16 ms·
Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible "forever"
- christophilus 3y agoPirated and / or drm-free content is the only content you own.
- brian_herman 3y agoI agree
- lupusreal 3y agoCharge the executives personally with scamming and fraud. Otherwise this sort of thing will never stop happening.
- zbrozek 3y agoConsumer protection law could also demand a full and automatic refund.
- romwell 3y agoInsufficient. If I buy a book, and later find it missing on the shelf because the bookstore owner took it back and burned it, it's not a matter of refund. It's theft. This kind of analogy and language has been used to punish those who break copyright laws (particularly, by Sony, which also influenced these laws). That sword better cut both ways then. The executives should get prison terms for the corresponding number of counts of theft, just like copyright infringers did, and their victims should be compensated for damages, not what they merely paid.
- voakbasda 3y agoThat would be the just outcome. It’s theft, and they should be convicted for such. Unfortunately, we only have the law, and the courts regularly demonstrate that the law has little to do with truth or justice.
- dawnerd 3y agoAlso digital items need minimum supported years advertised. If I buy a download I should be told up front for how long at minimum it’ll be valid. Same with streaming. Another solution is to allow a drm free download if the service goes down. This likely won’t fly with rights holders but something has to change.
- latentcall 3y agoIf you can afford to buy physical media, that is the alternative here if you’re worried about the rug being pulled from under you. Streaming is fine but people need to know it can change any moment and to have no faith in something being on that platform for all time, even if the company insists on “forever”.
- int_19h 3y agoOr just rip the streams (StreamFab etc). There's no rational reason to respect property rights of people who don't respect yours.
- doctorwho42 3y agoProblem with physical is that all things degrade. Digital can be reproduced ad infinitum with error correcting code
- MobileVet 3y agoYep. My play is to buy the physical media to support the artists and then rely on my digital backups for true ‘forever’ access. NAS FTW ‘Power to the people Coz’ - Martin Bishop
- PeterisP 3y agoYou're allowed to make backups of your physical media with copyright-protected works and replace them with fresh perfect digital copies if they degrade.
- owlninja 3y agoBut this announcement is for people who bought the physical media and it came with a code where they could stream it as well.
- edude03 3y agoFor what it’s worth blu rays copy protection system was designed so that keys can be revoked so without ripping a DRM free version it’s also possible to lose access to your physical media in this way
- neilv 3y agoI expect Sony to find a way to honor the original agreement. I personally don't care about anime, but I've spent a lot of money on other digital products through Sony, and would like to continue to do so, with confidence. We need to be clear about this now, that a company can't just weasel out of digital purchases with the fine print.
- jstarfish 3y agoOr maybe we should have realistic expectations. Craftsman owes me a torque wrench; they promised a lifetime warranty. Except Craftsman is now dead. The lifetime of the company has expired. Expecting otherwise is delusional. Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost? While it would be nice for companies to honor such promises through mergers, it would make many toxic when the obligations of their generosity is what led to their insolvency. It's the stuff of horror stories when your ex takes "but you said you'd never leave me and you'd always love me forever" to its most literal extreme. The expectation is irrational and unreasonable.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI have to admit I’d love to go to a wedding with realistic vows. I’d imagine something like, “I promise to love and cherish you until such time as it becomes inconvenient or I get tired of you or whatever”.
- taneq 3y ago"For better or worse, in sickness or in health, unless you turn out to be a total bitch."
- pdimitar 3y agoA fairly realistic one, having various stats in mind: "I will love you for however long most humans can love a single other human without getting tired of them, which on average boils down to 15-20 years" A bit more brutal one that happens quite a lot in more traditional countries: "I really want my relatives to leave me alone about marrying and having kids so here, I am marrying you as a ticket to another life that I'll abandon once I am reassured I won't be deprived of inheritance".
- mingus88 3y agoIf buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing
- ftrelli 3y agoThere is so much of this going around these days. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39308520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39308520 Take-Two shutting down servers for games when users still have unused “in game currencies”.
- smaudet 3y agoI love the top comment, they point out if the currency is fictional there should be no problem with mods to add currency. "But we lose our money then!" - they cry...thought it wasn't money though, lol.
- Ekaros 3y agoSo someone hacking them and adding more currency to everyone would not be bad. Just very tiny breaking of rules. Not likely worth prosecuting at all. As in that case they would lose absolutely no money...
- theshrike79 3y agoPiracy should be more like joyriding[0] because the owner still has full control over the original :) > "joyriding is not considered to be theft because the intent to "permanently deprive" the vehicle's owner of the vehicle cannot be proven" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyride_(crime) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyride_(crime)
- Lammy 3y agoThey're also doubling the price of the streaming service https://twitter.com/Pikagreg/status/1755259587400470754 https://twitter.com/Pikagreg/status/1755259587400470754
- m_0x 3y agoThese services should be forbidden from using the phrase "Buy it now" if they do not mean it. The phrase should be "License it now" or "Get a license" so people know what they are getting into. Words have power.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThey need to declare that the license is not active in perpetuity.
- tacocataco 3y agoWould you like this on page 2026 or 2027 of the terms of service?
- alpaca128 3y agoIt should say "buy time-limited license"
- yencabulator 3y agoMore like "business-interest-limited license".
- nulld3v 3y agoAka "renting"
- indymike 3y agoWe need to use simple language that everyone understands. "Rent" is the right word for this transaction. Sellers hate it because no one like rent at buy prices.
- mattclarkdotnet 3y agoIn British English “lease” is the word for something between “buy” and “rent”. “Lease this content for 10 years” is a deal that makes perfect sense, even if the sellers might hate it
- 3y ago
- pierat 3y agoLol, and this is money I never spent. And instead it went to server and loads of disks, for a Jellyfin server. And you know what? I 'pierat' and I keep all my files. When the money grubbers can get that through their thick skull, I'll start buying. But until that time, this scam 'purchase' is a shitty rental.
- shiroiuma 3y agoOn a side note, I really wish the Jellyfin people would do some work on their UI. It's pretty wonky for me. The underpinnings seem good, but using it on my TV to just find a file I just copied onto my HD into ~/Videos isn't all that easy.
- pierat 3y agoAh yeah, you have to do a rescan of that library to index the content. Usually, rescans happen at night 12a local time. But if you manually put new content on a library, you have to manually scan. I also do that when I download mega-content packages. They're usually not adhering to Jellyfin's methodology of content index. So I fix it, and rescan. And once the scan indicates done, it's usually all good.
- snakeyjake 3y agoSurely all the customers losing access to their libraries have to do to regain access to the content they paid for is either watch or rip the physical media that the streaming code was issued with that they still completely have and didn't sell, lose, or give away, right?
- interestica 3y agoThe digital version would be a different quality than the physical. Dvd is pretty low quality
- Karellen 3y agoI was always very confused when I saw DVDs with "includes digital copy" (or similar) on the cover. Like... yes? I know. That's how DVDs work. It's what the first "D" stands for. The DVD version is a digital version. Who came up with that phrasing? And why did whoever hired them get someone who apparently doesn't understand how DVDs work to do it?
- pdimitar 3y agoHow to forever convert people to pirating 101. There are so many anime streaming sites out there, and word goes out pretty quickly when one gets killed and two others get up. Copyrights holders are losing the whack-a-mole game, they know it and are doubling down. Quite funny to observe how short-sighted and denying-reality [supposed] adult people can be.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI mean, they have to fight. If they shut down, everyone except the most dedicated anime watchers lose out. And I'm sure anime streaming is nowhere near as prolific as TV (some of which also serve some anime). I guess if people are fine reverting back to the 90's where they can barely share new shows with potential new friends, it's a better future. Sounds like a good way to ruin a lot of the respect slowly gained over the decades though.
- pdimitar 3y agoWho has to fight? Sony? You seem to be implying somebody else. Sony is fine though, more than fine even, since they figure they'll just do their very best to be scummy. Obviously no business wants to roll over and just die, but if they fight super dirty and when their word is obviously not worth a dime then the consumers' reaction is predictable, no?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoNo one has the fight. But someone mad and rich enough could potentially fight. Or the right lawyer who cares enough to whip up a class action. Will it happen here? Probably not. Anime isn't that respected. But there's also a lot of rich and very invested anime fans so I wouldn't be completely surprised if someone was bored and angry enough to sue on their own.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoAbsolutely. I don't know how these people can think like that (including netflix). I was so happy just to pay for something so I don't have to have the horrible UX of piracy. But they fucked it up so bad, removing movies I wanted to watch, pushing ads etc. that I'm back to a seed box. Weird stuff.
- jrm4 3y agoWho would have thought that company that deliberately infected everyone's computers with a virus on a music CD could be capable of such a thing?
- crazygringo 3y agoOn the one hand, I don't expect anything to exist "forever". Companies don't stay in business forever. A forever contract doesn't even make sense. But on the other hand, there need to be protections here. Just because a company merges or gets bought, doesn't mean they should be able to end their guarantees. What about if, to be legally allowed to license streaming content, companies were required by law to: 1) Specify a minimum duration available as part of the buy button and all other text using the term "buy" or "license"? E.g. "Buy for 5 years" or "License now (min. 10 years guaranteed)" 2) Require some kind of insurance/escrow/backup in advance, that guarantees that if they go out of business, all accounts and purchases will transfer to another service that will continue to honor them for the time period specified (or full purchase price is refunded) In terms of a minimum time duration, there are even physical analogies here -- books can yellow and their bindings crack and glue fail, vinyl wears out, floppy disks become unreadable after a decade or two -- I've even had CDs experience some kind of green growth in humid climates rendering them unreadable. So we already have a kind of pre-existing expectation of media purchases only lasting so long, on average.
- consumer451 3y agoI believe that the rules you are asking for exist in the EU. https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-business-eu/contract-rules/digital-contracts/digital-contract-rules_en https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-bus...
- NegativeK 3y agoI agree with pretty much everything you've said. But the difference with physical media and streaming access is that it's actually legal to make a backup of physical media. It might be annoying or enthusiast-behavior to do so, but on the flip side, if a company finds out I'm making rips of streams, they'll at the least shut off my account (which includes access to the rest of the media) and quite possible throw a lawyer at me. Companies have done everything they can to nuke the idea of perpetuity.
- RajT88 3y ago> if a company finds out I'm making rips of streams Vanishingly few people are themselves ripping streams thanks to Widevine. They are just torrenting stuff. BTW only the first "level" of widevine has been cracked as far as I can find, which is limited to lower quality streams.
- LispSporks22 3y ago“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
- costanzaDynasty 3y agoMajor entertainment ecosystems should be making digital purchases more sacred not less thus encouraging more digital sales and hoping to attract new customers and further retaining current customers. Personally I’m digital only but I buy everything on sale at >65% off. There are enough sales and trackers to get everything on sale given time. If one day it goes away then all be upset but not surprised. But it will be the last dollar that mega corporation gets from me. They need your money more than you need to give it to them.
- boring-alterego 3y agoYo ho ho and a raided nas.
- kevin_b_er 3y agoIf buying is not owning, then piracy is not theft.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThere's an easy fix for this: Trade secrets and trademarks are supposed to be forever, and both copyrights and patents seem to last almost forever. The US Congress can legislate those to expire the instant a company has been found to not live by their "forever" and indefinite promises. I would love to see the people who killed their Zune archive lose all their IP.
- gxs 3y agoLet this be a lesson to people who never put up a fight over things like DRM, privacy, etc. Once you give up control, you never get it back. Sony is deleting things you paid for fair and square and there is nothing you can do about it.
- kuon 3y agoA few years ago I started buying old second hand CDs for as low as a few cent a piece. I rip all in flac. I have 10TB of music. Yes it is not the latest album and it is some work to rip and organize, but I think it makes me enjoy the music more.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago[dead]
- LinuxBender 3y agoAdding to that CD's and DVD's can not be censored, redacted, altered to whatever fits the current social order. I have plenty of music and movies that were "cancelled" or edited via public outcry to satisfy small yet highly vocal groups. I strive to preserve the original artistic composition of the actors, directors and producers.
- kderbyma 3y agosame. Though only 0.25Tb so far. :) getting there. I struggle with bands that do not sell CDs, but everything from my childhood is cheap and easy to find.
- xtracto 3y agoAaah, more and more the /r/drmgraveyard subreddit gets populated... https://www.reddit.com/r/drmgraveyard/comments/1amdv5q/sony_is_erasing_digital_libraries_that_were/ https://www.reddit.com/r/drmgraveyard/comments/1amdv5q/sony_...
- wombat-man 3y agoI'm happy with the rental experience. I don't mind paying a few bucks to watch something specific every now and then. I don't usually rewatch movies. I don't know if people are actually building large libraries of funimation content, but if I were one of them I'd be pissed.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoProbably more than you think. There aren't that many ways to buy translated anime, since the business is effectively 2-3 companies at any given time.
- olliej 3y agoThe solution here is simple: If you advertise something as being "bought", then removing access should require a full refund, plus inflation and/or interest, and have any contractual term that attempts to undermine the plain language of the advertisement and/or UI for purchasing be explicitly unenforceable.
- FiddlerClamp 3y agoOne of the reasons I get immediately turned off as soon as I see a service (VPNs, etc.) being offered with a "one-time lifetime subscription cost." Nope. Not going to happen. Either they'll change the terms down the line, shut down, or be acquired by someone else who'll change the terms. With a monthly or yearly subscription, at least you can calculate how much you're spending per unit of time. For a 'lifetime' you have no idea how long that single purchase will be spread across.
- davkan 3y agoLifetime is easily calculated against the equivalent periodic subscription cost if both are offered. I don’t buy a lifetime subscription thinking I’ll be using it in 10 years. I purchase it thinking I’ll still be using it in 3 years, at which point it starts being free compared to the monthly. Of course that’s not really relevant for digital assets like movies or anime, which I want to own, not rent.
- FiddlerClamp 3y agoBoingBoing frequently has sponsored offers for lifetime subscriptions to products. At this point I won't even click through and check out the periodic subscription cost. Any company offering a lifetime subscription ought to know by now the chances of such a thing lasting is small.
- m3kw9 3y agoAnyone claiming or believing anything can be forever is dumb
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoIt stays forever if pirated for the sake of preservation.
- kazinator 3y ago"Forever" evidently means, more or less, "as long as I, the employee writing this document or the representative telling it to you verbally, continue to work here".
- linuxandrew 3y agoThis happened with MSN Music back in 2008: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-s... My family was impacted, hundreds of dollars of legitimately purchased music files were mostly useless. Fortunately, there was a way to replace those music files (cough BitTorrent cough). Seriously, DRM just compels people into copyright infringement. I won't touch anything DRM with a barge-pole anymore. BandCamp has a good DRM-free model but it's only really used by a few small-time artists and bands.
- kragen 3y agoit happens sooner or later to every file encumbered by digital restrictions management; it's not a question of if it goes into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames, but when
- josebama 3y agoI think it should be illegal to label access to digital content as "buy" or "purchase" if you can't download the digital file DRM-free. If the way they presented the option to pay implied ownership, you should be able to own that digital file.
- Animats 3y agoThe problem: (d) Disclaimer. Crunchyroll does not guarantee that any content (including without limitation Crunchyroll Content or User Submissions) will be made available through the Site or Services, continuously or at all. WHILE CRUNCHYROLL IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO DO SO, CRUNCHYROLL RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REMOVE AND PERMANENTLY DELETE ANY CONTENT FROM THE SITE OR SERVICES WITHOUT NOTICE, AND FOR ANY REASON CRUNCHYROLL DEEMS SUFFICIENT.
- gigatexal 3y agoThis is why I find copies of the data I have bought from such places as apple or iTunes so I always have a copy I own DRM free.
- DotaFan 3y agoTerms like "Forever" or "100 year" should be forbidden. https://wordpress.com/support/plan-features/100-year-plan/ https://wordpress.com/support/plan-features/100-year-plan/
- histories 3y agoThis makes my blood boil. If I "bought" these shows, you are literally (and sadly legally) stealing my stuff. And money is not even the issue. My "unreasonable" request is that I get to keep what I buy. Piracy offers me this. It also offers me a free product, but that's mostly irrelevant. I have a gigantic bandcamp library precisely because they let me download drm-free files (but even they pull up stuff; that's ok, I have my local files). Pirate everything. Rip everything. Keep backups.
- Manfred 3y agoSome of these company's portfolios will be too big to keep. Imagine what would happen if YouTube stopped existing? Who has enough capital to store billions of hours of video other than Alphabet?
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI sort of feel all this we sold the company and now we can get out of whatever obligations we have relates to Disney's screwing over of Alan Dean Foster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926
- h2odragon 3y agoI thought they came to a "no tell" settlement on that in 2021
- bryanrasmussen 3y agohmm, OK I missed it then. Although really I think it still relates then, they came to settlement that they won't tell because hey they didn't want to a clear ruling that when you buy a company's assets you also buy their liabilities because that might make it more difficult to run the same scam later.
- h2odragon 3y agoI don't know how the other authors made out. IIRC Disney said they owed no royalties on the entire "Star Wars" extended universe books, entire. I don't think I heard anything about the other authors caught up in it except that there was some.
- bowsamic 3y agoThe situation for visual media is absolutely awful right now. Everything from movies to TV shows to manga to books is all completely awful. Here in Germany it's basically impossible to legally access manga and anime, and you will actually receive multiple thousand euro fines if you torrent without a VPN (or sometimes even stream if it turns out the streaming service uses a p2p connection, which hit a fair few people) People got excited because music was such a "success" story with cheap access to almost everything, and frankly gaming isn't too bad either (though we can still name a lot of horror stories in that case), but this has absolutely not materialised for visual media
- j45 3y agoThis reminds me that the cloud is someone else’s computer. This reminds me the cloud is sold as convenience, which it delivers, but not permanence. The cloud always costs someone, the internet always costs someone. Whatever I want to keep a copy of I must maintain a physical copy of. I haven’t bought many dvds lately but this is a reminder it might not be a bad idea.
- Woeps 3y agoI wonder how this will go down, it's not the first time Sony has removed something that was advertised/a selling point and was challenged in court for it. See the case about the PS3 being able to run Linux. I as a layman see this basically as the same thing so I assume we'll get a similar result (and I'm probably wrong about this)
- M95D 3y agoI wish there was a site/service/seller/provider that would sell me just the license to own and use a copy of <something> for as long as I live. A digitally signed PDF with the license would be just fine.
- ohyes 3y agoThe best way for people with money and resources to make more money is for you to rent from them. This seems to be a depressing fact about modern capitalism ranging from digital media to apartments. If you have something scare that you control (or that you can potentially make scare via legal maneuvers), don’t just sell it once, sell it multiple times to the same person. This situation seems like it will further devolve as it is a fantastic business model and is making rich people a lot of money. I don’t see how we close Pandora’s box because fixing the problem of usury and the negative impact it has on free people is older than modern society.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eemil 3y agoI think Youtube's policy on purchased content[1] is somewhat reasonable. I still disagree with the word 'Buy', when they don't offer a way to download the content, but it's probably the best we'll see from any major marketplace short of buying physical media. > 7.2 Removal or Unavailability of Content > For purchased content: (a) if the content becomes removed or unavailable during the first five years after your purchase, you will be entitled to a refund or a reasonable replacement; or (b) if the content becomes removed or unavailable following such five year period, and you are not able to download a copy of the affected content before it becomes unavailable (if applicable), then we may, at our option, offer you either a reasonable replacement of the content or a full or partial refund of the price of the content. [1] https://www.youtube.com/t/terms_paidservice https://www.youtube.com/t/terms_paidservice
- rpigab 3y agoI love the fact that even NFTs containing deadlinks to IPFS or other resources somehow have more value than these digital media, because at least there's a record that you tried to own something, and they can't take that away from you (unless the blockchain it's on stops operating).
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoI just got a friend to write me a receipt for the statue of liberty.
- rpigab 3y agoWould you exchange it for my Man of Steel bluray digital copy on UltraViolet? I don't think I ever watched it, it's mint-in-box condition!
- JohnFen 3y agoRegardless of what company it is or what commitments they make, if you aren't in possession and control of the thing, that thing will vanish sooner or later. Any data being held by an entity that isn't you has to be considered temporary.
- ajdude 3y agoFor additional conversation see also: Funimation End of Services (funimation.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309337
- tacocataco 3y agoWouldn't making it available forever mean releasing the IP in question into the public domain once the business cycle concludes?
- Donaldbendo 3y ago[flagged]
- up2isomorphism 3y agoNot sure how much one can blame when believing in something impossible.