Sony is facing a $7.9 billion lawsuit that could impact over 9 million players. They’ve been accused of deleting purchased movies, TV shows, and games—items customers thought they owned forever.
This lawsuit, filed by consumer advocate Alex Neill, challenges Sony’s alleged abuse of its dominant position, charging high prices and restricting competition on the PlayStation Store.
yeah, dont buy digital. If its not available as a physical product steal it.
Unskippable ads, required downloaded updates, region restrictions…
Nah, I’m downloading that fucking car, I’m done giving movie studios chances to be reasonable.
They were good for a bit, but they are a slave to stock value and their finance bros will take every opportunity to squeeze you for revenue, ruining every experience.
Fun thing, even a DVD or Blu-ray is technically licensed by them, and they claim they have the right to revoke it whenever they want. In the case of Blu-ray they have tried to do this via “updates” to the Blu-ray players
I remember complaining on Amazon about the price of digital books when they were still relatively new. They wanted me to pay the same price for a digital book as a physical book. Back then, Amazon still had pretty decent customer service and wrote me back saying that the price for the book wasn’t for literal pages but for the work in making the book, etc. etc.
I told them I understood that but I don’t get the same rights with the digital book as I did with the physical, namely the right to sell the book.
Books, board games, etc. any physical media is technically a license, yes. BUT the copyright holder cannot bar you from doing whatever you want with the physical copy, within the limits of copyright law. Those same rights simply do not exist with your digital copies and, in fact, is often codified within your terms of service that you don’t fucking own anything and they can pull your license at any time.
DVD is next to impossible to revoke while Blu-ray is not. But you can’t revoke Blu-ray licenses to specific people but to regions. I haven’t heard of this happening but if it did, you could, in theory, still play your Blu-ray disks on players that aren’t connected to the internet to receive those updates. That said, I’m like 80% sure that Blu-ray keys have been leaked and you can rip them like DVDs today.
I am not saying you can or you can’t, but if you could, and I’m not saying you can, download basically any ebook or audiobook you want from “mouse torrent site”. It’s a private tracker, so you do have to apply for membership, but it’s the best place on the net for books.
I grab audiobooks from there, then pipe them straight from qBittorrent into an Audiobookshelf server so me, my family, and my friends can stream them to any device.
I am not saying you can or you can’t, but if you could, and I’m not saying you can, I would have full DRM-free backups of every Blu-ray I own.
I’m not saying they would or they wouldn’t, but if they would, and I’m not saying they would, they would distribute the keys to the Blu-ray players online so other people could use their rightfully purchased discs in any way they pleased on their own hardware.
I’m not saying you you should or shouldn’t, but if you did, I’ve heard it’s possible to access a backup of the original even if you don’t have an original disc.
Sony owns Blu Ray tech but not DVD. DVD was industry consortium to prevent a repeat of the VHS and betamax war. Only lasted a generation unfortunately.
BRB I have a blu ray player from 2017 I’m disconnecting from the internet
Is it stealing though? Theft, as it is legally defined, requires depriving the original owner of the thing you are stealing. Stealing a car for example, means the owner cannot drive the car since you have it.
If you could take someone else’s car, but they still have access to their car as if it was never taken, is that really stealing?
You speak of copyright infringement. Some people call it IP theft but in reality it has nothing to do with stealing in the traditional sense of the word (such as stealing a bicycle). You can’t actually steal something that’s still there after you “take it.”
I think that’s called conversion. Or unjust enrichment.
Well, there’s also the concept of intellectual property though.
There shouldn’t be.
I fully agree with you on that.
Otoh our current law systems don’t.
Even physical these days means nothing, just look at The Crew.
Thankfully modders have made good progress of coming closer to emulating servers for it so people can play it offline.
Bad part is Ubisoft actually removed The Crew from some people’s Ubisoft account. Steam versions were safe ironically to be able to download the game to make use of it when Crew community made fix is out.
I’d be happy with DRM-free video purchases, but they don’t exist like they do for video games, and even video games aren’t available DRM-free across the board.
It’s not necessarily cheap or convenient, but building a physical collection of Blu-Rays (or DVDs if quality isn’t priority) is something that can’t be taken away.
Add on a compatible Blu-Ray drive to your computer and you can even rip the digital files yourself. It’s taken me a few years, but now I never have to worry if my favorite movie is available when I want to show a friend. It also makes them easy to loan.
I’d very much prefer to not even have them take up shelf space, but it’s the only way that exists to actually own a copy of a movie or TV show. I have ripped a number of them, but if someone made the GOG for movies, I’d move all of my purchases over there.
The marginal cost of information goods is zero. Digital Capitalism is inherently a scam, even moreso than physical products.