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Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.

I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.

At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.

When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.

Always keep hard copies people.

This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.

I wonder why their license affects your local copy of a purchased product.

Imagine a supermarket losing the contract to sell Nescafé, so Nestlé comes into your house to take their coffee. Okay, Nestlé would totally do this anyway, but it’s bizarre.

Sony and Apple aren’t the only offenders. Google Play Music did something similar 12 years ago or so. It’s been a bit but I recall permanently losing access to a lot of music I owned at the time.
With Apple, you can at least download the media you bought and keep it.

Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?

> Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours

Wrong, Kotaku. Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves. Digital ISO files on hard drives that are ripped from the aforementioned digital physical DVDs.

What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours - and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else. Someone else can always delete files, take down servers, or go out of business entirely.

The word digital contrasts with analog. Digital and physical are two independent axes - there are digital physical things, digital virtual things, analog physical things, and analog virtual things.

This is technically true, but not helpful. These online services have buttons that say "rent" and "buy", they don't say "rent for a little while" and "rent for a longer but unknown amount of time". Of course they can go out of business, but the impression they intentionally give to the customer is that if you click "buy", you get access to the movie for as long as the site exists.
I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?

Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical

A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.

> Digital movies on DVD and Blu-Ray discs on our shelves.

It actually already got a bit more fuzzy with Blu-Ray and especially with later BD+ doesn't it? You own some encrypted data, but there is absolutely no guarantee you will always have access to a player with the right keys and a TV that is compatible and isn't refusing to play it.

It already drove the needle way past acceptable copy protection, do not buy Blu-Rays!

Digital in this context is merely shorthand for "digitally distributed", as opposed to "physically distributed"
They should absolutely be forced to provide either a refund or a downloadable copy, this is absurd. It sounds like they didn't actually have the license necessary to be able to sell these movies in any reasonable way.
Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”
Not to worry, eventually somebody will file a class action lawsuit, and after mere 12 years of litigation everybody affected will get $2.17 in store credits (in another 5 years).
it should not be legal for the product page to say “purchase” or “buy” when in reality you’re only renting it with a to be determined end date
So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).

At one point, about 10 years ago, one of the major Hollywood studios came to us and required us to change that because they believed that exactly this sort of thing would happen and we would all be setting ourselves up for liability because consumers would rightfully assume that that meant they owned the movie "forever."

and this should include musics and similar in games (excluding stuff like sessional content)

if you sell a game you should have to have bought a license to use the music (and similar) in the game permanently (for given game sold, new sold revision can change what they contain but only if there isn't deceptive advertisement and it's very clearly labeled that it's a different revision/the content changed!).

Piracy is justified especially when it comes to movies!

If I am buying a DVD, I own that copy regardless of the studio and the distributor being in legal trouble or not. If I "buy" or "purchase" something online, I expect the same thing.

I'm not always a fan of the EU over-regulating some things but I feel like they should start fining companies who want to re-define the meaning of the word purchase

How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc? I have multiple games that you can't "buy" anymore, but Steam doesn't stop me from reinstalling them as often as I like.

Are they negotiating that as part of the deal with their vendors? Or is it as simple as "We're not dicks." ?

I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.
I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
A decade ago they pulled my purchased copy of mortal kombat 2. Not the first time they've done stuff like this.

I stuck to buying hard copies and dwindled off the series as they started to charge just to play multiplayer.

I find it a bit sad that everyone is dumping on Sony here, considering it's StudioCanal that is presumably demanding the movies be made inaccessible to customers, but presumably is not offering to refund the royalties they collected. I't's natural for people to direct their ire at the reailer to whom they gave their money, but in my view its the rightsholder who is generally the abd guy in these situations.
Again? They already tried to pull that one a few years ago.

[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony%27s_attempted_removal_of_...

Off to small claims court people should go. Amazon tried something similar and got in trouble because people when after them.

And people wonder why some people sail the high seas.

No refunds. Sounds like Playstation customer support. The most customer-unfriendly policies a company could think of.
What’s wild is there is no legal way to actually buy and truly own movies anymore. Any major service is a license and if you can even get a DVD the legality of ripping it is questionable since you have to break DRM. I have purchased a few movies (surf films) from people who actually give you the digital file and it is so wonderful.
Would love to know how hidden the fine text was on that buy button. Unless it said rent this should be illegal.

  sudo pacman -S transmission-gtk
I suppose it's time to form a new media consumption habit.
I own a playstation. I do not buy digital games, only discs. See the article for why not.
Sony sucks and I will never give them another dime. Had a PS5 with a 120+ games (majority PS4), also PSVR2, got f-ed over by Sony when they would not refund in incorrect game purchase I'd bought literally minutes before asking for the refund. Gave up my PS5, I will never purchase anything from Sony ever again. Recommend everyone else do the same.
Fix the headline to say Sony
What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.
I will only buy digital media from DRM free stores, which as far as I know, means I can buy music, not movies.

I don’t trust any provider to honor purchases I made 20 years from now. I really wish I could, as it would simplify things for me.

A Jellyfin or Plex server can be had for real cheap using used hardware. A Ryzen 3 build can be found for next to nothing here in Brazil[1], so I imagine it’d be even cheaper in the US.

Add an old Quadro card for hardware decoding, or go with an Intel CPU for Quick Sync, throw some IronWolf drives inside, install your favorite Linux distro, and you’re off to the races.

Yes, managing a server is more work than just signing up for Netflix or whatnot, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

[1]: A quick search shows me a Ryzen 3 3200G build with 16 GB of RAM for $200, and electronics are super expensive in Brazil.

How soon until the digital distributions are owned by just a few cartels, and later when it’s suitable for them, they also modify digital movies to suit a political agenda without letting you know?
Here is the full list of the 551 movies and TV shows being removed: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/

Top movies include Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Graduate, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, Room, Silver Linings Playbook, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Pan's Labyrinth.

Nobody can delete 551 or even 1 movie from my Plex library other than me or the hard drive grim reaper.
Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!
Makes me glad I never got in the habit of buying digital copies of movies or TV shows. This a one off many reminders that if you really want to purchase a title, get the Blu-ray or DVD
This is ridiculous. I thought at first that it concerned pirated movies that people were playing on their playstation.

But no. It's purchased content. That is being deleted. That's insane. Even if an EULA states they can do this, there should be statutory rights that overrule this.

I notice that Sony calls it "previously purchased" content. As if it's ok to do this because it's been a while ago.

By not teaching the younger generations the virtues of piracy, millennials have failed them.

It'll be all the more critical in years to come when we get more and more AI remastered versions of stuff so even stuff pre-2020 is slop.

This is making me mad enough that I’m going to spend my weekend figuring out a media server and pirating movies.

If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Fuck those guys.

It’s been 20 years since I’ve pirated shit, but here we are again…

I expected better from Sony's lawyers. How did they not get the right agreement to keep purchases in perpetuity?
At this point, "piratery" is not just valid, it's our obligation
This remains my favourite quote from any user agreement I've ever seen, from the PlayStation Terms of Use:

> Use of the terms "own," "ownership", "purchase," "sale," "sold," "sell," "rent" or "buy" in this Agreement or in connection with the Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content

I mean, this is chef's kiss level of deceit. No parody could top that.

Any jurisdiction where a company can just put "when we say you'll own it, it doesn't mean you'll own anything" in their contracts and get away with it, is broken.

Sony is “stealing” 551 movies from customers.
Is it just me who thinks that everything went wrong when we accepted the closed model hardware and their ecosystem?

If it was an open ecosystem, we would have alternative options like we have in PC such as GoG for games. I know movie industry is stupid to begin with but it’s reasonable the make DRM free copy of the movies you own or even pirate at this point given how hostile the whole industry is until they move to more open approaches.

Maybe EU should crack down on closed eco systems and make it mandatory to side load things officially on anything that runs external apps.

Own your software. Own your music. Self host. This is becoming ridiculous.

It is ironic how digital has led to us owning nothing, now that it should have been so much easier!

Wow.