> due to our content licensing agreements

Aka, due to their mistake. When Sony originally signed an agreement, they should have insisted on a perpetual license for anything already in the customer's library.

I was initially inclined toward some minimal sympathy for Sony here, but I see no good faith reason why they'd sign a licensing agreement which allows the other party to do this.

Discussion: "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 26-jun-2026 208 comments

I don't consider anything digital as being bought unless I own it free and clear, unencumbered of any encryption. Not interested in anyone's "digital locker" or storage scheme. I have 20 years of music bought digitally through iTunes and Amazon. I can still play them to this day without needing to check-in with a licensing server. That is ownership. That is why I don't buy encrypted movies.

The industry has yet to adapt from physical media to digital media consisting of binary ones and zeros that costs next to nothing to copy and file transfer. Despite saving a fortune in manufacturing, printing, distribution, shipping. They still try to milk every penny.

Meanwhile the pirates are laughing their arse off...

Type in the name of any media and you can have it in less than 5min with none of the silly DRM restrictions. All you need is the know how.

Until they make it that easy and stop trying to screw over the consumer. They will lose to piracy.

Game of Thrones was the most pirated show on the planet. Eventually HBO realized what they had to do. They offered an HBO streaming subscription globally everywhere for a reasonable price. It bypassed 50 year old cable tv agreements, etc. People could cancel the subscription at any time. But they also had access to the full HBO catalog of shows. Although it didn't stop piracy entirely it did reduce it significantly. HBO made a large profit off the decision.

Open your eyes, figure out what people really want by analyzing what makes piracy better than the legit marketplace. Then do what HBO did and set aside your old school perspective and look at the larger untapped market. Restricting access and going after pirates does not increase your market share. But catering to what people want will open up millions in sales. If you just make it crazy easy and consumer friendly without overcharging.

Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip (or redeem the digital code version that often comes with modern releases, though those tend to have DRM). Even then, why do people buy from the playstation store? I could maybe understand that when the Vita was still around, but nowadays it seems like an odd choice

Buying a physical DVD means you own the item and have it in your hands.

"Buying" a streaming movie means that you enter into an agreement with an online service that promises to make your experience the rough equivalent of physical ownership. But to do that they have to solve a pile of problems, and solve those forever for as long as your purchase is valid.

Realistically, Sony will have service outages, they will have contract disputes, they may have data loss, security incidents, etc., all of which can make your "bought" content unavailable either temporarily or permanently. The real question is what type of agreement Sony had with StudioCanal.

None of this would ever affect your DVD. So the word "buying" wrt a streaming movie is easy to understand, but a bit misleading in practice. It's clear what Sony is signing up to provide; it's just hard to see how they can provide that consistently over the time period involved.

Its because of things like this that I self host all my media.

As an example why buy games from Steam when I can get them on gog.com DRM free and make them portable (without a setup or installation step on future machines)? So, I run my own Steam Store/Library like experience on a home server using Game Vault.

I use JellyFin for video. It works for music files, but I don't really like it for audio. So, I wrote my own music app that works in the browser/phone securely across the internet from my own server.

This is so much better than paying for subscriptions..

between this and their mucking around with game studios (no new PC versions of marquee titles like ghost of yotei etc, unceremoniously shutting down bungie and laying off artists/game devs prior to vestment etc), Playstation management is a disaster at the moment

I'm slowly getting into buying physical media of my favourite tv shows and movies.

I have to wonder what small claims court judges would think of it. Get a few hundred cases filed across the US and the travel expense for Sony could be significant.

Selling something to customers without having the rights to it yourself is very clearly illegal. I wish some government agency had the guts to prosecute this.

Does anyone have a link to the relevant terms of service from the sony store?

"Enshittification complete.

Thank you, PlayStation Store"

"Purchased".

"I buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

Man, instead of "Thank you" they should've said "Fuck you"

And this smells of fraud.

If it was a real sale, then they could not do this remote control/deletion at a distance.

Shit I buy at Walmart can't be physically taken away from me later on. Its legally mine.

This? Its fraudulently sold as a "sale" but is really an indefinite rental with the terms of "fuck you I'll do what I please when I please".

And on top of fraud, I'd also throw in the CFAA as well, a criminal statute. Its established law that if I set a timebomb in software at $company where if I'm fired/laid off, that's criminal access. No boilerplate from some shitty clickwrap can excuse criminal law.

Time to start jailing Sony execs and the like.

silk road... torrent...

I think they meant "Studio Canal Movies rented on PlayStation Store removed without refund because they are rented"