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Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it. My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as: If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Copying something isn't stealing by any legal definition. It's copyright infringement.
Its all a bit hand wavy nonsense. Own a physical copy? How long until its unplayable because either the media corrupts or the player isn't available? The only real "ownership" is the IP, everything else is just renting.
If they do want to posit it as this, I'd personally be fine if they said "a CD will work for 100k plays before corrupting" so you'll have 100,000 credits to stream The Wizard of Oz before you need to purchase it again.
But they need to say that upfront.
if you cant hold it your hands, you don't own it. used dvd and bluray on ebay are cheaper anyway. another underutilized resource - the public library - mine has a huge catalog of movies you can borrow for free.
If you can hold it in your hands you still might not necessarily own it. Remember DivX? (The medium, not the codec).
I read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing. Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
Source? Is that reddit?
It simply doesn't make sense.
Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For (294 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389
Sony erases digital content from libraries (74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904
IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?
They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it. My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as: If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
It's never been legal to copy a book, film, or music album and sell the copies, for example, because the licence doesn't allow it. Hence freeware, shareware, and copyleft licences.
Obviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money?
Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".