If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.
I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...
"You wouldn't still a car" etc etc..
> In the case of file sharing networks, companies claim that peer-to-peer file sharing enables the violation of their copyrights. File sharing allows any file to be reproduced and redistributed indefinitely. Therefore, the reasoning is that if a copyrighted work is on a file sharing network, whoever uploaded or downloaded the file is liable for violating the copyright because they are reproducing the work without the authorization of the copyright holder or the law.
Both uploading and downloading is a violation. All the major cases are against distributors, because those are the big fish. But rights holders have gone after individuals: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/lit...
if you dont distribute this to others or brag on a forum about all your streams, no one will even know.
"Asking a computer to not copy things is like asking water to not be wet."
Piracy is a real crime, I am tempted to describe it as theft of goods under transport. But it is probably much more complex than that. It also shares many similarities with organized crime(a company of men decide to ignore the law).
Anyway you slice it, people probably just want the crime to sound(worse/cooler) than it really is. It always sorts of bugs me to equate one of the worst crimes to one of the least. Might as well call it "software rape" at that point. And that is probably closer to the actual crime than piracy.
"PlayStation Store users who bought a limited license to play a movie on approved devices and approved displays, revocable at any moment with no or minimal notice".
There, FTFY.
It’s less about the money and more about:
1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)
2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.
3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.
If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.
Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.
There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.
Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.
In fact, for those things, I'd say a private tracker isn't that interesting because of the share requirements.
That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.
Unless you get an irrevocable full digital copy of the product, the “buy” button should technically be called “lend” or “borrow”, as you lose the product when the shop disappears.
But that doesn’t solve the deteriorating ownership problem as consumers will choose to borrow due to convenience even if they know they get to keep nothing. Especially if that is the “only” option.
Digital products are hollow and short-term, yet still asking full price or even quadruple the price of physical products (happens a lot with games).
Consumer protection would mean that buying means owning, with all perks and hassle that comes with it.
There currently are no long-term protections. “Stop killing games” is a reflection of that, but needs to broaden.
Edit: clarification
In Finnish criminal law the threshold is "significant harm", but given that there were already multitude of ways to get around DVD copy protection the "significant harm" clearly isn't very high bar. Also both distribution the method and actually using the method are both criminalized.
Finnish Copyright Act does individual to bypass copy protection to view the content, but it notably does say that you are not allowed to copy the work.
Unfortunately I cannot find the exact page right now, but I found one of the appeal documents from from https://www.yumpu.com/fi/document/view/38482300/1-helsingin-.... It's probably under https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikki/, but it's no longer available and Internet Archive is currently giving 503 when trying to access the old pages.
1. To my knowledge, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
[1] (a)1(C) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
If I am the reason for damaging my purchase then I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase.
Same happens with books, you buy the copy and if you don't take care of it, soon it will become unreadable.
I am fine with that characteristic of the purchase, I am not fine when my purchase can be taken away from me abruptly by the decision of random Joe
It's almost already like this. Buying a movie is sometimes the exact same price or only a dollar more. They know what they're doing.
Initially, the new button might say "buy license" and then eventually it will go back to just "buy".
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?
Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.
What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.
The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.
I don't care if some lawyer suit says it's ok because I really bought a license and not the content. Screw that. I bought a movie. If that's allowed by the law, the law deserves no respect.
Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical
A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
The image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape.
>A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
Correct, a digital physical thing stores digital virtual things, and an analog physical thing stores analog virtual things.
It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.
It already drove the needle way past acceptable copy protection, do not buy Blu-Rays!
Some warned that everything would work that way eventually anyway, and everybody (including me) blew them off.
Well, they were wrong, weren't they? The way it works now is much worse: what you're purchasing is a license for playback for an indeterminate amount of time, which can be arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated by the provider.
At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."
if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).
You can still offer limited-time subscriptions, of course, and you can extend the minimum deadline for your server-dependent software to free as often as you want, just make sure people know what the deal is when they buy your software.
DVDs and other media also aren't yours to buy, they're just licenses and a physical container to use that license. You can buy software the same way you can buy a DVD, and you can rent software the same way you can rent a movie on a digital storefront.
So what kind of transaction is buying(2) something? What do you get in exchange for money? It's clearly not a good, so is it a service? Is continued permission to use the software a service? Then if that service is interrupted the consumer should be entitled to some kind of reimbursement from the provider, right? Because otherwise the provider has an incentive to stop the service.
This should be criminal. If the sale copy says "buy" "own" "purchase" then they must not be allowed to remove your license to that content by any means.
I'm fine with them removing content from storefronts. I'm even okay with them saying "you're responsible for your downloaded copies, if we decide to discontinue licensing you won't be able to redownload". I'm not fine with them saying "buy" "own" "purchase" and then coming in later "oh we decided to change the licensing situation and so you no longer have access to what you have 'purchased'". That is theft, more than copyright infringement ever could be.
I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.
How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)
This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.
> I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing
Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?
> Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?
Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.
You're explaining that while the ticket was a purchase, it had specific limitations and the vendor would follow a specific contract, with specific recourse for people in eligible cases.
That's exactly what's happening with Playstation.
Some people might not understand the contract, but we're decades into this now, it's time we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
What a great argument.
To people, "buy" when in the context of a movie largely means owning the freaking thing.
> we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.
That's normalization of deviance. It's fine if you're fine with that scam, don't come onto people who aren't.
A ticket that would allow you entrance into a particular concert. Is this some sort of rhetorical question? I can't decipher what it's attempting to illustrate.
1. Unless you write a damned clear company charter, Gabe, get on that.
I am pretty sure that whatever contract streaming platform has with publishers has a some kind of date. It might be unpleasantly short (a year or month) making it look like a bad deal, but that's the point.
In current situation the "unknowable" date might be as short as 1 day. It's up to the good will of streaming service to warn ahead of time. Knowing what you get and the quantity of it is the most basic part of fair deal.
If a streaming service has only negotiated a 1 month license they shouldn't be allowed to re-license the content for longer period. If they want to offer longer deal they need to negotiate better license with publisher or take the risk on themselves by being prepared to give refund in the case of failure to deliver promised service. Telling that they guarantee only single year of service to provide doesn't prevent them from providing it longer.
If a travel agency rents a bus for a day, offering a 1 week trip around Europe would be considered a scam.
If that minimum drives customers away, these companies should put more work into ensuring their minimum availability is a good deal.
"Verb
"purchase (third-person singular simple present purchases, present participle purchasing, simple past and past participle purchased)
"To buy, obtain by payment of a price in money or its equivalent."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase
"Verb
"buy (third-person singular simple present buys, present participle buying, simple past bought, past participle bought or (archaic, rare, dialectal) boughten)
"(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods."
Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?
The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.
Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
I stuck to buying hard copies and dwindled off the series as they started to charge just to play multiplayer.
[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony%27s_attempted_removal_of_...
https://filmstories.co.uk/news/funimation-streaming-app-to-s...
(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)
Sony created a contract where this was possible, is who sold the product to customers, and is physically carrying out the act.
They deserve every bit of blame.
sudo pacman -S transmission-gtk
But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.
I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.
Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.
Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.
I don’t trust any provider to honor purchases I made 20 years from now. I really wish I could, as it would simplify things for me.
Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.
And people wonder why some people sail the high seas.
Which in many (not all) states can promptly be followed by a Motion to Transfer/Notice of Removal/whatever local custom to a county/circuit/district court.
Once moved to a higher court, you will lose because you don't know the procedures, deadlines, and customs of that venue. Then, the counterparty will often be awarded fees.
I don't mean to disagree with you, and I have basically no expertise in this area, just shocked by the whole thing.
Tech EULAs are just absurdly long, and I'm sure they've expanded since this article was written in 2020: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizin...
If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.
Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.
If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Fuck those guys.
It’s been 20 years since I’ve pirated shit, but here we are again…
A queerly sticky ego defense mechanism.
It'll be all the more critical in years to come when we get more and more AI remastered versions of stuff so even stuff pre-2020 is slop.
"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.
If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?
Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!
It's just a theory.
Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.
Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?
Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.