They should at least make an effort to let you sync them into MoviesAnywhere which is supposed to solve the "I have this on iTunes, but not Android TV" problem by unlocking it across platforms if you sync your accounts. They should really let you permanently keep movies on defunct platforms as part of your standard MoviesAnywhere movie collection.
And with more and more content being distributed digitally, and even Sony announcing that physical disks won't be a thing from 2028 [0], the days of media ownership are gone. The only way to "own" content is it being DRM free (rare) or piracy. And ironically, DRMs justify the existence of piracy.
I'm surprised movies haven't yet moved to DRM free on purchases the way music did on iTunes back in 2009. With movie files being so large and people having streaming services integrated in their TV's I can't imagine there is all that much incentive for people to share them anyway. The only thing it does is help prevent situations like this.
Anyone remotely surprised at their history of utter contempt for the end-user need only remind themselves of SVP Steve Heckler's remarks to conference attendee's in 2000
"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."
The remarks of Stewart Baker of the DHS admonishing Sony are as relevant today as they were then; namely that "it's your intellectual property - it's not your computer."
Ever since Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. started offering "free" online storage for photos, ever since streaming started to be popular, I have ALWAYS extolled the virtues of µSD card slots in phones and owning your own media (i.e., purchasing CDs and DVDs). Many people would give me a hard time about this, calling me a Luddite, but I will never lose access to my photos, music, or movies ... unless it is the end of the world as we know it, which I happily have on R.E.M.'s Eponymous album.
Highly recommend setting up your own photo hosting and backup. People love Immich, but ente.io is also great! Much better than trusting your photos to a single microSD card which may die at any moment.
Nothing really wrong with being a Luddite. The Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-progress. Rather, they opposed deployment of technology in the workplace which they believed would reduce their pay, reduce the quality of their output, and make it easier to exploit vulnerable people such as children. They were, basically, doing the same thing as software engineers who argue that AI mandates are making their lives worse and making the quality of their employers' software worse.
From my experience with SD cards in mobile phone when I worked in a Telco, most customers didn't actually know how to use them. Because in many cases plugging in the SD card didn't magically increase the base storage of the device, they actually needed to know how to store things on it.
But in reality MicroSD card are easily to lose. And setting up an NAS is still a bag of hurt. Not to mention the lack of ZFS / BTrFS on cheaper model, and no ECC RAM your data will likely be corrupted half way through the decade.
We still don't have an easy solution to this problem.
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.
It used to be that streaming services were an excellent option even over torrenting because of the ease of access and use.
Now we're not even getting to retain what we buy, this is not a streaming service, these were sold to users individually.
We've gone full circle where I honestly believe pirating is a far better offering.
The root of the problem is these ridiculous content licensing agreements, it should be very very obvious to the customer when they're buying that "Hey, you will own this until X date when our content licensing agreement is finished"
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.
That's why I pirate content and will continue to pirate content. I'm not hurting artists. I go to shows and premiers and book signings. I'm perfectly fine with stealing from publishing cartels.
A friend of mine owned the first Ipod, and diligently ripped all his cd's and cut and pasted them too his device. I asked if he had backups, and he said he had the cd's. I told him too make a copy, just in case the Apple mafia came too delete his stuff. He didn't, and then after a move he lost or scratched many of his CD's. His only backup WAS the ripped MP3's. A few years later Apple deleted all of his music claiming he hadn't purchased them. He didn't even know how to download music. Every single MP3 he had he ripped himself...
I've heard there's a service called PirateBay that offers movies free of DRM. Maybe people considering being Sony customers in the future should give it a try.
We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.
I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)
I’d go with a simple proposal: if you use the word “buy” the seller is required to refund buyers if the seller’s action removes access (unlike, say, losing access to a CD or DVD after the disc is scratched).
The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.
We need consumer boycotts, not legislation. I find it hilarious that people would continue to buy (or license) content from a trash company like Sony after they were caught literally installing rootkits on customer computers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
> I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)
I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.
Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.
Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.
All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.
I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:
There’s only one party fighting for things like this and they are in the minority. Funny how people that cry about politics on hacker news don’t understand how it directly affects them until their digital media is no longer their property. Sad that’s what it takes.
The list of legislation we need is getting very big very fast, but our Congress is dysfunctional and the president only cares about the SAVE act. Even when we've had a functional Congress, most protections like these are written in favor of corporations and/or weakened by the next administration.
> and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price.
Wouldn't this incentivize people to buy the game, play it and once they are done with it get banned to get a full refund?
Maybe not a major problem since almost no centralised multiplayer games are one-time purchases.
> These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this.
I don't think it is reasonable to bundle those ideas together.
Companies renegading on their promise of perpetual access is not the same thing as a right to resell at all
Right to resell is just going to warp game prices in a way that is bad for everyone
After all how do new games compete with used games in that setup? Given the way engagement with games works there will basically always be spare copies
Key sales already happen at below new game value at nearly all times and that is unused games
> they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought
Also not the same thing at all, bad behavior removing access and no refund is normal
> that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price
Ah yes cheating in an MMO results in a full refund of all money paid that wouldn't be abused by anyone
I quite like the idea of what Nintendo Switch 2 is doing and hopefully could take on with some guarantee. The new Switch 2 cartridge, I am buying the Key to access the media. Storing and transferring media cost is going down every single year. You can pass the physical media to anyone. And they will still be able to access it. And the copy of that data should be legally yours and be protected by law they can't remove it.
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.)
Or when the account gets compromised. I recently lost my amazon account and with it, all of my kindle purchases. Fortunately, I was able to turn on the airplane mode on my kindle just in time and preserve the books which were already downloaded. Guess I have to jail break it some day.
82 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] thread[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346
[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Anyone remotely surprised at their history of utter contempt for the end-user need only remind themselves of SVP Steve Heckler's remarks to conference attendee's in 2000
"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."
https://web.archive.org/web/20090318115847/http://www.nyfair...
The remarks of Stewart Baker of the DHS admonishing Sony are as relevant today as they were then; namely that "it's your intellectual property - it's not your computer."
https://web.archive.org/web/20051229031842/http://www.mp3new...
Simple example: "The Things of Life", a classic French movie from 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_of_Life
No way to get it in the US. No physical media, no streaming. It is on Apple TV ... in France.
You can torrent it.
Utterly brokem model.
Music is the same btw, Apple Music and Spotify geoblock music. Workaround is to add to your library when traveling in EU. Insane.
But that's a separate issue altogether
We still don't have an easy solution to this problem.
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.
You will own nothing.
Now we're not even getting to retain what we buy, this is not a streaming service, these were sold to users individually.
We've gone full circle where I honestly believe pirating is a far better offering.
The root of the problem is these ridiculous content licensing agreements, it should be very very obvious to the customer when they're buying that "Hey, you will own this until X date when our content licensing agreement is finished"
Not hidden by design in some dense ToS.
I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)
The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.
Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.
All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.
I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:
https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Release:QmUWtV7fG1K9pM5TQSf5c38v...
Starve 'em!
Wouldn't this incentivize people to buy the game, play it and once they are done with it get banned to get a full refund?
Maybe not a major problem since almost no centralised multiplayer games are one-time purchases.
I don't think it is reasonable to bundle those ideas together.
Companies renegading on their promise of perpetual access is not the same thing as a right to resell at all
Right to resell is just going to warp game prices in a way that is bad for everyone
After all how do new games compete with used games in that setup? Given the way engagement with games works there will basically always be spare copies
Key sales already happen at below new game value at nearly all times and that is unused games
> they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought
Also not the same thing at all, bad behavior removing access and no refund is normal
> that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price
Ah yes cheating in an MMO results in a full refund of all money paid that wouldn't be abused by anyone