Sony is facing a $7.9 billion lawsuit that could impact over 9 million players. They’ve been accused of deleting purchased movies, TV shows, and games—items customers thought they owned forever.
This lawsuit, filed by consumer advocate Alex Neill, challenges Sony’s alleged abuse of its dominant position, charging high prices and restricting competition on the PlayStation Store.
Fun thing, even a DVD or Blu-ray is technically licensed by them, and they claim they have the right to revoke it whenever they want. In the case of Blu-ray they have tried to do this via “updates” to the Blu-ray players
Sony owns Blu Ray tech but not DVD. DVD was industry consortium to prevent a repeat of the VHS and betamax war. Only lasted a generation unfortunately.
I remember complaining on Amazon about the price of digital books when they were still relatively new. They wanted me to pay the same price for a digital book as a physical book. Back then, Amazon still had pretty decent customer service and wrote me back saying that the price for the book wasn’t for literal pages but for the work in making the book, etc. etc.
I told them I understood that but I don’t get the same rights with the digital book as I did with the physical, namely the right to sell the book.
Books, board games, etc. any physical media is technically a license, yes. BUT the copyright holder cannot bar you from doing whatever you want with the physical copy, within the limits of copyright law. Those same rights simply do not exist with your digital copies and, in fact, is often codified within your terms of service that you don’t fucking own anything and they can pull your license at any time.
DVD is next to impossible to revoke while Blu-ray is not. But you can’t revoke Blu-ray licenses to specific people but to regions. I haven’t heard of this happening but if it did, you could, in theory, still play your Blu-ray disks on players that aren’t connected to the internet to receive those updates. That said, I’m like 80% sure that Blu-ray keys have been leaked and you can rip them like DVDs today.
I am not saying you can or you can’t, but if you could, and I’m not saying you can, I would have full DRM-free backups of every Blu-ray I own.
I’m not saying they would or they wouldn’t, but if they would, and I’m not saying they would, they would distribute the keys to the Blu-ray players online so other people could use their rightfully purchased discs in any way they pleased on their own hardware.