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Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

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Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.

Remember that the power is always with the people. We can enact any law we want

Power in numbers is with the people. Power in votes is with whoever has the votes. Power in money is with the billionaires. Power comes in many forms and isn't fungible.

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#122
post #24

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.

Piracy isn’t stealing because copies don’t destroy the original

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it working/being enforced? Anecdotally I haven't seen or heard of any changes in verbiage, but I haven't been paying that much attention.

Steam/Valve follow the law: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/11/24267864/steam-buy-purch...

So they avoided having a "rent" button by using the technically correct "add to cart", "continue to payment" instead of "buy this game", "buy all games in cart", and just have a separate sentence in small grey text that is confusing to most people.

Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#124

IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?

Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely". Sadly the case was settled, see: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/apple-settles-alleg...

So basically "you should have expected to be scammed because everyone knows we are always scamming everyone"

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.

Remember that the power is always with the people. We can enact any law we want

ok but who enforces the law?

If you haven’t been paying attention lately, laws are only as good as they are enforced and it has become obvious that the ruling class is not going to enforce laws against themselves.

The solution here is not something most people are willing to inconvenience themselves over

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they still make sense for the non technical user. Having an idiomatic control makes setup far easier than on a PC and the UI for a console is designed to be used with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. This makes dealing with a television easier. I don't see consoles disappearing ever for those reasons.

Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.

The largest gaming market, by about an order of magnitude, is mobile games like Candy Crush. But we should differentiate the market further because most of us probably don't want to be making Candy Crush.

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#127
post #2

And yet Sony wonders why people pirate their movies. In this case here the owners who had their movies stolen should be able to steal them back.

If you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.

It'd be a case where the spirit of the law clashes with the letter of the law.

Sony's lawyers would argue about how things are, while your defense has to argue about how things should be.

Which way it goes likely depends on how sympathetic the judge is rather than actual arguments being made.

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#128
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-----

I don’t think the appeal is just to the less technically inclined masses. I’m a developer with a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation. Proton has come a long way, but consoles just work for the most part; I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console (setting aside the random buggy messes we see). Then there’s the convenience. I don’t want to play games where I work. I want to…

> I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console

Thanks to recent moves by Sony, this is no longer the case!

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#130

IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?

California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.

Effective after most people likely bought their movies.
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