Pirated copies do not get erased due to the whims of the copyright owner.
* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.
* content was not able to be purchased.
I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.
I’ll pay for digital music on iTunes, which is DRM free, but won’t buy movies there, as the DRM means it’s only good as long as Apple decides to keep it going. As we move from people maintaining media libraries to streaming, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those digital copies become worthless.
I have ample money and subscribe to netflix, amazon prime and something else I forgot (I hardly watch tv).
I never pirate music anymore - Spotify is perfect. I have a family subscription.
I subscribe to Youtube because I like the content free from ads.
Netflix is getting worse and worse so someday I will stop the subscription and get the content via BitTorrent
The exception for me is old stuff. I have exactly zero qualms about not paying for a forty year old movie. Half the actors are dead anyway. The film studio doesn't need or deserve my money for something nobody alive had anything to do with.
I do blanket pirate music, though. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy music without 99.999% of the money going to a label or a studio. Apart from bandcamp and other indie stores, but those typically aren't my jam in the first place. If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.
Oh, and I will gleefully pirate textbooks, of course. Also research papers and most nonfiction in general. Audiobooks and fiction are a hard no unless unavailable or older than I am. Everyone should pirate textbooks always, it's only just.
So yeah, mostly for ideological reasons and the incomparable convenience.
In one country show X is available on service Y - in another it’s available on service Z, in another it’s not available at all.
However, they are always available on Torrentleech and The Pirate Bay.
I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient. Why? Pirating content is inconvenient. Popcorn Time was as close as it got to “convenient” but that was quickly shut down/abandoned.
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke.
When I got a job and grew older, I would continue to pirate, because it was annoying to shuffle through a DVD collection or for the game the disk to put into the drive bay for a game that was already installed on the computer's hard disk. I regularly downloaded no-cd cracks for games I had legally bought, and if I'm going to be fucking around with shady executables from disreputable corners of the internet anyway, I might as well save myself a car trip to the mall.
When Netflix streaming became ubiquitous and Steam became good, I stopped pirating, because it was more convenient to do media legally than it was to pirate them.
Now that Netflix has been Balkanized into a dozen competing services, all of which are shitty, I pirate TV/movies again, because it is more convenient to always know what site to go to to acquire media. I subscribe to Amazon prime for the free shipping, but even for media which is available on Amazon Prime, I still pirate it because -- wait for it -- the DRM doesn't work.
I still buy games on Steam because it's easy and convenient. If Ubisoft and EA get their way and cut into Steam's market share and make it so there are too few games available to play on Steam, or games that I've already paid for start becoming un-bought from my library, or Steam starts becoming unusable due to onerous DRM, I'll start pirating again.
Music is more complicated. In the '90s I ripped all my CDs into MP3s, and burned them onto data CDs which I put into a big ass CD changer in the trunk of my car. Later on, I could fit all of them on a DVD in the head unit. Later on, I could put them all on a USB thumb stick which I plugged into the console. As time went on, I realized I wasn't engaging with my music in any meaningful way. I'd turn it on and hit random and literally never think about what I was listening to. So I've picked up vinyl specifically because it's less convenient. I have to actually think about what music I want to listen to, and then actively make a decision.
So do I pirate movies and TV because I like free stuff? Not really. I probably spent in the ballpark of $50 on games a month, maybe $200 on music per month. I have the money to pay for video media. But the last thing I watched was the Legend of Vox Machina, which is produced by Amazon Studios specifically for Amazon Prime Video, which I already pay for, and I pirated it anyway because it's more convenient.
So do I pirate movies and TV for ideological reasons? Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, Hollywood is kinda gross, but so is the video games industry and the music industry.
Sorry for rambling. I guess my point is that it's incorrect to set this up as a dichotomy between getting free shit and sticking it to the man. For me at least, it's neither of those things.
Simple as.
I don’t have much sympathy for people who see these headlines and use it as a blanket justification to pirate anything and everything.
It's perfectly rational to me to decide to avoid getting burned in the first place, and actually a bit less rational to knowingly allow it, then wait for it to happen, and only then do something about it.
i really don't try to justify my piracy much anymore. i like free shit and it's easy. but things like this really make it hard to feel guilty.
edit: there be pirates in these waters!
edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.
But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.
In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.
That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E...
That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.
I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?
I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.
If you "buy" something, there should be an implied right of ownership, lending to others and resale, and we probably need a better regulation of those. If you can't do that, you're not buying but leasing/borrowing and that should be clearly noted.
And this should be true for physical items too... buy a cloud enabled camera with features requiring cloud access? Manufacturers should put guarantees for how long they intend to support those features at the purchased price, and refund the customers if they fail to do so. It's a lot easier and more scammy to sell a "camera that you can watch on your phone" than if it had a large label "guaranteed to work at least until 1.1. 2025" on the box... you'd reconsider buying that product if you knew that it'll maybe last only a few months or maybe a year or two, but you have no way of knowing that in advance (ahem, Nest).
I could expand this also to parts and software availability, right to repair, etc.
If the seller uses "ownership" words like "own", "buy", or "purchase", then the product must be usable _indefinitely_. If at any time it becomes not usable, e.g. due to a server shutting down, a full refund must be provided to everyone who "purchased" the product. Also, there must be some way to lend the product; it's OK if this lending deprives the original owner of the product while it is lent.
One way to satisfy the "ownership" clause is to sell the product without DRM. Another alternative would be to sell it with DRM initially, but remove the DRM when you want to shut down your hosting servers. An online-only multiplayer game that requires a central server cannot feasibly be sold by "ownership", because the seller would eventually lose all their money when they shut down the server.
So the next option is "rental", where the seller can use the word "rent" along with a clear time period like "for 1 year" or "through 2024". The product must be usable through this time period, or you get a full refund. No requirements about it being lendable to friends.
I imagine almost all companies would pick the second option. This is fine! Consumers still get two benefits: (i) clear labeling, including knowing how long they can expect to use the thing for, and (ii) a full refund in case the content gets removed before that time period.
As for getting banned from an online game: this is completely allowed via the "rental" option. The company just needs to give the player a full refund.
I would also require a standardized disclosure box that must be included in the promotional materials. The disclosure box could contain information such as ownership period and so on, and consumers will get used to reading that box before purchasing digital goods.
The solution is to change the law. But the disparity in power between corporate copyright holders and consumers manifests itself in politics just as it does in the market.
As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
Note the use of "purchased" (not "licensed"). To a layman, purchased means "I bought the thing" not "I bought an ephermeral license to the thing". US consumer protection law sucks goat ass - language around digital content licensing could easily be "fixed" (but won't because our government is a revolving door with industry insiders).
even fitgirl repacks will die one day. be it a legal issue, lack of interet from the pirates providing content, or a change in ownership crashing the site to the group. Change is the only constant
Someone smarter than I would need to flesh these out, but if we are want to law up on this, we cannot rely on fuzzy terms.
If they offer something where they deserve the right to take it back for any reason, then "buy" is not a correct word here, and the button should say "rent"/"lease" or whatever, but not "buy". stuff being online doesn't and shouldn't change all the rules, but somehow it does.
If you have an enforceable claim on something, then you own it. If your claim is not enforceable then you possess it.
No, that’s possession. That’s why they call it piracy; you have it but you definitely don’t own it.
This could apply just as much to "buying" something from the Playstation store.
With torrents, you always have possession, even without title.
With, e.g. Playstation, for a while "title" gave you "possession" (as it should) and then it didn't, breaking the whole thing.
For this to change there either needs to be incentive for the platform and IP owners or there needs to be legal changes to require it.
Also, blockchain means that anyone who has your ID can know you entire catalog of ownership. This removes privacy.
Why would any content creator (outside of those specifically pushing it on idealogical grounds) want to lose control over the distribution of their content by using blockchain and cloud storage technologies?
(Because it would mean I would be able to lend my copy to the rest of the US population and the original seller would never make more money than from my 1 copy.)
That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.
Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
I have a physical copy of Overwatch 1. When Overwatch 2 came out, it was an "upgrade" to Overwatch 1, and they simultaneously killed all Overwatch 1 servers. Nobody can play Overwatch 1 anymore.
Maybe Nintendo Switch is the way. It seems physical copies only protect you on platforms where offline use is standard.
This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.
Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.
There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".
Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Edit: and duh. When you buy a game that's only played online you're dependent on the servers staying up. It's logical.
There are other kinds of games though.
Piracy (and a PC) is the only option at that point.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490#:~:text=Ava....
"Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming."
The Xbox store has been great for me. And their backwards compatibility is amazing; I've bought and played Xbox 360 Lego games with my son on the Xbox One.
the streaming wars more or less solved that problem already. No one is even pretending to sell you content on Netflix, D+, Hulu, Paramount, etc. And that is what's reigning surpreme.
>hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
in theory, sure. They can take control of your accounts. I'm guessing a kid that far off is about as likely to log into my old PSN as they are to hunt down an ancient PS3/4 to play an old disc though.
Isn't the same happening with video games? I've seen video games remove some music from their soundtracks as their limited-time licenses lapsed.
To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if this Playstation move ends in a lawsuit.
If I buy digital content, I should be able to download it on removal media and use it off-line (esp. in the case with movies/music). I should be able to sell it (which is still legal). But these companies want you to "rent" instead of own.
So I never buy digital anything. No wonder many people head to pirate bay because of the rights they loose.
I hope the US Gov (and other govs) wake up to this, but as always donations (bribes) trumps people's rights all the time. (no pun intended).
If it can be revoked, then it should be labeled “rent”, with the appropriate time frame. Even if it means businesses have to label it “rent - until an unknown time in the future when we go out of business or drop the license or decide to ban you”.
Eventually prices would have to drop to reflect that you are merely temporarily licensed things. A digital game is not going to be perceived as a $60 value when it is more obviously a temporary license regardless of the length. If a physical copy of a game is valued at $60 that can be sold then a digital temporary license is going to have to be less. In my opinion a lot less.
Buy = forever (can download and use offline)
License = Implied forever, but streaming only and revokable
Rent = Streaming only, time period made explicit (day, week, whatever)
There's already regulation we can use to combat what digital "ownership" is: bait and switch.
However, to your point, I'll easily find my way to (insert a random pirate site - non-disclosed) download something that I own just because it's ONLY available exclusively through a platform like EA Play or Ubisoft. GOG's Galaxy platform is what I wish all gaming platforms to be. I'm getting too old to care about such nuisances, but would like to think that preservation of any game (rather written: any software) culminates into preservation of DRM-free archives.
A DRM medium that claims to be DRM free? That's a weird thing to want.
Plenty of games that GOG sells will refuse to run, or disable features, if Galaxy isn't running in the background.
You can do all that when you buy digital content. The problem is that most stores aren't selling you the content - they're selling you a non-perpetual license to access the content while it's available from the store you bought it from. That's what needs to change. People need to actually buy the content and not rent it.
Yes they are, the stores are just not delivering on what they're selling.
> People need to actually buy the content
People are buying the content, then discovering that they no longer have it.
This is actually the sort of thing that a properly-functioning consumer defense bureau would go after.
Plex. It's an app. And you don't even have to put the files on the phone... you just stream to the phone from hardware at home. Problem's already been solved on the technology end of it.
Do you not think companies were smart enough to plan for this??
Freakonomics once asked a corruption researcher who is more corrupt, China or America? She said: Well in America you can't really call it corruption if it's legal.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-u-s-really-less-corr...
Are we reading the same article?
>ANG: So if we compare it to the standard index, the similarity that we see is that the United States, overall, total corruption is much lower than in China, and that’s totally expected. But what the U.C.I. is able to add is that it unbundles this total score into four categories, and by doing so, we can see more nuance and we can see that first of all, in both countries, the United States is much lower on petty theft, grand theft, and speed money than in China. But they have roughly the same amount of access money.
I assume their contracts for listing on Steam are quite different in order to support this. I'd be interested to hear more about the inside of these sorts of things.
You absolutely have to list your games there because many people will refuse to buy your game anywhere else even if you are listed on more player-friendly DRM-free platforms like GOG or itch.io. Yes, I get that players want to use one launcher for everything but with DRM-free, you know what? You don't need launcher! Just download and play!
For the hefty 30 percent cut they take from devs, I would at least expect them to do some basic curation. They allow so many asset flips and general trash games to flood their listing making it very hard for players to find good indie games.
Plus, censorship is a bit of a hit or miss. You see some very sexually explicit titles on steam but then again even relatively harmless stuff can get you flagged. This creates an insecure situation for devs in certain niches and not just erotic. For example Visual Novels can be easily flagged for having a certain art style. Artistic freedom and monopolies never mix well.
[0] (Please no "Actually, it is not a monopoly...". Yes, I am using a broader definition of monopoly on purpose. )
This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.
1 You need to start Steam to play most games
2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems
In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.
The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.
Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.
Don't laugh. It's completely possible.
I know there is this meme among gamers that if anything ever happens to Valve they will release all the games they distribute from DRM but this doesn't make any sense because, except for Valve's own games, they don't have the legal right to do that; whoever comes into legal possession of Valve wouldn't allow it. The fact that Steam DRM is weak and easy to crack, presently, is a bit more comforting but even so I'm not interested in paying for a product that is even nominally under DRM. So I buy games without DRM, from GOG/etc, or not at all (I don't pirate software, simply because that's too sketchy for me.)
Just a quick Google will show you others that have had their accounts locked and even apps removed from peoples libraries (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1pzpny/steam_has_now... )
Only gaming launcher that's different would be GOG for their focus on DRM-free...
I don't really care what the law says. I care that I can be without something I literally paid for, due to corporate sophistry, that I have zero recourse to address. Well, it's addressed now, at least in my personal case.
The other side is I rarely support this model any more. I haven't bought a Steam game in years, because one day, they'll all vanish, just like my money did.
Now the windows store, that's more worrying. As for the consoles, they have limited storage and I don't think I can ship my files over to the synology for safekeeping. You are relying on 'just redownload it' as your cold storage but that function isn't actually guaranteed to stick around. The diskless consoles are untenable to me compared to any other option.
"Buy license" or "License" (as a verb, although it's ambiguous in English) is more accurate... but that still doesn't tell you any of the fine print, so I'm not sure it does any good at all. (After all, anyone who cares at all about this stuff already knows it's a license, and doesn't need to be told.)
In a case like this, how the heck are you supposed to know that whether or not your license continues is dependent upon whether or not Sony and Warner Bros. can come to an agreement to renew it?
I saw a headline today that more car brands are moving forward with electronic paywalls for features.
The dream of open computing from the 90's and 00's era of open web and P2P is dead. That was a glorious but brief moment that greed has all but overtaken.
Apple normalized turning consumer devices into fiefdoms we don't own. The manufacturer can completely control the post-sales experience.
They did it insidiously too: by having the best ecosystem, privacy and (arguably) security for 2 or 3 decades straight.
If only their devices were less pleasant to use, out of the box, their fiefdom would have failed and there’d be no copycats.
Computing is more open then it ever has been.
It’s not completely dead, there’s still the Steam Deck.
Certainly dead. The question is: Was it murdered, or closer to suicide?
That said, it's like having two political parties. With no competition, the power becomes more absolute, and in turn more corrupt.
And to be frank, Playstation was never known for their movies/TV library. Most people who own a Playstation won't be affected by this. Won't even be aware this happened. You gotta piss off a lot or the exact wrong people for a corporation to suffer consequences, and at the very least the former isn't met.
"Buying" digital files from Apple/Amazon whoever is where I feel like the least value is.
At least for music they've mostly gotten rid of the DRM, so they lose the ability to take your music back.
But at this point buying digital files saves nothing over CD. I feel like you either need to just stick with streaming or if you must purchase buy CD/Vinyl as it's pretty easy to argue it's a better product other than the case of wearing a vinyl record out, which is awfully rare.
My biggest exposure to digital ownership is books, followed by games. I am very very unlikely to care about re-playing games. Books I'm a little more likely to re-read. But paper books take up a lot of space and I'm more likely to have to get rid of them before I get to re-read them.
TV/Movies I just don't care, I watch it once and that's enough, so it's rare I would ever buy them. And even if I have to buy them it's less than going to the theater once.
Now if I go to a digital store, select a specific movie or show or song, click « buy » or « purchase » and pay full price (sometimes more!), I have an expectation to own the media indefinitely. Not « as long as the store is licensed to distribute it ».
These stores simply shouldn’t be allowed to use words like « buy », because it’s a blatant lie. Prime Video is pretty clear that you can rent movies at a small price. That’s clear, there’s no expectation of ownership either.
Buying without a discount only to then lose access is different.
Spotify's artist compensation is laughable, though, so whatever good stuff I find, more often than not I seek out physical media. (Much to my wife's despair...)
Can I do the digital equivalent yet, or are purchases still permanently tied to your account?
While it has its problems like why do I pay this on a HDD, SSD, computer or smartphone that I exclusively use for work? It definitely has its upsides as in making a backup copy of your media and circumventing copy protection isn't in some legal gray area or straight up illegal.
Edit: There are attempts to make this law more restrictive and they succeeded in offering products to circumvent copy protection illegal. But you are allowed to use them to exercise the rights above.
I believe some of the consoles also have limited sharing features, or at least had them.
If you are family sharing then you cannot play ANY other game if someone else is playing.
If they are playing CS:GO from your library and you try to launch a game in your library you see a notice telling you that the other person will be booted. The player sees similar.
Imagine if books (historically) couldn’t be lent or libraries created. It’s time to tip the scales toward the buy side for a while. I’m sure the most profitable companies in history can stand a few decades of slightly lower profit.
The Rossman quote is very apt. If the "purchase" of a file won't give me ownership of the file, then pirating the file isn't theft.
"Cloud" service economics cannot work for "sales" of content, that only works for subscription models. The vendor has ongoing costs related to a one-time sale; of course they're going to screw you out of it no matter what lies they tell you.
I mostly buy physical media, although BandCamp got a fair amount of my money before it was eviscerated. The first sale doctrine still exists, as much as rentiers hate it.
Where I draw the line is for applications, music and books. Because their uses are perpetual. So no DRMs for anything. I'm not asking you to support new hardware (if I purchase an exe file, a wma album or a mobi book, that's what I'm stuck at), but no shutting down access because you need me to pay for the latest version. I should be able to pop up a VM and consume or use what I purchased.
Saas is another story, but that because it's their servers, not my computer.
Mainly because the streaming service rarely has the actual thing I want to watch and there's no way I'm going to subscribe to a whole bunch of streaming services.
Unfortunately, this has turned into a full blown collection hobby, so I’m likely not going to save any money. But there’s nothing wrong with a new hobby I guess.
Fortunately the local record store has plenty of cheap used disks.
Time Warner has recently moved towards "unifying all their streaming platforms" which meant that a lot of adjacent services will close/migrate to Discovery+ directly.
I am someone that suffers the fallout of them shutting GCN+ down, which gives me about two weeks to watch around 100 cycling documentaries that the GCN people have put out in the past 3-4 years. Granted I haven't paid for them individually, so it's not as painful as for the Sony customers, but they will be shutting down access to all of them without any backup plan and without a look back.
The people at GCN seem to be as baffled as everyone else about this move. Luckily they still have a good presence on their Youtube channel where they have more accessible content.
I understand the sentiment of that, but as harsh as this sounds I really don't care. The least bad thing Sony could do right now is refund everybody.
I learned my lesson with Sony back in the Sonic Stage days. They are not to be trusted with digital purchases, period.
Sorry but if you allow your platform to sell 3rd party content, you better have some consumer protections built-in in your contract with that 3rd party in case of such a scenario.
You mean Warner Bros Discovery
Ownership could do with better regulation but ownership is an issue with physical goods...
He also melodromatically states on his personal page that Netflix is a threat to freedom (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html).
Ironically, the documentary, Revolution OS, that he stars in, is not free https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/revolution-os
My issue with this is the use of the word "buy". If DRM can remove my access, and I don't have perpetual ownership and control of that DRM, then it isn't buying and shouldn't be labelled as such. I can then make an informed choice "rent" vs "watch-as-many-times-as-the-drm-provider-lets-me". It should have the side effect of encouraging there to be a _real_ "buy" option
No, it's not. When you steal something, you get something from someone who lose that thing, which isn't the case with digital piracy.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/list-games-required-firmware-ver...
Han Shot first! I had to find an old VHS to see this with my own eyes.
Btw, Panasonic actually makes a UHD player that doesn't include 'apps' and only has ethernet for updates and local streaming; hope restored!
I'm still wary of buying digital items, but the availability of pirated versions does give me some comfort
The true pull takedown on steam are very rare and usually they are legally obligated to for some reason.
The DMCA should be reformed to allow de-drming content owned by you. This mostly applies to digital content and cases such as: your account being banned, licensing issues resulting in content being removed, buy in x country which later gets blocked etc. However, cases like making copies to store off-site in case of a fire, natural disaster, robbery or on digital storage (NAS, cloud etc.) should be allowed especially for people who pay. I thought it'll happen though. Perhaps a federal law entailing consumers for refunds for such cases such as Sony's recent actions should be created.
This will never actually happen, however, because getting individual plaintiffs into court to sue them for ripping their own DVDs is hideously expensive. You would never actually see someone sued under DMCA 1201 for merely ripping their own media. The only people who actually need to worry about violating this half of DMCA 1201 are large corporations' software licensing departments. So this reform would be useless and this argument is purely academic.
There's, of course, another half of DMCA 1201 that is far more insidious, and is the real reason why DRM seems unbreakable. Subsection (a)(2) forbids the production of DRM breaking tools, and this section has no exceptions whatsoever. This is what actually makes DRM ironclad - otherwise, companies would sell DRM breaking tools for people to use for legal purposes, and then everyone would use them to pirate everything. Everything but the most insidious, consumer-hostile, backstabby DRM[1] would be completely devoid of value.
What might work would be a mandate to provide lawful access to decryption tools or unencrypted copies of a work for any case that the Copyright Office would otherwise say is legal to break DRM for. If the DRM vendor doesn't comply, then subsection (a)(2) no longer applies to their system and it's legal to sell the tools to break it. So they either have to come up with a way to format-shift works that you purchased, or I can just sell a decryption tool and their shit gets pirated 12 ways to Sunday.
[0] To be clear, bunnie keeps asking for a rather wide 1201 exception that keeps getting denied every three years, I'm not sure if that counts.
[1] see also: any Apple ][ game
maybe they should call it cloudy ownership?
There should never have been a contract that required renewal with Warner Bros. in the first place.
Sure you can require renewal in order to sell it to new users, and if you don't renew then new users can't buy it.
But the idea that Sony didn't originally have the right to stream it in perpetuity to existing purchasers is absurd.
I don't care what the fine print of the user agreement said -- this is a perfect example of what consumer protection laws are for.
I mean, what's next -- can I rent a house for a year, sell that house to someone and pocket the money, and then at the end of the year they find out it's not their house anymore because I didn't renew my lease...? Because that's basically what Sony has done here.
Thing here is that usually you get to keep delisted content you bought. I can still download that Scott pilgrim game on my PS3 that was delisted almost a decade ago.
^^ just in case it wasn't clear those are all assumptions of mine
i.e. If you spend $10 million making a movie, and will only release it when customers pledge $50 million, you're eliminating any chance of becoming a billion dollar blockbuster, and also any chance of being unsuccessful but still recouping a million dolars. Heck you could even become a cult classic 20 years later and make more money back.
Also could you image crew moral if there was constantly a high chance that the thing you've spent a year working on goes completely unreleased?
Could we have a super easy p2p streaming platform that integrates with Tor? I.e. tracker running as onion service and every user being a Tor relay?
But I wonder how good the program is on the disk. Everytime I put a disc in the console it downloads a huge file of patches and bugfixes..
Playstation removing previously purchased Discovery content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492747 - Dec 2023 (174 comments)
1) Sony refunds the price. This is the least that should happen.
2) Else, the purchase should be honored by Discovery and it should provide an alternate means for users to access this content by transferring the purchase OR provide download for use without restriction.
In parallel, there should be a class action filed.
Personal experience: I had a huge PS3 games collection, but PS4 came out and Sony no longer was interested in keeping PS3 going (except for re-released). I had no machine outside of used one, and because my library was massive it only gathered dust in shelf.
One day I finally sold it off which brought less than 10% of its purchase value. It barely covered cost of work that I put into cataloging and cleaning boxes. So I swore to never go physical drives.
Today with Steam (where I have 4 digit title count) I don't really care, it's probably easier to pass down my account than 2 containers worth of dusty drives. And even recently I played Braid that I bought almost 15 years ago.
I think it all boils down to the "slippery slope" argument. Sony and Nintendo showed multiple times - through remasters and re-releases - they don't give 2 cents about end-customer as long as they're happy and fed. But not every business is like that.
As far as I know Amazon also took some book of people's Kindles, but still (for many) convenience of not having to build your own library in a small metropolitan apartment.
This is outrageous.
I fail to see how their « licensing agreement » is any of the customer’s business. They « sold » something they didn’t have the right to sell, instead of renting it. Sony should be forced by law to renew the licensing with their provider at any price, so that customers keep getting what they paid for. That, or a refund.
Hell you can even make it so its costs $1 to register it to a new device.
Lots of possibilities here.
Or am I wrong?
*Borrow Until Yanked. Terms and conditions apply.
