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.
Even physical these days means nothing, just look at The Crew.
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.
The marginal cost of information goods is zero. Digital Capitalism is inherently a scam, even moreso than physical products.
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.