that they provide more access to more creative work to more people while the rights holders also make a return.
I am in favour of copyright reform but not of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Does it though? The incremental revenue from customers renting something and then renting it again is going to be very small. The "loss" from providing them with a permanent copy instead would be a rounding error, especially for a product with no marginal cost.
Meanwhile rentals are an attempt to cheat the public out of a bunch of rights they would otherwise have under First Sale etc. Which turns your access argument on its head, because the thing they're being denied is the ability to sell their copy when they're done with it, which in turn denies less well off customers the ability to buy a cheaper copy second hand.
It destroys the library model used by Spotify, Netflix, and all the other similar services for one example. Those are clearly not working on the same basis as selling permanent copies of everything you might want to listen to or watch. They clearly do make a lot of revenue from subscribers enjoying the long tail of music and programmes and often that includes repeats. Many more people enjoy many more works that aren't the big headliners under this model. People can also try something they might enjoy without committing to the cost of buying it and therefore don't have to feel bad if it's not for them and they give up after a few minutes. And yet obviously the subscribers individually spend far less in many cases than it would cost them to buy permanent copies of everything they'd listened to and watched. Given the popularity and financial success of the streaming services this is evidently an alternative model that works for both sides. So I would challenge your claim that the loss from always providing permanent copies is insignificant.
I don't really buy the other argument you're making either. With digital works there isn't much reason for a "second hand" market where copies would be significantly cheaper than a "new" copy direct from the supplier. When people used to trade used works on physical media there was a degree of degradation in those media that justified a price reduction. Why would someone who had bought a copy of the latest summer blockbuster sell it for 30% of its original purchase price if it's a flawless digital reproduction identical to a new one? Naturally this shifts the dynamics in the market and the price of buying a true permanent copy that can legally be sold on afterwards would tend to increase because of this effect. Meanwhile the library services I mentioned above work on almost the opposite basis and it tends to push the price per work accessed down because the subscribers aren't effectively subsidising other people who are enjoying identical works to themselves but without paying the original source anything to access those works.
I think there is demonstrably room enough in a world of billions of people with access to orders of magnitude more content than any of us could experience even once in our lifetimes for multiple economic models. What matters is that people get to create useful works and other people get to enjoy those works and the financial arrangements make this worthwhile for everyone. There are certainly flaws in the current copyright model that is established in most of the world. There are rights that I think people who have bought (or believe they have bought) permanent copies of works should enjoy with the force of law behind them if necessary.
I don't have a great answer yet to the problem of rights holders not wanting to make anything available permanently at all so that everyone is locked into some form of temporary arrangement. Clearly market forces haven't always sorted that one out effectively and some sort of adjustment is warranted. But I'm also wary of relying on some form of government regulation that distorts the market and potentially excludes arrangements that everyone actually involved might find worthwhile. Maybe you could somehow require that once any work has more than a certain number of licensed copies in circulation or has been available to a certain number of people from authorised sources for a certain (relatively small) number of years then it must also be available for sale as a permanent licence - regardless of any other continuing and still legitimate ways to access it from authorised sources - but with some recognition that a fair price to buy a permanent copy that comes with all the associated rights today might be significantly higher than what these things used to cost in the days when physical media were required.
Why would that model not work if you got to keep one copy of the current catalog? Consider the existing failure mode of the fractured streaming market: The user signs up for Netflix for one month, binge watches everything they're not caught up on, cancels, signs up for Disney+ the next month, does the same, repeat for each service. They only subscribe for one month out of the year but still get to watch everything.
What would change if they had to sign up for a year a time, but as a result got permanent access to everything that was in the catalog that year? Would people sign up once and then cancel forever? Of course not, because then they wouldn't get any newer content, which is what the services are supposed to be getting paid for anyway. Copyright is supposed to expire; why do we need a business model that relies on renting years-old works that under any sensible system would already be in the public domain?
> And yet obviously the subscribers individually spend far less in many cases than it would cost them to buy permanent copies of everything they'd listened to and watched.
Which is to say, they should offer bulk discounts where you get the whole catalog for a fixed amount, but then what's the problem?
It's not that people could resell them, because if you bought them all at once then you would only be able to resell them all together (can you currently resell individual tracks from an LP?), and then many people would want to keep some of them and thereby keep all of them.
> I don't really buy the other argument you're making either. With digital works there isn't much reason for a "second hand" market where copies would be significantly cheaper than a "new" copy direct from the supplier.
Sure there is. If the price was the same then most people would prefer to support the creators. On top of that there is the same reason most ordinary people buy electronics from Walmart or Costco instead of eBay or Craigslist. The product may be exactly the same, but Some Guy is a lot more likely to take your money and not deliver anything and then people will pay a premium to get it from a trusted source.
> When people used to trade used works on physical media there was a degree of degradation in those media that justified a price reduction.
This argument has always been nonsense because you were always allowed to make a backup copy of something you bought and then transfer that with the original if you sold it. Far from the copyright holder having a right to the degradation, the customer has a right to undo it.
> Why would someone who had bought a copy of the latest summer blockbuster sell it for 30% of its original purchase price if it's a flawless digital reproduction identical to a new one?
Because they don't want it anymore but need to provide some discount or people would just go to the original source. The amount of the discount would depend on supply and demand -- if lots of people buy it but then it sucks and they all want to get rid of it, the resale price is low, but maybe that's what ought to happen then.
> Naturally this shifts the dynamics in the market and the price of buying a true permanent copy that can legally be sold on afterwards would tend to increase because of this effect.
Except that it also increases the value of the product by that amount because the buyer can do that. If the price of a rental would have been $2 and the price of a copy would have to be $10 but you can resell it for $8, what do you care? If you want it temporarily then buy it and resell it; if you want to keep it forever then at least you'd then have the option to do that whereas right now there are things where buying a permanent copy isn't even available.
> Meanwhile the library services I mentioned above work on almost the opposite basis and it tends to push the price per work accessed down because the subscribers aren't effectively subsidising other people who are enjoying identical works to themselves but without paying the original source anything to access those works.
And a buy in bulk plan would still work that way. You would pay for a lot of assorted works at once (e.g. everything in the Netflix catalog that year) for a much lower price per work and then have the option to keep them or resell them all together. Keeping them permanently would naturally be more expensive, but not as expensive as buying them all individually, and either way then it's up to you.
> I think there is demonstrably room enough in a world of billions of people with access to orders of magnitude more content than any of us could experience even once in our lifetimes for multiple economic models.
The general problem here is that copyright is a monopoly, which as a general rule is bad but we're trying to get something good out of it by providing some incentive to create works. But to prevent a monopoly from being abused it needs to have a lot of limitations on it, which is supposed to be fair use, first sale, antitrust prohibitions on tying, etc.
If you just let them do whatever they want then look what happens -- you pay a monthly fee forever to never own anything, things disappear at random, owning a copy isn't even an available option, the service dictates what kind of device you can use to watch it which in turn causes antitrust problems for playback devices, etc. It shouldn't be like that.
> Clearly market forces haven't always sorted that one out effectively and some sort of adjustment is warranted. But I'm also wary of relying on some form of government regulation that distorts the market and potentially excludes arrangements that everyone actually involved might find worthwhile.
The source of the problem is that "government regulation that distorts the market" is already there in copyright itself. It's trying to do something useful, but you can't have it both ways. The thing the market uses to keep things in check is competition. Once the government issues a monopoly, the monopolist has to be strictly limited in what they can do or they'll turn into autocratic robber barons.
I do agree with some of your important points. It is a problem that copyright works by creating an artificial monopoly without sufficient control on how that monopoly is then used. It is a problem if there's insufficient incentive for creators to make works permanently available to those who want them. As I said earlier I do think some reform is needed in this area.
I don't think that's sufficient today to support your central argument that works should only be available on a permanent basis. The two financial models we've been discussing are a trade off between having access to specific works indefinitely (the sale model) and having access to many more works but only for a limited period of time (the library model). Either way the scope is limited and that makes the price viable. I don't think the prices for streaming services that operated on the alternative basis you're proposing would stay the same. I think they would go way up and that could reduce a lot of people's ability to access the long tail of works that they wouldn't want to spend the full price to buy permanently.
I also want to point out that your views here appear to be based on the US implementation of copyright. Some aspects of copyright in the US are at least questionable under the related international treaties already but pragmatically the US is powerful enough economically that its big companies can get away with a lot for now. Likewise the US itself can get away with having very generic fair use exceptions in its laws. That could change - with very significant economic effects - if the US attempted the kind of legal shift you're proposing without engaging strong international support first. And that would obviously require convincing everyone that the economics would continue to work. In any case some of your arguments about backups and physical media wouldn't apply in most of the world (or even in the US given the DMCA - but of course DRM and the legal protection it's been given around the world is a whole controversy in itself because it potentially makes a lot of the legitimate criticisms of copyright even worse).
IMHO your last point is the place we should look first. The problem is that the market isn't really competitive when copyright holders can license the works exclusively. This leads to problems like works only being available on a single streaming service or broadcast on a single TV channel. Sometimes different seasons of the same show or successive films from the same series end up on different services or channels. Sometimes works get yanked from a streaming service's library with relatively little notice when their deal runs out. If we changed the rules so that works being offered commercially to one distributor also had to be offered to other distributors with similar terms and pricing and within a relatively short time then I think that alone would restore a lot of healthy competition in the market and solve some of the significant problems with how the current distribution models are working. And importantly it is relatively practical to explore options in this area compared to trying to radically restructure the entire copyright model globally.
There's a lot more that we could discuss here. For example we haven't even touched on creative works like software that tend to be updated over time and the different models for supporting that. We haven't considered how to deal with work of potentially high value but a short useful lifetime like news reporting and investigative journalism either. It's a huge area - and that's a big part of why I think throwing out the whole principle of limited licences in favour of allowing only permanent sales is probably not the right way to go here. But the problems are real and I do agree with you that the system could be significantly better than it is today.
The customer has to know what they're getting. Either they own it, or they're renting for a certain period. Nothing ambiguous.