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Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

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Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#81
post #51

Wait, people trusted a corporation and got screwed?!? Why, that's...unheard of!(My wife, bless her, has "purchased" dozens of movies on amazon. I warned her that when the amazon wind changes, she may regret those purchases. I got the look.)

I understand where you are going with this, but it also feels incorrect to me to blame people innocently "buying" media from a $corporation. What are people to do if they want to stay on the non-pirate/legal side of this but also prevent being royally F-ed?

You can just not watch a movie. No one needs movies.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#83
post #6

It should be illegal to have others purchase what you as a company only licensed and therefore aren’t legally allowed to sell.

Studio Canal directly got paid for each individual purchase. It isn't all on Sony, Studio Canal sold a product then took it away.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#84
The honest product description would be: "You are purchasing a revocable license to stream this content at our discretion, for an unspecified period, subject to change without notice."

Nobody would buy that. So they say "buy" instead, and courts have largely let them get away with it. Until legislation actually forces the word "buy" to mean ownership, this will keep happening.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#85
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people purchase digital movie rentals from Apple, Youtube, etcetera because they know they will watch it once, and the lower price in exchange for a temporary license is acceptable to them. I don't think banning this is pro-consumer. It should, however, be illegal to tell your customers that they are purchasing/buying media without explicit "Rent" language (which implies a non-expiring license) when you do…

They often have two tiers, a rental tier and a purchase tier. If you purchase the assumption is it will be available forever.

Seems like a bad assumption at this point even if it goes against expectations. We've seen on multiple occasions now from different companies where a digital purchase wasn't forever. This is no way an endorsement of the behavior, but if that's your assumption then the quip "you know what happens when you assume" wins again.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#86
post #29
post #17

No refund? I have a similar grief with YouTube movies although in that one, they don't play UHD. Some do like Valerian plays at least in 1080P, most movies are capped to 480P unless you have an "approved device" eg. something probably riddled with ads.

1080p or higher is pretty common on the high seas, even for titles like cartoons, which in my opinion is overkill.

A long time ago I worked in the video codec area and was shown then that the most difficult videos to compress (i.e. with the most compressed bytes resulting in the file) were cartoons, because of the sharp edges, etc.

Not sure if it is still the case today with the latest generations of ultra-advanced codecs.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's copyright infringement. They do not have the rights to distribute the movies.

Neither does Sony (anymore), apparently. They still sold them.

Sony sold them while they still had the license with a clause that they could remove them at any time.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#88
post #6

It should be illegal to have others purchase what you as a company only licensed and therefore aren’t legally allowed to sell.

Studio Canal directly got paid for each individual purchase. It isn't all on Sony, Studio Canal sold a product then took it away.

They're both to blame. Studio Canal insisted on a licensing agreement that works this way, and Sony agreed to it to sell their content.

For Sony, the correct move here would have been to not list Studio Canal titles in the first place, and put out a very public statement saying that they aren't being listed until Studio Canal agrees to make purchased licenses perpetual as they should be.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#89
post #77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If buying is not owning, piracy is not theft.

Piracy was never theft. It was a copyright violation. Which, I don't give one fuck about.

Yeah. Copyright monopolists equate copyright infringement to literal high seas piracy because it's the only way they can make any impact. Nobody would give a fuck otherwise.

Re: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

#90
post #27

Not the first time and not going to be the last. Unless you can download it to hardware you completely own and can make a backup, it's not really yours. Online purchases I can get on with, like Bandcamp are pretty good. I bought the new Globular album on CD and it took 10 days to get to me from the UK. I also had access to high quality downloads. That works, these other models do not.

Even if you have a back up copy of a DRM file and they have turned off the authenticating services, that digital file is of now use to you until someone comes up with a way of decrypting it. This is what Microsoft did with their music service.
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