Live data from Hacker News

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

techdirt.com

241–250 of 472 posts

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

#241
Curious what others use to store media for home/remote use.

I naively assumed my purchases from [company A] would mean I have permanent/immutable access. Even in the case of access not being revoked, I've found content itself changes over time. Usually related to jokes which have "not aged well" let us say.

I'm not here to champion leaving in that content. Or defend nostalgic rewatching. It just feels strange to not acknowledge.

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

#242
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re in, say, Ohio, where the government will simply overrule decisive mandates with years of procedural nonsense https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/03/31/ohio-republican-la...

Ohioans need to elect better reps then, don't they?

It’s a lot easier to act as a few people than as millions. Let’s not pretend this is some fair fight.

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

#243
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have capital. People never had power. Whenever they've thought they won ... they just damaged position of someone powerful for someone even more powerful without even knowing it.

> In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital.

By this logic, in consumerism power comes from consumers, but maybe it's more complicated than that?

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

#244

Without laws to force companies to honor this, The only reasonable answer to this ownership issue will end up being piracy. Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.

> Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal. Unless I missed something recently, it's not illegal. You've always had the right to make backups of content that you purchased legally. It's the distribution that has been illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... outlaws circumvention of DRM.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.

No, the thing to remember is that "buying a revocable license" is a dishonest way to say "renting for at least one millisecond"

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world. Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with setting…

"Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world" Let me tell you, as someone that repairs a TON of XBox 360s, this comment is very, VERY wrong. The GPU isn't even the same revision between the same batch runs. Did you get Xenos? Zeus? Jupiter? That determined one set of things needed for install/refurbish. Is that a Valhalla motherboard in your hands? That just limited you to a very narrow…

There's a ton of differences that matter to refurbishing, no doubt. Different eMMCs, different chips on the board, different cooling needs, different board layouts, different ports, and more.

What really mattered to end users though was "this disc says Xbox 360. Can I put it in the box at home that says Xbox 360 and have the game run properly?" This didn't really matter if it was a Jasper motherboard or not. The game ran practically the same from a user perspective regardless of which board revision you had. I can go pick up any generation of 360 that still powers on and any 360 game off the shelf and it'll work pretty much how the developer intended.

Meanwhile, if you don't really know anything about computer specs, who knows if a game will run on your computer? This was a $3,000 gaming PC, it should run anything! I bought it in 2002 though, is that a problem? The Radeon 9700 Pro from that red GPU company, probably better than that Radeon RX9070 right? Bigger number and all, and after all its Pro. And its got 128 MEGA bytes, probably better than that other card's 16 something or other.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

No, there is a much better alternative.

No renting of copyrighted works for money. The customer owns a copy or GTFO.

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

#248
Seems like a class action suit ready-made? Idk why this isn’t absolutely lawyer-crack.

I mean, on one hand you have centuries of precedent about what “buy” means, and on the other you have one party depriving another party of access to their property , without providing alternative access, defacto depriving them of their property in absolute terms.

This seems like a clear case of theft, conspiracy to commit theft, and fraudulent advertising, interstate commerce in the pursuit of an organized criminal enterprise , etc.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The proliferation of copies economically devalues the originals.

Nobody has a right to have an economic value for what they sell. That is a special privilege, not a right, and harms everyone for the enrichment of the privileged

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

#250

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?

It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/06/switch-2s-first-ye... I can't say I know anyon…

Splatoon is mainly a competitive multiplayer shooter but the new Raiders game is a more traditional adventure game, I expect the sales for it will be insignificant as far as actually pushing new consoles.
Post reply on HN