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If the content is not stored locally and DRM free, then you don’t own it. Don’t pay for content that you can’t own. 🏴☠️
Is there any platform or medium where I can buy locally stored and DRM-free software? Even if I buy a game on disc I am fucked, cause most games need updates. I can only name GOG.
Given the recent controversy, it calls into question the definition of the word ‘buy.’
GOG is the only one that I know of too.
itch.io is fantastic. Mostly indie stuff with some bigger name stuff, but it’s by far the best out there for devs.
It’s hard to find quality games in the sea of single dev weekend projects on itch io…
Buy the disc, put it on a shelf and download a clean copy.
Is there any platform or medium where I can buy locally stored and DRM-free software?
Steam, but you’ll have to manually search around the forums to see which games does it and which doesn’t. It’s not exactly a well advertised feature, but integration of Steamworks copy protection is optional. Most of the games that are DRM-free on GOG are DRM-free on Steam too.
Humble (the company that sells Bundles) has some games listed as DRM free games in their store. Never bought individual games from them, but I have gotten DRM free games in their bundles.
Also, fuck GOG. They are owned by CD Project Red, the piece of shit lawyers who trademarked the term cyberpunk.
Pretty sure they bought the trademark from the company who owned it previous (for a 1980s era board game if I recall correctly). They bought it to prevent shitty 2077 clones with the same name from popping up. I haven’t heard of them actively pursuing copyright infringement against others who use cyberpunk.
2077 and its spinoffs are literally set in the boardgame universe and an updated rulebook was released at the same time as the game.
2077 and Edgerunners are just stories set in the setting and universe from the boardgame. The Arasaka Tower Heist, Johnny Silverhand, Morgan Blackhand, all the corps, gangs, and cyberware are right from the boardgame. The story had heavy involvement from the creator of the board game as well. For fucks sake he does the voice of Maximum Mike on the in game radio.
Did people not realize that Cyberpunk 2077 is just another Witcher situation, but this time the original author wanted to stay a part of things?
Just because they are not openly pursuing enforcement does not mean that they will not. Just the audacity to trademark a generic term widely used in media discussion makes me think that they are being represented by scumbag lawyers.
The fuck are you talking about wrt Cyberpunk? It was already the trademarked name of the boardgame that all this new shit draws from, the boardgame that coined the fucking term in the first place.
They purchased the trademark from the old role playing game and then expanded it, if I recall.
The RPG did not invent the term. It was riding the hype of cyberpunk literature. The first use of the term is from 1980 (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cyberpunk). According to Wikipedia, the game did not come out until 1988 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(role-playing_game) ).
Muh witcher
What are you even talking a out, there are plenty of games with cyberpunk in the tittle on steam.
And CD Project Red has the right to sue those publishers.
Of course, if they do and the other side chooses to fight, they will have to explain to a judge why the trademark was granted to them despite a mountain of prior art describing games as cyberpunk.
Most games don’t need updates
Have you played any new games recently?
Yes, most games are better with patches. Most games do not need patches. And most games come out just fine, the big AAAs that push consoles often have a patch that is worth caring about.
I played through the most recent yakuza game without a patch recently. Was great.
Real quick: how high are you?
How high doesnt matter, we need to know what they are high on
And where to get it
Whatever they’re smoking, don’t do it. You’ll end up drooling gibberish with a blithe grin on like that. ↑
Ok, if you think most games don’t need them, then I hope that you’re enjoying bugs. 10/20 years ago games were unfinished, too - but you were able to download and SAVE an update. This is nearly impossible, now.
I literally gave you an example of a game I played recently, without patches and zero bugs. Please read the whole thing before leaving a comment.
The quality of comments on lemmy has really gone downhill the past few months, it’s about reddit quality now and getting worse
“people disagree with me, it sure feels like reddit around here”
You ever think the place wasnt the common denominator?
one of many
Not much of a gamer lately, huh?
Updates are always an option now, so games are no longer released in a very stable state. And by not very stable, I mean “crashes immediately with X company hardware”, “frame rate drops to 1 frame/s in certain areas”, or “quest line is bugged and incompletable”
Day one updates generally aren’t optional… With a publisher who values polish like Nintendo? Generally they’re playable, but a bit rough. On average, they’re literally impossible to play through. It’s a real problem in modern gaming
I played through the most recent yakuza game without a patch recently. Was great.
Ok, but that’s Yakuza. Their team is great and cares a lot about quality. They’re hardly a representative example, but…
I just scanned through their update log. A week after launch, they fixed a crash when you deleted a picture from the photo album. Another couple weeks later, they fixed one where the game would crash intermittently. A few weeks later, they fixed a bug where the game wouldn’t boot if you unlocked all the achievements. And it keeps going, more than a year later they fixed a crash during a quest if you have an inconsistent frame rate
There’s a lot more, but I just scanned through looking for crash fixes - there’re also many issues with graphics that would make the game unplayable with certain setups
Also, I noticed the first patch is 1.02, making me believe the “unpatched” game actually included the day 1 patch
Maybe the release version worked for you, but it didn’t work for everyone (or maybe your version included patches you’re unaware of)
And again, this is an example of a highly polished game - most games are far, far worse
Old games had crasher bugs too, and even had new versions :o. 99% of games release in a state where 99% of people will never notice an issue.
Most games are not “far worse”, you are looking at the high profile exceptions and extrapolating rather than looking at the actual real landscape of releases.
It’s entirely possible that we play very different games, but I’m a gamer programmer, I read patch notes and listen to retrospectives recreationally
I never said games are far worse, I think that’s true for AAA gaming (for different reasons), but modern indie games beat the crap out of the bargain bin games from a couple decades ago
My point is this - OTA updates change how software is developed. It used to cost a lot of money to fix if you release it with breaking bugs, and there were several system builds to test on.
Now? There’s an infinite number of configurations you can support with one engine and minimal porting - hell, Nvidia regularly patches their drivers to support specific games better.
The cost of extensive qa has skyrocketed, and the consequences of bugs at launch has plummeted.
If that doesn’t convince you, go pick 5 random games released this year on steam, and look at their update logs. All 5, maybe 4 if you’re lucky , will have patches around release time for major issues.
It’s not because they’re lazy or bad devs, it’s because QA could take months or years to tell you what user feedback would get you in 48 hours after launch
Correct, most indie and AA games ship complete
I bought DRM-free TV episodes from Google Play (IIRC). Everything was great until codecs got updated a couple of years later and the videos were suddenly jerky to the point of unwatchability.
Even when I own it, there’s no guarantee I get to keep it.
You can probably play it properly on a PC using something like VLC (A pretty powerful video player)
VLC is also available on android, do that might be worth a try!
Uh, that’s practically all software and games these days.
In this case Sony is taking away TV shows that people purchased. They can be purchased on physical media that will be playable as long as you have the disc. The DRM on DVD and Bluray discs can be easily removed to make backups that will play on anything forever.
As for games, everything on GOG is DRM free. They have downloads for the installers so you can keep a backup copy to install decades from now even if GOG is long gone by then.
If the content is not stored locally and DRM free, then you don’t own it.
Have fun managing tens of TB of backups. I have given up on that quite a while ago, DRM-free is just not a practical for the amount of digital content you collect over the years. It’s a nice to have thing that comes in really handy sometimes (e.g. watching movies on unsupported device like VR headsets), but it’s not a solution for digital ownership. In some ways it’s actually worse, as you can’t practically resell DRM-free copies, as you don’t have a proof of ownership. You’ll also miss out on updates for new technologies (codecs, OS versions, etc.).
This needs a legislative solution or some NFT-like thing that gives you a certificate like “You own this, feel free to pirate if we go out of business”(digital signed by company).
Sony understands only one language… MONEY. I stopped buying their products since they installed a root kit decades ago in my computer to prevent it from ripping my legally bought CDs to my computer. I had to reinstall windows to get rid of that virus. Never again! And all my electronics were Sony back then
Hey, just wanted to say I’m glad a few of us remember the rootkit fiasco. I still won’t buy Sony products today.
Yeah, fuck those rootkits. Despicable.
They do something similar on their smart TVs - it’s not possible to run Kodi with torrent streaming plugins, they block it on purpose.
How is it blocked? Could you work around it with a debrid service? i.e no torrent protocol
I didn’t further investigated it, however I remember that the Kodi remote app port worked, but the torrent streaming port (Elementum specifically) didn’t.
While on the Xiaomi Mi Box S it worked.
I’m just shocked how many commenters here somehow seem to think that Sony can choose for their own profit to engage in contracts with mismatched responsabilities - i.e. a short-term contract with WB right next to a much longer term responsability towards retail customer - and not be financially responsible towards their retail customers at one end for the losses that arose from the termination of the very Contract Sony chose to sign at the opposite end.
Imagine if you hire somebody to build you a garden shed and they paid some fly-by-night company for the wood because they were cheaper and that company just to took off with the money. You think they could just legally turn to you, their customer, and say “sorry, we chose some fishy guys for the wood for your shed and they took the money and didnt gave us the wood, so now we’ll keep your money and you’re not going to get your shed. Bye bye!”.
Contract Law isolates Contractual responsabilities in any one contract (including the implied contract of a Retail Sale) to the parties in that contract alone exactly because long term contractual commitments would be de facto impossible in a world were every purchaser also ran risks on every one of their supplier’s own contracts as purchasers, in turn having the risks of their suppliers’ suppliers’ and so on as deep as the chain went.
I think most rational people hate the game rather than Sony directly. We don’t care if that’s the rules Sony or anyone else has to play by. It’s time for the industry to evolve or die.
In-fact I reckon if we see digital retailers reject “selling” digital content because it’s not profitable due to end customers rejecting the terms, the studios licensing the content would evolve overnight.
I’ve been boycotting Sony since the late 90s exactly because they not only played the game in the most anti-consumer way possible, but they very activelly lobbyied for the kind of legislation like the DMCA.
This is maybe one of the companies who spent the most money to make “the game” the incredibly rigged mess it is today.
Your naive “blame the game” reaction is exactly what companies like Sony want: blame the puppets not the puppeteers.
Ever since their Media Production Division took over the management of the company in the 90s (before it was mostly the Engineering side that led it, hence why they were once famous for the exceptional quality of their eletronics) they’ve very much been reliably acting in the most corrupt, abusive, evil ways possible.
I’m not defending Sony. Though I am also trying to discuss the industry standard practices that they operate in. That said how come Valve lets you keep any purchased game after the license is revoked but nearly every other digital store doesn’t or is hit and miss. It’s clearly something in the contract/licensing deal.
In other words Sony could choose to play hard ball and only sign contracts that permit continuous use of content after purchasing it. Thereby allowing something closer to actual ownership. Though the question is whether Sony and other digital marketplaces can convince rights holders to agree to such terms in the movie/tv industry.
Reminder that the largest brands regularly and shamelessly steal from small independent artists to sell for profit, knowing that the artists don’t have the resources to do anything about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230726050616/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/arts/design/digital-art-copyright-marvel-panini-wizards.html
And these are the companies trying to convince you that pirating big name media for your own personal use is theft.
Artistes must be between a rock and a hard place when even “legal” Spotify openly admits to screwing on royalties.
It’s an open secret that musicians get totally screwed by record labels.
What I love about this whole thing is that it’s not just Sony’s fault but they’re getting all the blame because WB would pull all their future content if Sony bad-mouthed them.
Sony choose to not offer refunds. Sony knew the contract when they agreed to sell the content. When something gets pulled from steam I can still download and install it.
It’s not the responsability of Customers to make sure what Sony’s chosen contractual relationships elsewhere are - Sony can engage in whatever contractual relationships it wants in whichever way it wants (and thus maximize their profits), but if it breaks their side of contract it has to pay the penalties for it, quite independently of why.
This is how Contract Law is designed exactly because otherwised it would make it impossible to Trade: if a purchaser had to track all contractual relationships of each supplier, then as those too were linked to the contracts of their own suppliers, of the supplier of the supplier and so on. So Contract Law neatly isolates each Contract relationship from all the rest and legal responsability starts and stops at that Contract (including the implied Contract in a Retail Sale) and only betwee the parties of that Contract unless very explicitly stated otherwise in the Contract.
So, have customers in this case entered into a Contractual Relationship where Sony gets to pull the plug whenever it feels like for any reason (which are probably invalid contractual conditions for retails customers in plenty of countries, though probably not the US which has near-zero consumer protections) in which case the problem is of the customers, or have they not in which case Sony is the one with the responsability (probably of refunding their customers) and it’s up to Sony to exercise whatever contract clauses they had with WB and claim compensation from them for their own breach of contract, if Sony had such clauses in their contract (if not, it was their own choice, so tough luck)?
Sony is one of the vilest corporations out there.
Fuckers literally installed rootkits on customers’ computers (across the board, you listen to a CD on your computer- bam) to police DRM.
Check “Sony Rootkit Scandal”, they got caught and were sued… yet here we are. Again.
Just feel like I should at least add two more things here:
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Storing information do their customers as plaintext data, then getting hacked and losing all that information (infamous PSN hack);
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Releasing a portable console that cost between 250 and 300€, promising support for it then 2 years in, give up on it, never officially tell customers, but have one of your higher execs tell the press said console is a great “accessory” for the PS4.
This is why I don’t personally buy Sony hardware.
The Vita’s failure is really weird when you consider that they had already produced a successful portable system that had years of support, the PSP.
The only thing I can think of is that they were refocusing their games division around the PS4 to reclaim their space in the home console area after the disaster that the PS3 was initially taking advantage of the initial failure of the Xbox One.
PS Vita and their owners were just a collateral Sony was absolutely willing to sacrifice.
I blame mainly their insistence on using proprietary memory cards. That stupid piece of shit was overly expensive and used nowhere else. If they went with microSD, it’d have sold better. Even pirates have to buy hardware.
I keep forgetting just how many scandals they’ve been involved with, and the serious negative influence they’ve had on how business is done with regards to digital as well as physical goods.
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Don’t forget: Selling the PS3 with Linux support so that they could pay taxes as if it was a PC as well as to justify the high price to consumers. Then removing Linux later through a mandatory update.
Ooof, this one was new to me. My surprise level still hovers stably at 0%.
They’ve done this to me. When it first came out,I bought the fallout 4 DLCs. I cleared my email one time and deleted all those old purchase receipts.
One day last year, I pop in fallout 4 and go to my file, and it says that I don’t have the dlc that corresponds to this save file. I know I bought them, so I go to the psn to redownload, but it’s asking me to pay. Long story short, I call Sony, my dlc purchase vanished at some point, and since I deleted the receipt, Sony refused to give me the content or money. They say I can’t prove I owned it, even though my files say so.
Anecdotal, I had the same with EA. When Origin first launched, the two games I had in my EA account disappeared. Do amount of battling with their support got me anywhere, even though I had the retail copies and the serial keys.
Got to the point where I gave up. Rather play games I actually wanted to play, to than Spore and The Sims 3.
Spore had itself a 3 or 5 installs limit before not allowing you to install it anymore.
So they stole from you and experienced no repercussions. Great story. I hope that you’ve at least stopped buying other titles from them.
I couldn’t care less about the two games, and fighting on principle seemed like too much effort at the time.
But yes, I’ve not bought an EA game since.
No credit card receipt? It might help.
Banks will charge for record searched, FYI.
Kinda slightly sensationalist title but yep…
We are having a good discussion about this in AskLemmy: https://lemmy.nz/post/3983363
“What is the legal difference between owning digital and physical media?”
As a side note, how are we going with instance agnostic post IDs? I can only post a link that uses my home instance, but obviously most of you won’t be on lemmy.nz and will have to do some fuckery to open that in your home instance if you want to be able to comment.
Fortunately Sync just redirects to a link on my home instance. I know I saw a GH issue on what you mentioned but I haven’t checked it in a couple of months.
Edit: found it. Still in discussion phase. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
Ah thanks, we’re still waiting.
Reminds me I should check in on the merged communities process. Federation at the community level instead of/also at the instance level would be awesome.
As a side note, how are we going with instance agnostic post IDs
Tapping it works fine on my app, redirected to the post on my instance 👌 although I believe the situation is still pretty awkward for desktop frontends, they need to put the link into the Search box to open it on their instance AFAIK
There are two proposals (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987), one for a syntax specific to comments which would make your link the following:
#[email protected] (it might already work in some frontends, but it most likely won’t yet)
and the second is using standard web technologies to register handlers for lemmy and then linking to posts like so (using my instance as an example):
navigator.registerProtocolHandler("web+lemmy", "https://lemmy.escapebigtech.info/search?q=%s", "Lemmy cross-instance link handler")which would take you to the search page where your instance will show you the post on your own instance.
I personally think the best way is something in between, or rather implementing both
I prefer the simplicity of the first option but it’s good to see progress
Thank you for contributing to the discourse.
The majority of comments in this community are at the level of a 12-year-old, offering no insight whatsoever, with snarky remarks like, “doesn’t affect me, arr,” “just sail the high seas,” with even the title appending “piracy is justified.” That’s terrific for all those commenters, but I had hoped that the comment section here in a technology community on Lemmy would be more sophisticated than my high school class.
If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing.
If buying is not owning, thenpiracy is not stealing.It’s its own, separate thing.
One thing I’ve not seen discussed, is this actually Sony’s fault or are they not behest to the companies that hold the content rights to do this?
I’ve not looked into it much beyond comments so I don’t have the answer myself.
I don’t know if it makes any sense to assign blame here to another party than Sony. As a customer who bought a license to watch these shows, that’s the company that you have an arrangement with. It seems that their licensing arrangements with Warner Brothers were limited time, and either WB isn’t inclined to renew them or is asking more than Sony is willing to cough up.
Probably a combination of both if I had to guess. WB is seeking to maximise the value of their own HBO Max streaming platform, so they want the content to be exclusive and not license it out to others. At the same time Sony is probably not excited to keep spending cash every few years just to keep content available to customers, they’re not making any additional money from that.
So the end result is the current situation. Obviously customers agreed to whatever terms Sony put in their EULA at the time so I’m sure it’s legally covered and whatever, but it seems pretty scummy and misleading nonetheless. Like, if they were honest on the purchase screen and said “you can pay $20 for the right to watch this season of mythbusters, but any time we like we can take it away from you again and there’s nothing you can do,” how many people would have bought that? But effectively that is what people bought, they just weren’t aware.
Yes, it’s Sony’s fault.
Since we’re sharing YouTube videos around, I suggest this video by Jeff Geerling about how to legally own and stream media (Piped link)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
An Odysee link in the wild! Awesome! Lol
Yep! I prefer not to use products by companies that hate me so I mostly avoid YouTube and other similar platforms.
Interestingly this link was how I discovered that Odysee support in Grayjay is broken
How so? I watched the video IN grayjay
When I open the link I get redirected to Rossmann’s YouTube channel
maybe report it as a bug? I’m not experiencing it personally, so maybe it’s related to the order of the sources?
for me it’s my peertube instance -> odysee -> youtube
That’s why streaming is the new cable TV.
I think streaming is fine - if a show is removed or the service dies you haven’t lost content because you never owned any in the first place and never expected to.
I really don’t know why anyone buys from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Sony etc. People don’t own the content, they own a license which lasts as long as the service or the rights to the content and then it’s gone.
Shout out to Streamio + real-debrid + torrentio! 🖤🏴☠️
Yaaarrr, matey!
The problem here is people didn’t buy content. They’ve bought a license to view content and somewhere in the smallprint is Sony’s right to revoke the right whenever they like for whatever reason. Other services have done likewise, either withdrawing content or just failing altogether.
So first off, as a consumer stop buying DRM’d shit because it won’t end well under any circumstances. Second, lobby for digital property to have rights akin to physical property so the right to destroy, lend, sell, or donate it is inherent to a purchase. e.g. maybe a purchase gives you a token and a signed / watermarked file in a playable format. And incentivize providers to sell digital property by taxing services that impose DRM to create a favourable price disparity.
No, what you describe is called “Rent” or “Lease”. People who press a “Buy” button and buy something, expect to own it. Words have a meaning, and trying to wiggle around this with fine print should be considered fraudulent.
People are buying something - a revocable license to view content through the service. Look at the T&Cs of any of these services and it’ll say as much within that wall of text.
Hence why I advocate for digital property, a token of ownership and rights that go with it.
If I give you the impression that you buy a gold bar, but in reality you get a cheap gold plated metal bar, then that is fraud. It doesn’t matter if it looks and feel the same.
People are buying something - a revocable license to view content through the service. Look at the T&Cs of any of these services and it’ll say as much within that wall of text.
Hence why I advocate for digital property, a token of ownership and rights that go with it.
That may be but it’s what these services are doing and will continue to do until lawmakers enact digital property laws along the lines that I suggest.
Copyright is literally the definition of “who has the rights to determine how copies are made.” If you were to believe most people who publish content on YouTube, you might think that copyright means authorship, but it does not.
When you purchase a movie on Blu-ray, you don’t own the film. You own a piece of plastic which represents a license to watch the film. But you can’t turn around, make copies, and start selling those copies without violating The film studios “right to determine how copies are made.“
The only difference between a physical Blu-ray (license) and a digital license is that digital license is revocable. It’s not fair. It isn’t just. But it’s literally part of the contract that you agreed to.
There’s a separate discussion to be had around “fair use.” Backing up stuff that you have paid money for does fall into “fair use,“ unless third-party encryption is involved. Because it is against the law to circumvent encryption. (Unless, of course, you’re the FBI.)
This is the only characteristic that separates ripping CDs from ripping DVDs — CDs missed the boat on encryption.
I’m not necessarily arguing for or against anything here other than to simply explain how it currently works (in the US, at least). There’s a separate discussion to be had about perpetual versus revocable licenses after money has been exchanged. Beyond that, there’s a discussion to be about how to protect the intellectual property of the things that you spent millions of dollars creating; and how that fares with the consumers of said intellectual property.
These latter discussions are far more nuanced than most Internet commenters are qualified to decide.
I can sell a disk to whoever I want. I can lend my disk to a friend. I can play my disk in any player I want. Heck, I’m even allowed to crack the copy right on the disk if that is needed to play it on my device. I have the right to backup my disk to a hard drive.
Don’t pretend Buying a movie online is anything close to buying it on a physical medium. It doesn’t make you look good.
I never said anything about copyright giving you right to copy movies. But if I own a CD, blu-ray or a book, I physically OWN that blu-ray or book. I can stick it on a shelf, lend it to someone, give it away, burn it, sell it on e-bay. It doesn’t entitle me to duplicate it, but the media is mine, as is my right of ownership in law.
Conversely if I buy a digital movie on Amazon (or any other provider) I’ve bought a license to it. Next time I go view it, the movie might have gone. Or maybe Amazon just shitcans the entire service (as it has before). Or maybe they just decide to ban my account for whatever reason. Or maybe they don’t like that I’ve moved to another continent. Whatever the reason I have no recourse. Nor can I sell my license, lend it, or anything else.
That’s the problem I’m talking about. There is no reason that when I buy a movie from Amazon or another provider it has to be this way. Instead I should buy the movie, and have a copy of movie and a token that shows my ownership of it. They can watermark the mkv to bind it to the token and me and copyright holders might come after me if I unlawfully share the file. But I should be able to sell my copy if I want. I should be able to borrow a copy from a digital library. I should be able to do things equivalent to a physical copy.
I would have more sympathy for that argument if the same was applied to the government regulating land and taxes. It ain’t your land or your money, you have it on lease from the government so stop bitching and render unto Caesar.
No, he’s right. You are buying something, but what you’re missing is that you’re not buying the content itself. You’re buying the right to access the content for an indeterminate amount of time. You’re not renting in the same way that buying a movie ticket isn’t renting. The thing you’re buying is just inherently temporary, and that’s the problem.
It’s not “buy” by itself, it’s “buy a film” or “buy a TV series”.
The word “buy” followed by the name of a service (say, “access to films”) can indeed carry the meaning you describe (so in that example “buy access to films” is the same as “renting films”) even if it is an unusual wording, however when the word “buy” is followed by the name of a good, not a service, (i.e. “buy a film”) it is interpreted in trade, legal and common terms as acquiring ownership rights to that good.
Granted, IP law is a big bloody mess and Consumer Rights in places like the US are pretty much Fuck-You-Plebe, so legally in the US who knows what levels of misleading contractual terms and one-sided post-sale of imposition of new contractual terms via EULAs towards retail customers are legal, but in both common usage and trade, in pretty much all areas but those covered by IP Law, “buy a good” means buying a product, which is something else altogether than “buy temporary access to a good” which is the meaning Sony is using.
Generally in Consumer Law, these things tend to boil down to whether a normal individual with no legal expertise could be reasonably expected to understand the terms of the contract with the meaning Sony claims or not, though in the US, with the kind of Consumer Protection laws it has, run-of-the-mill (not rich, not lawyers or judges) consumers are most likely legally fucked, de facto and quite possibly de jure
however when the word “buy” is followed by the name of a good, not a service, (i.e. “buy a film”) it is interpreted in trade, legal and common terms as acquiring ownership rights to that good.
Thats why you’ll never see “The word buy followed by the name of a good”. In fact, you probably won’t even see the word “buy”. Most commonly you’ll see “add to cart” and then “check out”. Which are coincidentally the same words you’ll see when buying a movie ticket.
If you can “buy” a movie ticket which allows you to watch a movie on a temporary basis, you can “buy” a license to play a game on a temporary basis.
This isn’t even a new, online marketplace problem. Even when you were buying physical disks, you were still purchasing a license, not the game in perpetuity.
I remember when Apple was obligated to replace a text on app download button from “free” to “get”, because many apps are free of price to download but make money by in-app purchaces.
Maybe we could do something like that for streaming services.
We really need to add textbooks into that. It’s absolutely a crime to charge hundreds of dollars for a book that cannot be resold.
IMO textbooks, at least in schools should just be given away in electronic form. I live in Ireland where parents have to buy physical copies from a retailer and it’s just stupid duplication of effort and a waste of money.
