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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

#271

Post by m463 »

em500 wrote: post #188
qingcharles wrote: post #72

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.

I don't think this type of legislation will have any kind of real world effect. Apple App store labels all their buttons with "Get". Google Play Store just prints the price on the button for paid apps/games.

wow, sidestepping like that sucks.

Strangely, some kindle books actually do meet california criteria of "buy" by allowing a download of the book in .pdf or .epub format.

But when you go to buy them, it still seems to say:

  By placing an order, you're purchasing a content license & agreeing to Kindle's Store Terms of Use.
There is no other indication in the item description of this difference.

It is only later in your library that it quietly says:

  Download available in additional formats

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

#272

Post by 8note »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #230
delecti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a thread about movies, it's perhaps more relevant to talk about how those two platforms handle movies . In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX". The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Bu…

Not to defend this, just to further observe the different nature of their marketing -- games also haven't historically had similar "rent" options in the first place. Timed demos are a newer trend, demos in general have usually been smaller sections of the content, and they typically aren't something you're paying for.

blockbuster rented cartridges and disks back in the day. so do libraries

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

#273

Post by marcosdumay »

anigbrowl wrote: post #213

The same story again? Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 and several others. Looking in search, it seems there's a Sony hate thread almost every day over the last month, and many of them are just reposts of the same thing (eg >10 submissions about Sony's decision to stop manufacturing game discs in 2028)…

People like to hate Sonny products since that time they distributed malware on music CDs.

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

#274

Post by chaosharmonic »

8note wrote: post #272
chaosharmonic wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to defend this, just to further observe the different nature of their marketing -- games also haven't historically had similar "rent" options in the first place. Timed demos are a newer trend, demos in general have usually been smaller sections of the content, and they typically aren't something you're paying for.

blockbuster rented cartridges and disks back in the day. so do libraries

Fair, I more so mean for digital releases.

Movies, on digital marketplaces, have had this kind of distinction for a lot longer than games have.

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

#275

Post by hdgvhicv »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #212
papyrus9244 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws are great and all. But what we really need is a massive boycott. Stop buying shit manufactured or sold by Sony for a year. That alone will probably force them to backtrack every single anti consumer decision they've made recently.

> But what we really need is a massive boycott Is it? What’s the most effective boycott you can think of ever achieved?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

Completely different circumstances as the protest was very organised and the target far smaller than a multi national company and the reason was far more important than access to a few films

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

#276

Post by Retric »

inigyou wrote: post #200
Retric wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves. Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and t…

If I stop believing that money has value, men with guns will come to my house and force me out of it and change the locks. If they stop believing money has value (so they wouldn't want to come to my house), men with guns will come to their house, force them out of it and change the locks. This isn't a voluntary system, it's a forcibly imposed one.

> If they stop believing money has value (so they wouldn't want to come to my house), men with guns will come to their house

You’re assuming there’s going to be large groups of people that believe money still has value. However, there’s nothing inherently different about the first group of people with guns and the second group of people with guns.

If hypothetically there’s a large moon heading to earth so everyone is going to die, everyone is responding to the same situation.

Less extreme situations result in societal collapse, and that’s just one of many options.

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

#277

Post by voakbasda »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #190
mingus88 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them. Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip. Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy.…

Can we though? There is marked difference in how the government reacts to populist demands. Notably, they learned from Vietnam how to manipulate the population to divide public opinion. I am not sure people today can overcome such organized machinations.

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

#278

Post by Narishma »

trencedamp wrote: post #227
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete. I don't think there is…

Part of what I've always hated about consoles is the inevitable push toward an entirely new generation of hardware when the current hardware is more than capable. The best games I've played in the last year would run on a PS4 and probably even a PS3 with a little optimization, yet we're already at the "end" of the PS5. It's so disingenuous. We should be squeezing everything we can out of the wonderful hardware we hav…

The PC is worse in this regard since everyone's hardware is different. There's rarely much optimization going into PC games compared to consoles.

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

#279

Post by demosthanos »

jeremyjh wrote: post #252
demosthanos wrote: post #191

Recent and very related: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation (797 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456 So Sony is simultaneously announcing that all purchases will be digital from now on while actively demonstrating that digital purchases aren't actually purchases. They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.

Yet people have been “buying”games from Steam the same way for more than two decades…

First, I think people should buy from GoG for exactly this reason.

But also, the difference is that Steam has as far as I can tell never yanked a game from someone's account and failed to refund them for it. Games either get delisted and you retain access to them or they're removed entirely and they refund you. The only exception is online-only games whose developer stops maintaining the server, but I think it's reasonable for steam to not claim responsibility for the developer's malfeasance.

So Steam has this model of licensing-not-ownership on paper but in practice treats purchases as much closer to ownership. Sony clearly does not.

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

#280

Post by Retric »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #216
Retric wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves. Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and t…

> value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Are we taking about abolishing the fiat currency system or bringing back the guillotines ?

Any of the above, the world could just decide arbitrarily everyone with 1+B is suddenly broke. That’s not likely but it doesn’t break the laws of physics or anything.
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