Binding arbitration shouldn't be a thing. If we want to go to arbitration is because we are in the same level of negotiation. One side imposing arbitration or any other kind of restriction on the mechanism that the individual or organization has to redress issues shouldn't be a thing

We have a legal system precisely because it's inefficient. Rather than arbitration lets just not have any laws, functionally equivalent and cheaper.

Having no enforcement would be cheaper too. What makes arbitration preferable is whatever meaningful protection it provides. So what protections does it give consumers in this case, and why are those adequate? "It's more efficient" doesn't answer that. There are practical limits to the number of individual claims Sony can lose. Of course if it's within their rights Sony would very much want to steal ~$1,000 from everyone that uses their services.

This all assumes that the arbitrator isn't getting kickbacks which they are more likely to than the traditional legal system.

Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of the party imposing these terms.

Courts often look at these contracts differently, but around the world, they allow them to exist because they are useful. A good example are the "terms of service" for public or private transit. If the carrier can't define some common-sense rules, like that you can be kicked out or fined for not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus, it'd complicate things.

The legal standard is basically that the rules hold unless they're unreasonable or unconscionable. But of course, what's seen as reasonable depends on the country, the state, and the judge.

Honestly, nowadays I'm tending towards the idea that huge TOS or EULAs (at all) should be criminalized.

It's ridiculous that rich people just get to use the justice system as a goon to harass normal people.

Binding arbitration as an abstract concept seems fair (really, the entire court system is a complicated system for binding arbitration)

However, in practice it isn’t fair at all.

A related outrage: Companies that are happy the law enshrines their private rules/standards, but they want to charge you for access.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/congress-no-one-should...

How would anyone ever settle a case? Also, it's pretty easy to sign away your life and liberty: join the military.

Sadly, the scammy parts of ToS are common enough to be "usual"

Has anyone tried arguing they didn't agree to the ToS? Without your signature it should be nearly impossible for the company to prove that you did.

There's a difference between restricting your freedom and restricting your rights. When you enter an employment contract, you agree to give up some freedom in return for a salary etc. but it doesn't take away any of your rights. You still have the right to life, liberty etc. You still have the right to not turn up to work, though too much of that will likely cause them to terminate your employment. An employment contract that removes rights is typically not legal in sane countries (e.g. agreeing to become a slave).

>Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.

Not when only one person gets to write the contract and terms are take-it-or-leave-it. If there is no chance to negotiate, it is clearly little more than the wealthy abusing the less wealthy to their own advantage.

You were a juror during a civil trial? Is that a thing? Where?

My favorite was some (probaby Microsoft) boxed software I got in the 90s. The top of the box had a big warning that by opening the box you agreed to the terms of service that were IN the box.

Yeah, I bought an NVIDIA Shield, took it back to the store after I got it home and found out you literally can't use it without signing into a Google account (and this wasn't mentioned on the outside of the package).

A friend bought a rowing machine; turns out you can't use the fancy magnetic resistance element without agreeing to the app's terms and entering a credit card. I really tried to convince them to return it…

Disney argued that the family of a man who died at one of their parks couldn't sue because he had signed up for Disney+, which has binding arbitration terms: https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit...

This pretty much flies in the face of what any reasonable person would think the law should allow IMO

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...

Guest died from allergic reaction despite informing staff multiple times of the risk, but the case was dismissed because they had signed up for Disney+ years prior.

Here’s a decent up-to-date report on this (now-resolved) case: https://www.allergicliving.com/2026/03/03/lawsuit-against-di...

Since I stopped being a poor student, I pay for media that I consume so that the creators can continue to create. I told my wife that I’d renew my Disney+ subscription after the clocks change and we have less hours of daylight. But now I think it’s morally wrong to give Disney any money – even if they do make great shows like Andor.

Somehow I'd never encountered that shorthand before, so for anyone else wondering it's probably intended as the opposite of "/s", genuine rather than sarcastic.

To be fair, this example doesn't work because those chip bags are two physically different objects that one can consume.

Sony is trying to argue that because they are selling digital copies, that consumers cannot be granted rights to their copy because they can't transfer the intellectual property rights, which is complete nonsense. I have a 1999 DVD copy of The Matrix that I have owned for 27 years, and short of the physical disc-rot, I will be able to play that DVD until the day I die, and Warner Bros can't do anything about it unless I try reselling new copies, or claiming authorship because, despite owning the disc, I do not own the rights to the movie...

A download isn't any different just because it lacks a physical form.

> same amount of money for a worse product.

I like physical media, but this is not objectively true. Digital purchases come with benefits consumers want like quicker access, less materials waste, and (in general) more longevity since a digital product cannot rot or be damaged. Obviously that last one is lessened because the seller is able to yank your "license" at any time, but it generally holds that you're in less danger of a little brother snapping a disc in half or a roommate borrowing and losing it.

But consumers still pay it. No one has to play video games.

I am in no way defending Sony here but I think it’s beside to the point to chastise them for selling a worse product (I mean revocable license) for the same price because consumers continue to choose to pay that price. And this is not a purchase made out of necessity or duress such as food or housing.

> It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

FWIW, everything I ever bought digitally in the Nintendo E-Shop for my 3DS (gone since March 2023) still works, can't be disabled remotely, sits on a MicroSD card that I can freely remove and back up, etc. Although Nintendo did implement a system that's supposed to prevent it from working on another 3DS.

> If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend.

Don't forget that retail is cheaper than online for consoles from day one!

> Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.

Because property law is not defined in terms of hashes. Why would you expect that property law operates on a mathematical construct that was discovered centuries after it?

It's about how copyright law was originally conceived. It did not particularly care about what you did with the information, apart from when you copied it. Copyright is only about the right to make more copies of a work (hence the name!), it doesn't give you any particular rights on its own to what anyone does with any given copy of a work, such as reselling it. This has changed more recently with (first with software) the concept of buying a license to a work as the primary means of purchasing it, which is far more restrictive.

Two copies means two copies. I have a copy, my house burns down, your copy is fine.

Hashes have nothing to do with it.

If I buy a Billy book case from IKEA, is it not the same as your Billy book case?

Hashing said book case is left as an exercise for the reader.

It is a distinct physical object. Whether anyone stored digital information about it in a bit-wise manner, does not change that fact of a physical object being unique. The same book can not co-exist at the very same place and location and time in this universe. That makes no sense.

If I buy a game, and my friend buys a game, we can both own a copy of the game, without owning the same copy. My disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is not the same as my friend's disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

I can sell my copy of the book to a third person without interfering with your copy. And I can do so without the involvement or permission of the publisher or book store.

games are actual physical bits stored somewhere.

This is a bad faith argument and the commenter knows it

> Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.

That wasn't the direction I was going towards. Sony treats digital copies as if only one can have the ownership rights attached to it. This logic can be extended to any other right.

> Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.

The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce. The license is attached to the content of the DVD, not the plastic disc per se. This license gives me the right to read that disk and send that digital copy to my output device. It's also why I can't just copy the content to a disc I own and call it a day. So a digital copy read straight from Sony's storage and sent to my output device can very well have the same license attached to it.

To be honest, I think it's a stupid defense but one that may just fly in places with the best justice money can buy. And there's a lot of money trying to buy a carte blanche to not give ownership rights to digital content, coming from every producer or distributor of such content.

> the people in California have lost the plot

I say this constantly about many topics.

Californians are a super different breed

I have the receipts. I've always retained them for the deposition. :-)

(It is, of course, not really out of the question that the first sale doctrine will always completely cover things like subscription-upgradeable cars and cameras)

They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.

More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.

But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.

They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.

So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.

They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.

The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.

Oh, I do. I mean part of what is so great about these cameras is their everyman quality — plus secondhand availability.

There is a Sony mirrorless camera at essentially every secondhand price point you can imagine.

At heart, I am a Nikon guy. My wallet, though, is a proper little Sony fanboi.

One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.

The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.

It's ridiculous to me that trying to play some recent games from Microsoft-affiliated studios requires me to sign in with a Microsoft account even just to play also malone. Paying them for Halo MCC or Gears 5 isn't enough to be able to play the campaign alone; the main menu is literally blocked by a sign-in screen. There's no reason whatsoever this should be allowed.

On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life

If you measure it based on raw quantities of people reacting, sure. The issue is that the people who are upset about this are often tastemakers, whether through their local networks of people or online. It’s like saying a tiny vocal minority of people were pissed off enough about IE to use Firefox— true at one time, but with big consequences

Xbox already lost one console war over plans to stop the second hand market so they know how important it is to players. Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.

If the PS6 is digital only and Xbox doubles down on discs it might be a slam dunk victory. Not all players understand or care about it now, but if they explain it well in the launch window and combine that with their back compat history I think they have a good chance to win.

Even Microsoft knows that gaming is a competitive market and pulling customers from PlayStation is better than trying to extract as much as possible from your existing user base. One Game Pass sub is worth more than marketplace fees from 3 extra games you would normally buy used.

> Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony

That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.

The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.

Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.

everyone believes something different, everyone knows a different set of facts, everyone thinks of themselves as reasonable, and the law depends on what a reasonable person might believe. absent some objective standard of reasonability it's all just places where you can inject ambiguity and then leverage that ambiguity to make the law shift like sands in the wind while still thinking of it as absolute and immutable. "Reasonable people understand that words don't always mean what their common definition would imply and it's on the consumer to know the difference" for Sony immediately followed "reasonable people assume words mean what is implied by their common definition and it's on the producer to account for that" for the California Dairy Council, then when we accuse them of crafting separate laws for separate clients they can say "well we just applied the reasonable person standard here the same way we would for anyone else".

No of course not, they merely license it from the government /s (or not /s? this whole thing is confusing)

Yes, and that might help some people who always bought the game, but it won't change the situation going forward is what I'm saying.

You're right! that's a bug in my comment then (or more like a spec redundancy I guess) :)

PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.

This is very different on PC since Valve does not have the same iron grip on the platform that Sony has. If Steam becomes evil and tries to take my games away I'll just download a pirated copy instead. I purchase my games for convenience and to give some money to the creators. I don't need to purchase games to play them. I also can back up my Steam game files and use a crack on them if necessary.

Pirating has literally never been easier than it is today. Even Denuvo's been defeated for the most part, both via VM bypasses and through actual cracks in some cases. If it weren't so sad, it's hilarious that the games even run better without the Denuvo crapware running on top of the game process.

If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.

Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.