On 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.
Let's tie it to the length of copyright law. If it's still protected and under copyright then the obligation to keep it available exists. So if they want to keep extending copyright, well, it will go both ways.
And if they want to stop maintaining it, let them have the option of releasing it into the public domain and sending a digital copy to the library of congress or something.
You can't make a work public domain, just because one distributor is shutting down their digital library. In the first place, they don't even have the rights for this, they just resell other people's work.
Demanding for ensuring another way for accessing the work in the same or similar way is fair enough. You lose nothing, they gain nothing, fairly balanced.
True. Yet I think the idea is sound — if a publisher / rights holder refuses to put a work into print or make it available, they should not be able to keep it away from the public. Copyright is a benefit given to authors & publishers, but is too-often used to suppress works due to content or retire works that can be replaced in the catalog by more profitable offerings.
Yeah it needs to be made transitive. If you've bought a digital copy of the work from one distributor that should obligate the rightsholder to transferring the individual distribution rights (this needs to be nailed to the wall by the legislature so that distribution rights all carry this mandate by law). If they want to switch distributors then the old distributor needs to be obligated to provide a method of transferring those individual distribution rights to the new distributor. If all this is "too burdensome" (editorial note: cry harder about your profits you fucking capitalist goons) then all the parties can just make it public domain.
Yep, and if they want to end distribution altogether or start fresh and still keep copyright, they could distribute DRM free copies for some minimum time frame.
At the very least I would also accept a DRM free copy being provided to everyone who had purchased it (e.g. at least one year or so to download it), and in failure to do that it becomes public domain. Anything less and we basically just end up with the classic xkcd situation https://xkcd.com/488/
That's a clever idea, but I'm not sure it really works because the company who owns the copyright isn't necessarily the company providing the stream to you digitally.
This is about ensuring it stays available from the streaming distributor, and how much time remains on the copyright doesn't really have anything to do with them. And even if the copyright expires next year, I still want to make sure I can keep streaming it for the next 10 or 15 years or whatever, if I buy it today.
If the provider made it available for purchase (not subscription), the liability should go to them first to make DRM free copies available for those who purchased it before shutting down the service. If they are unable to do so, e.g. a sudden bankruptcy, then the liability could go to the copyright holder to find another provider to continue the service and transfer purchases, or provide DRM free copies (either should not be a problem if they are still making money from the given IP). In the event they are no longer making enough money from that IP and wish to just rid their hands of it, it becomes public domain.
> then the liability could go to the copyright holder to find another provider
And they'll choose the crappiest provider they possibly can whose website (no app, presumably) only works in some ancient browser and is "down for maintenance" 50% of the time because that provider has the lowest costs and is thus willing to charge the least for it...
Yep, there would definitely need to be some regulations to prevent that sort of thing as well. I could see this becoming a business where companies are paid to take on this liability of distribution for copyright holders that meets some minimum defined threshold. Ideally it would be as seamless as the prior service if locked, or just reasonable download speeds if DRM free.
If made a law it would make such negligence illegal. You may try to launder the responsibility, but at the end of the day you would be on the hook as the copyright owner. You might have legal contracts that your servicing contractors might break, allowing you to pin the blame back to them, but this would all be making it a business problem rather than a person problem.
This is too easy to loophole out of and it leaves too big of a hole to patch. As a company, all I would need to do is sell the rights, shut down the service, buy it back, rinse and repeat. I don’t think this is a great solution.
Then they can be blocked from selling the rights without the liability of maintaining the service being attached. In order to end the obligation of maintaining the service, DRM free copies must be provided to everyone who purchased the content for some minimum time frame. Failure to do so puts the work in the public domain.
I disagree; in that if they try and sell the rights, they're trying to get out of their obligations to make the content available - that's the point at which it should be blocked; or the new rights holder needs to pick up those obligations to existing customers with the same terms.
I imagine it’s much more complicated than that because they themselves may have never owned the content. A lot of times, they’re leasing content. I think the content owner could choose not to renew a contract thus requiring the distributor to stop distributing. I imagine if the regulator were to go after this, thee’d really need to start at the content owner themselves as well as every middleman.
I chuckled a little bit when I read this. I honestly believe this isn’t something these companies care about at all. It already does damage their reputation yet we see it happen again and again. I do wonder why, does it come down to the monopolization of content? I want to say I’m surprised but I’m not.
I don’t see how Sony isn’t simply defrauding their (funimation’s) customers. How does a merger change this? I could maybe understand a digital library being disappeared after a bankruptcy but it appears funimation was doing okay and they just screwed their customers to make extra margin. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be sued.
It’s not as though funimation advertised these leases as leases, they called them forever purchases lol. It’s outrageous these companies don’t advertise a period of time your purchase is good for and purchase insurance to ensure availability. They trick their customers with the fraudulent lie that they’re buying something and then screw them because they paid a lump sum up front and made themselves easy marks.
I’ve paid for Crunchyroll before but fuck doing that ever again when anime piracy sites like aniwave provide in many ways a better experience.
The license agreements and ToS for all of this has various "we can terminate this in any way we want at any time we want for any reason we want" clauses, which is effectively a magical bulletproof solution in many countries.
The thing is, company can put literally anything they want in their ToS, they can say we're free to break your legs for any reason whatsoever at any point of our choosing, that won't make it legal. Courts frequently rule based on the customer's and market expectation vs what ToS say all the time, and the consumer wins more often than not.
contracts that have contradictory clauses, might generally find those clauses to be nulled out by the courts.
in this case using the term "buy" and in their ToS use the terms license / termination, might find the front and center "buy" term causes the license / termination terms to be nulled out, as the concept of "buy" doesn't fit with the concept of "license" and "termination".
Do companies that do not have such clauses and provide comparable services exist? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage even in theory.
If those companies exist, is there any practical way for customers to know which ones they are? If not, customers are not free to refuse to engage in practice.
The only freedom that customers (=citizens) have is to engage into a cartel (=state) to impose their collective interests (=democratic choice) on companies by force (=law).
Companies are then free to refuse to engage with states which have such customer-protective clauses in their laws.
There is not any significant DRM free digital movie marketplace, and the reality is that movies aren't fungible: if I want to watch Strange World or Doctor Who, I'm not going to just instead watch an indie arthouse film that happens to be available without DRM
Media is as (un-) fungible as always. Your complaint sounds a bit like complaining that you can't buy an iPhone that runs Windows. Bundling is a thing in the economy. You can't buy a Porsche with a Tesla engine either.
You can still buy movies on DVDs, which still can't be disabled remotely. DVDs are very digital.
Yes, you can complain that there's no 'significant' movie marketplace without DRM. But you have to complain to and about your fellow consumers: their patronage ultimately decides which suppliers become 'significant'.
They are also free to vote for a government that will protect their rights against egregious and plainly deceptive marketing practices, so they don't each have to do that stuff individually. Companies act as a collective enterprise, so can citizens.
I just recently noticed that new Sony TVs come with a dedicated Crunchyroll button and wondered whether this streaming service is worth it? It seems like you don't think it is, correct?
There's probably nothing wrong with Crunchyroll if you're into the content it provides. The article is about Sony removing the digital copies that buyers of Funimation DVDs/Blurays purchased together with their physical media - and the article argues that some may have discarded the physical media because they have (had) convenient access to the digital copies (hint: don't do that!). But yeah, this is another instance where people who forked out their hard-earned money for legal copies of media are screwed and might be tempted to think "why didn't I simply download a pirated copy?".
It’s really a baffling move by Sony which seems to be unaware that they have the most to lose from consumers losing confidence in and sympathy for official anime content distribution.
Sony’s Crunchyroll is advertised as “supporting anime creators”, when you are trying to persuade people to pay for anime on moral grounds, and often do so successfully, it seems like a stupendously bad idea to put people in the position where supporting Crunchyroll means financially benefiting a company that just defrauded their customers. The PR win of making sure people didn’t lose access to their content would have been well worth it.
If you want to support anime creators AND consumers, buy merch, don’t give Sony your money. Don’t be a sucker getting guilt tripped by an evil corporation. At least with merch you actually own something.
This is the same company that recently deleted huge swaths of TV shows that people had purchased from their library because they didn't want to pay to renew the license. That one got enough people pissed enough that they walked it back, but this is just how Sony operates.
Crunchyroll is the most bizarre streaming service I’ve tried. None of the anime had original audio tracks. One Punch Man was available only with a French dub. A Korean anime had many audio tracks to choose from... but none of them were Korean. What the hell?
No. If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it. If it starts falling apart, you can repair it. If a cd gets a scratch you can repair it. You can store it in a climate controlled environment. All of these things are in your hands. Some people will burn their books or toss them. Some will preserve them for centuries.
The problem is that with purely digital, there is just nothing you can do. None of it is up to you. You can’t copy it, preserve it, etc. Sony says you’re done and that’s it.
Nit: It's not protected by DRM, it's protected by copyrights. It's still against the law in most places to violate copyrights, even if there's no DRM involved.
But it's equally important that where the copying would otherwise be allowed under copyright rules, anti tampering DRM laws (like DMCA 1201) make it criminal to perform or aid that copying.
That's why DRM protection for its own sake needs to get tossed. It's a massive overreach.
Yes - it's non-trivial to figure out for the first time, but if we're allowed to share such information, it only needs to be figured out once. Each subsequent copy after the first is trivial.
Maybe we should be given a lifetime "license" for the digital goods we buy. For example, if I bought a digital copy of a game or a movie and the company went out of business, I would be allowed to obtain and use a bootleg copy. Ideally, we should be allowed to download it from anywhere, including other stores, but that seems unlikely.
Why only my lifetime? If I buy a copyright protected work, the doctrine of first sale asserts that I have the right to transfer it to anyone else, and if I die before doing so, whoever inherits me should have the rights to access to every single copyrighted thing I ever bought.
Perhaps anybody that uses the term “Buy” or “Forever” should risk the content falling into the public domain should they cease to uphold their service requirements of the contract they made.
Just to be clear for anyone who didn’t read TFA, the digital copies were given out as a bonus with purchases of physical media. Sure someone may have made a different purchasing decision if they knew the streaming platform would be going away eventually, but it’s not like they took back their DVDs.
Just to be clear for anyone who thinks that makes Sony's actions acceptable in any way, it does not.
Sony took from the customer what they sold. That they legally "allowed" themselves to do this in fine print while telling their customers otherwise makes it even more scummy, not less.
Sure, but that's a lot of effort. And if you want to copy your streams illegally or pirate duplicates you can do that too, which also involves effort.
I'm just making the point that after 10 or 20 years, most people either no longer have most of the media they bought, it's degraded, they're upgrading from VHS to DVDs to Blu-Rays or similar, or they never touch it again anyways. Not true with all of it, but probably most of it. So there's already a kind of expectation that consumer media usually only lasts for a time period anyways -- yes, unless you're doing fancy things like climate control and making copies.
Having AC and bookshelves is not fancy or hard. Books with decent paper can and do last centuries. Books with really crappy paper last decades and are generally still usable if you’re careful. DVDs last a stinking long time, too.
All you’re saying is that physical things aren’t eternal. Yes everybody knows that. Digital things aren’t generally eternal either. I accept that. But look at the timeframes.
Making copies isn't fancy. It's just illegal because IP brokers have too much power and made it so. It's a commonsense measure that you could do with most forms of purchased media, increasingly trivially until said IP brokers succeeded in roping the government into threatening people who did so, and so now less people do so. To promise that a digital copy would be accessible forever and then rescind that access without offering a download is straightforwardly fraud
That is incorrect. We still have perfectly fine vinyls from the 1970s and that's just us. No climate controlling or anything like that.
If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
>If anything I think the expectation with digital files is that yes, of course I will still have my same MP3s from 20 years ago, ripped from CDs I own, in another 30 years.
Remember to re-rip as lossless (e.g. flac) while you still have those CDs.
Vinyl doesn't degrade with time, but it does degrade each time you play it. A heavily played album does not sound the same as a new one. The rate of degradation probably depends to some degree on your specific turntable and needle. (Of course, a worn-out record has its own special charm.)
And I've certainly lost all the MP3's I had from 25 years ago to 15 years ago. God only knows what old hard drive they were on that got tossed. I hadn't listened to them in years, of course, once Spotify's library grew large enough.
If you deliberately throw out your record collection, possibly because you no longer like that style of music that's OK and not the thing we are debating here.
I do still listen to those records from 20 years ago.
We are also not talking about you renting music. That's OK if you decide you'd rather rent your music and are OK to loose access to it at any point in time at which Spotify or a rights owner may pull it from rental access.
We are talking about music that someone bought to own, albeit with DRM because copying. That's OK too but then Sony can't pull something like this without valid outrage being directed at them. The expectation was that I can listen to this in 75 years if I so choose.
You are reasoning from what might be better described as an artifact of a limited period in time that will never come again reasoning from happenstance as if it were a fundamental source of meaning.
It's trivial with backups to retain digital data forever. Even going just a bit further back in time books and vinyl can last a lifetime. What you are hanging your argument on is the lack of durability of optical disks a factor for ~40 years vs the inherent infinite durability of files forever after.
We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
The interests of rights holders is rarely aligned with the public. Its a multitude of barren fields that have never yielded anything because they are capable of buying art but not capable of making it. Even creatives have largely been compensated for their work many times over and are largely offering society bondage in return for nothing. More manure than fertile field. I suppose this is an overly long way to say fuck em.
Instead of quite frankly over complicated nonsense just don't legally let people use the term buy if the company can by any means whatsoever reclaim their rights EVER. They should have to use the word rent and give a duration and that duration should be enforced. The simplest way to enforce this is if you use the word buy you cannot encumber the PURCHASE with DRM whatsoever.
Current rights holders should have to provide a means to remove existing DRM. Failure to do so should imply forfeiting the entire purchase price. Rights holders that offer rentals and don't meet the duration should have to offer a prorated refund for the time stolen from users.
The sky wouldn't fall. People would still make movies, music, and write books.
> We shouldn't expect infinitely durable things to emulate tangible things that wear out because it would be convenient for rights holders if it were so.
Not only that, it's copyrights which are supposed to expire. The idea that physical media should be expected to degrade through the passage of time sooner than works will enter into the public domain is absurd.
After the copyright expires it's no longer a copyrighted work and then you're not circumventing DRM that protects a copyrighted work.
The real problem is that circumvention tools are prohibited regardless of what you use them for, so then they use the same DRM system on works that are still under copyright and you nominally can't provide someone with tools to break the DRM on the ones in the public domain. (In practice people just ignore the law or distribute circumvention tools from servers in other countries.)
It's not completely obvious that it actually works this way. For example, if someone's "DRM system" is that the box it comes in is screwed shut and you're intended to use some I/O pins provided on the outside, does that mean a screw driver is a circumvention tool and therefore screw drivers are illegal? Obviously problematic if so, but in the reverse case where anyone else using the same system for something other than protecting a copyrighted work means anyone can distribute tools to circumvent it, third parties would just put public domain works behind the same DRM system as copyrighted ones so that anyone could distribute circumvention tools. The prohibition on circumvention tools is batshit crazy.
So for example, if a diligent company offered a DRM removal tool, perhaps in escrow, for its media for which copyright had expired, it would be breaking the DCMA. Can DRM media be considered to be in the public domain if it is locked up by a company that’s probably out of business by the time copyright has expired, and breaking the encryption is illegal under DCMA? If the company is still in business, I suppose they could publish the keys publicly
I get your point but I think your timeline is off. I don't have concrete data but from personal experience (myself, friends family) is say it's trivial to keep books, records, even newspapers for decades. CDs in my world only go back to the 1990s.
Tapes definitely didn't
> If you buy a book and determine its quality will leave it falling apart sooner than you want, you can return it or copy it or work to preserve it.
Copying it is illegal in some countries, even if it is purely for private use - the UK and some EU countries, probably others around the world. The UK tried to introduce a private use exception but it was only legal under EU law (this was pre-Brexit) if the copyright holders were compensated for it (which was not part of the UK law).
This is why the analogy with "wear and tear" doesn't apply to digital goods, it doesn't even make any sense. Wear and tear is something that applies to physical things in the real world, not information, specifically information in a digital format.
The problem here is not physical things that are the medium for information, it's the information itself that somehow people want to control.
> We don't need to ban DRM, we just need to force content providers to choose between technical and legal means of copyright protection.
This is not even interesting because in practice all of the DRM is broken. The actual problem is that we have tools that prohibit circumventing DRM even when the copy is not an infringement of copyright (e.g. fair use) and that prohibit distribution of circumvention tools even if they're not used for copyright infringement, e.g. because the same DRM system is being maliciously applied to works already in the public domain.
Or -- and this is the real reason this garbage is on the books -- the DRM is being used for anti-competitive purposes rather than to prevent copying. Because it doesn't prevent copying (evidence: all the content being on all the piracy sites), but it does prevent a legitimate competitor who actually cares about complying with the law from doing interoperability things that are not an infringement of copyright but are a violation of the DMCA.
Yeah, I agree with that, and was going to add an edit to that effect but I guess I forgot.
The way things are currently, the legal protections are stronger than the technical protections. I think it's much more realistic for legislation to be updated to allow copying for personal use, than it is for DRM to be banned outright.
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.
Right, but my point is most people are not ripping streams. HDRips are likely either some 0day exploit in Widevine or a device which pretends to respect HDCP.
Just about everyone archiving or "archiving" is torrenting.
I'd argue that the archival happens the moment the DRM is stripped, the seeders are just helping out with the data replication part - but I get what you're saying.
As an aside, HDCP is broken in practice but frowned upon for archival, since it requires a re-encode, introducing generation loss.
No, HDCP itself is broken. According to the DMCA, and corresponding legal precedent[1], you're allowed to convert one version of HDCP to another. You can buy legitimate adapters off the shelf (provisioned with valid keys) to convert HDCP 2.2 to HDCP 1.4. No jumping through hoops, no legal grey areas (for now), it just works.
HDCP 1.4 uses export-grade (broken) cryptography, the master keys are available on the public web. But you don't need to bother understanding the specifics, since just about any HDMI 1.4 sink you buy from China (whether it's a capture card or splitter) will strip HDCP 1.4 as a matter of course.
You may be allowed, but how would such a device get keys from DCP, and how do they avoid all of those keys being immediately blacklisted from being used for HDCP downgrades? HDCP 2.2 isn't the latest version either.
They don't get blacklisted because what they're doing is explicitly allowed, and very widespread. Yes, HDCP 2.3 is the latest version but HDCP 2.2 is all you need in practice. I can't talk from experience on 2.3, but I can on 2.2, so that's what I referenced.
If you don't believe me but also don't want to buy any hardware to test for yourself, search for "HDCP 2.2 splitter" on amazon and read the reviews (but beware of confused customers who aren't aware of the difference between HDCP 2.2 and 1.4).
I'm not sure precisely why it works, but I can tell you for sure that my upstream devices cannot tell, and that it works in practice. I assume the splitter only tells the source about one of its downstream sinks (if at all), but not both. (maybe that makes it non-compliant and at risk of revocation - I'm not sure, but do know that it hasn't happened yet)
On one hand, that's kinda fair. Forever is pretty rough. On the other hand, companies probably shouldn't use the word forever when promising things then.
I don't like your solution, because there's legitimately movies I really only want to watch once (actually that's the majority of them), and I'm pretty sure companies are gonna use the need to provide it for X time as a reason to jack up the price. I think there's a legitimate place for limited time things, but the deal should be up front and you shouldn't be using the word "forever".
Also, kinda limits the notion of "buying" far beyond the standard english definition. "Buying" a ticket to a movie in a theater is perfectly legitimate, but doesn't really correspond to anything you're talking about. We all know we have to leave the movie theater afterwards and can't watch the movie again. This is fine, generally, because we know the deal going into it.
It seems like the solution here is to have companies be up front with the deal. I feel like the easiest way to do that is to hold a couple companies accountable for the language they use when promising something, and the rest of them will be very up front, very quickly.
And I don't mean bury it in a EULA, but the actual deal that gets filtered down to the human beings, just make it so that only provisions of the EULA that most customers know about are actually enforceable or something.
Hmmm, how about "if a company advertises something being available 'forever', they are required to make it available for a length of time not less than the average human lifespan"?
> 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)"
Why not till the end of life of the customer plus 95 years?
Though in a sense this problem is already solved. If a company promises "forever" but doesn't back it up with a surety bond or endowment guarantee of some sort, then you should treat it with great skepticism.
In the meantime, consumers are free to litigate under breach of contract, false advertising or other appropriate doctrine.
In this case, it was never really "forever" at all, as the Terms stated:
Funimation can “without advance notice… immediately suspend or terminate the availability of the Service and/or content (and any elements and features of them), in whole or in part, for any reason."
With inflation that is not enough - the minimum acceptable refund should be the price to buy the same product at the time of the refund.
> 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.
That's why copyright law in many countries allows you to make backups for personal use. This isn't possible with streaming services so the service must provide the equivalent.
There was a related post a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned that it shouldn’t be called buying, but _renting_ the content. Since it can be removed from you any point and time for any reason.
We need physical copies. We need to bring it back. A Storage medium, that is cheap, small, durable. I was looking at SD Card or Switch's Storage card the other day and thinking if Movies or Titles could be stored just like it while being significantly cheaper to manufacture.
> Require some kind of insurance/escrow/backup in advance
This is kind of ridiculous in this context. The content is not really at risk of being lost. Did the service go away even though you were supposed to have permanent access? Okay, now it should be legal for you to download it from The Pirate Bay.
> 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)"
They might already have that kind of fineprint in there somewhere?
> 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)
That's a nice idea, but I think customers should also be allowed to opt out of that requirement. Why should I be forced to pay for that insurance, when I don't need it? (And, of course, that's the situation we have today: companies can legally license you content with our without that kind of insurance.)
These 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.
They should be forced to commit to a specific time period that the rental is available and failing to do so is considered fraud. Failing to list the time period is considered equivalent to perpetuity and they should be forced to provide the content in perpetuity, regardless of their circumstances.
Oh, and if it seems unfair to do so and they don't like it, they're perfectly free to not sell that content at all. It's a free country right?
Agree. Given their license agreements, it should even specify something like "rent for at least x years", x being a number of years compatible with their own license agreement. If they have a 1 year agreement with the copyright holders, x can’t be greater than 1.
Transparency is the only way to make sure there’s no bullshit for the customer. Also maybe they would need to adjust prices, as they’re no way I’m gonna pay full price for a 1 year license (which is effectively what I’m paying for).
> Also maybe they would need to adjust prices, as they’re no way I’m gonna pay full price for a 1 year license (which is effectively what I’m paying for).
This is a large part of my gripe with the way things are now. I cannot make an informed purchase decision if I do not know what exactly it is I am purchasing; And when the goods that I 'purchased' can be arbitrarily taken away, it is impossible for me to have ever made an informed decision about the purchase.
For example, say that in this case, you bought one of these Blu-Rays with the digital code for Christmas last year, just two months ago, because your friend who bought it five years ago recommended it. They got to use their digital copy for five years, you only got two months, despite having agreed to purchase the _same exact product_. If the package said "free digital copy until March 2024" then there's not that much problem, you got exactly what you paid for, and you were fully aware of what it was that you were buying. But if the package said "free digital copy" then you might rightfully assume that you'll get the same amount of use from the digital copy that your friend did.
As it stands right now though, you have no guarantee whatsoever for how long the digital copy will remain accessible, so you're in effect paying for some nebulous vision of a digital copy in the hope that it materializes for long enough to make use of.
It seems to me that this kind of situation would plausibly be a straightforward case for Revocation of Acceptance, but there's not really any mechanism for doing so. I guess you'd have to send them a letter via registered mail demanding your money back and then take it to small claims court? I'm quite sure that not many people would bother, which is why they do things like this in the first place.
I agree that they shouldn't be allowed to say that they're selling you a good or that you're buying it when what you're actually paying for is a revocable license to use/access it at their discretion. But it's not quite as clear when the purchase includes a physical good that is purchased and also a revocably licensed digital good. That's still (at least partially) a purchase. I think the more relevant issue here is the extent to which a company's assets can be separated from its contractual obligations during an acquisition.
We 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.
You’re still generating a loss of income to someone somewhere. I completely agree there are some ethical arguments in favor of piracy, but don’t be a fool, of course piracy is a form of theft. Nothing is black or white. I still do it when the legal offer fails me, but I’m honest with myself.
In the same way, going to an half empty theater to watch the show without paying would not be stealing according to your definition (you’re not taking the place of a paying customer anyway), yet it is a form of stealing too.
>You’re still generating a loss of income to someone somewhere.
No you're not. A pirated copy is not a lost sale. Many people wouldn't interact with some media/software at all if they hadn't pirated it. Linux on the desktop would probably be more popular too.
And the person stealing a seat in the theater would not have bought it so it’s not a lost sale either according to you. Maybe lost sale is not the correct term, but it’s still a form of theft: you took something even though its owner didn’t allow you to take it.
Someone sneaking into a movie theater is consuming a limited resource (a specific seat at a specific showing) and causing some presumably small amount of wear on the seats. They're actually taking something even if its value is probably significantly less than the notional lost sale. But someone who downloads a movie has taken nothing. They just have something someone didn't want them to have.
IRL it'd be more like what monks used to do, copy books by hand. Only today we have machines that copy books by idiot savant automation at speeds our ancestors would call magic.
Further, none of the physical resources 'of the owner' are being consumed past whomever first liberated the data. Hopefully obtained as an otherwise legitimate purchase / rental / access. A copy of a copy...
Even if you bought a Blu-ray, chances are the licensing doesn’t allow you to do that. You usually can legitimately share with close friends and family to a certain extent, and that’s it
> These 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.
Web browser userscript/extension to change the terminology on purchase pages of major vendors?
Except that the customers did buy it - they bought physical DVDs! They could have kept those, probably did, and if so, can still watch them!
What Sony is doing here is shitty, but it's a long way from removing access to digital content which people have paid for, which is what the title suggests.
The customers thought they had bought a DVD and an access code. Just because there was also a physical product in the bundle does not absolve Sony of any blame.
Tell you what, I'll sell you my house for 100$ but at any time I can take back all but the doormat. You still have access to some part of what you bought so we are all good right? As for 'buying the physical dvd', that is just bad plastic because they can't actually use the data on it in any modern way. By law they can't rip it and view it with modern devices so they clearly never 'owned' anything.
This would only be true if Sony offered a physical or downloadable version of the content that the users could keep using after they removed online access.
Fire, theft, misplaced/lost, water damage, tiny kid damages the disc, so on and so forth. Keeping something sometimes is out of our control.
>... but it's a long way from removing access to digital content which people have paid for, which is what the title suggests.
They're literally pulling content they paid for. They bought this knowing they would get a physical copy and streaming access. They paid for both, and now part of that "both" is being taken away.
Just because you can't prove that the number of times something has been pirated is equal to the number of would be sales does not mean the person who owns the product doesn't lose out.
Parent-poster is talking about "losing out" in a specific way, where rights-holder copies would temporarily vanish or become unusable for some reason. (Which obviously doesn't happen.)
That's rather different from the definition you're using, where "losing out" is much more expansive, including hypothetical decreases in potential future sales of new copies that haven't yet been manufactured.
Except you're not. You're using a copy of their property without permission.
If I trespass into someone's house, it's invading their personal space. If they're in the house, it's invasive to them and alarming and would probably make them afraid that I intend violence. While in the house, I may damage things or cause disruption.
However, if I use a device to create an alternate universe with a perfect copy of their house, without them inside (since it's my own private universe), and then I enter the house and do whatever in it, I'm not disrupting them at all. I'm not inside their house, I'm in my own copy of it in my own universe, and they don't even know. It doesn't affect them at all.
not overloaded, just an older (but official definition):
archaic•literary
commit an offense against (a person or a set of rules).
But the word doesn't matter so much as the intent. If enough people just copy your product you cannot sell it. Or worse, others will sell it for pennies because they didn't spend any revenue so any money is profit. That's what's trying to be prevented.
The “property” being trespassed on refers to the IP not the medium it resides on. Unless you hacked someone’s computer to get access to that IP, which is a whole other matter.
have someone steal and abandon your car for a joyride and then tell me how you feel about joyriding not permanently depriving you of anything. you're still going to likely have to pay to pick it up from the impound, it'll be full of garbage or they'll have tossed your shit out. And then likely someone will have slept in it once they abandon it. You also won't likely have it for several days.
Or you can be like my friend who was moving to chicago, and we were at the bar the night before saying good by. Look up at the tv and lo and behold there is his car in a police chase. Could have been any car but nope his stuff was in the back window. Stolen from outside the bar. In a high speed chase. Then we watched as they took aim at and t-boned a cop car. So the car was now totaled and a crime scene. Took him several weeks to get his stuff back and actually be able to move and start his job up in chicago.
I 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.
So 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...
Piracy has, once again, become a better product than the one being sold. Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), the experience with pirated media is flat out better than anything being offered by any of the companies selling products.
Do you know what piracy doesn't give you? It lacks the torrential downpour of ads and other garbage that are relentlessly jammed in your face. I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. For example, I don't need a rotating billboard of ads on my homescreen when the hardware is barely powerful enough to keep things running. I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years.
I'm going to hack it and if I lose access to legitimate content, so be it.
In Canada, we have SportsNet for NHL broadcasts. It's terrible. Pirate streams are better (video) quality. If it comes to it, I'll pay more than SportsNet costs if I can get and ESPN stream out of the US. Think about that for a second. I'm willing to pay more than what they're charging, but the current product is so bad I refuse to give them a dollar.
>I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want.
I got one of these too. It's fantastic: I love it! Well, compared to the competition anyway. The reason is simple: GoogleTV is Android, so you can install Android apps on it. Specifically, you can install SmartTubeNext, a FOSS YouTube viewer that blocks ads and includes SponsorBlock. You can also install Jellyfin to have streaming access to any media on your PC or other server.
> I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years.
I've bought a Philips tv some 11 years ago that come with some custom-tied linux distro and bunch of smart apps - the usual stuff: weather, yt, netflix, facebook, some games and of course none of these work nowadays. Luckily there were no ads anywhere in the UI - yet, because that was just about to happen in 2-3 years.
>Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"),
That's a big thing to ignore. Of course every company wants to be able to serve all media for a low price (and for zero labor costs). If you need to pay for every license you own, for people to maintain your website, to maintain customer support, to translate media, for the servers to transmit media from etc. Then costs are going to add up immensely.
Pirates don't have to worry about any of that. The only catch here is that pirates are enough of a minority that they still eat their cake. If it gets too rampant, everyone loses. Tragedy of the "commons" (despite this being the exact opposite of a commons).
Piracy is frequently more difficult, yet better quality. Let's face it: using torrent search sites and dealing with a BT client isn't as easy for your grandmother as just using the built-in Netflix app on her TV.
I'm talking strictly about sport streaming. There is no "torrent search sites", just random hard-to-find websites with billions of ads (and they change frequently), or paid pirating services.
If we had actually supported legal torrents we could have paid for link access, legally owned the contents of the torrents, and never ever had to worry about the files disappearing. We would have just paid for some encryption key from a distributed DRM service and there would have been none of this licensing nonsense.
Each time I'm reading about what you wrote I'm thinking about Star Trek's teleportation 'dilemma' - whether the transporter is a killing machine or not
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.
it 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
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.
Absolutely. 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.
I 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.
Who 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?
No 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.
I 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.
I 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.
A few months ago they removed thousands of episodes of Discovery Channel content without making anyone whole. They got away with it then and they'll get away with it this time. The only way to "own" your shows is to buy the physical media or pirate it.
Hopefully, some principled wealthy lawyer gets peeved by these practices, and pursues class-action lawsuits with enough bite and tenacity, to make certain companies rethink their digital product practices.
I'd guess Sony's answer to this would be watch your DVD or Blu-ray, since the article is about Sony DVD and Blu-ray discs that came with a digital code that allowed you to also stream the content from Sony's service.
With each iteration of video optical disc, industry got more ridiculous.
(Started with DVD, with CSS nonsense, unskippable parts, and threatening screens with police state overtones. Then someone said "How can we make this even more consumer-hostile, and be total jerks about it", and thus all the garbage of Blu-ray. That was pretty hard to top with Blu-ray 4K, but sounds like someone said "Hold my beer...")
The restriction was that that 4K needed to be on 7th Gen Intel or newer and Windows only. This was due to the requirements that the DRM used Intel SGX security so if the underlying CPU did not have this tech then it cannot decrypt the disc. So no AMD, Apple or other ARM etc.
The SGX security was recently cracked so I suspect this requirement is going away. The other platforms can easily play the underlying video format, its just the DRM that was preventing it.
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.
> Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?
The company that metaphoically changed its name but is still selling torque wrenches. Or the parent who bought two torque wrench companies and had the power to gracefully merge them together but instead cut them in half. They still inherit the contract after all
>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.
sure but a SO isn't a company, who does indeed have a contractual agreement to "server you for X time". X time with many stipulations, but I guess lawyers will argue over that. They may be right in an absolute sense, but a judge definitely takes the power dynamic into account with cases like this.
> 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.
Can you actually shed contractual obligations through mergers/sales of a business?
Or do you need to do trickery like selectively buying assets, and hope a judge lets you get away with that?
So why should it be possible to buy assets and not obligations then? Perhaps this should be illegal: if you want to buy another company, you get stuck with the whole kit n' kaboodle. If the obligations are toxic, then don't buy it.
We'd probably need a good regulatory body to investigate M&As though, to make sure some company doesn't split itself in half, with the good parts in one half and the bad parts in another, and then sell off the good part while letting the bad one fold.
> So why should it be possible to buy assets and not obligations then?
If the sale was at an honest, market price, what would be the problem? The seller is fairly compensated and can use the money received to service any obligation.
Bankruptcy has something called "clawback" where sales or payments by debtors within some time window before the declaration can potentially be "clawed back". There are defense against this, included the mentioned time limits. So one approach in splitting up a company is not leaving the debt burdened part too burdened, so it doesn't immediately fail.
There have been a bunch of clawback cases filed in the FTX crypto exchange bankruptcy.
> 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.
Letting companies discharge debts and obligations at will, instead of through bankruptcy, has bad consequences. It means contracts with them aren't worth the paper they're printed on, if they can shed obligations when they wish (but keep what you paid them).
I 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”.
A 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".
This is a little more egregious than the usual attempts. It isn't Funimation being bought out and dropping old liability. It's Sony buying a new company and dropping its own liabilities by shutting down Funimation.
Letting companies drop contractual obligations through labelling shell games is not ideal.
"Craftsman" was never a company. It was a trademark under which Sears sold tools which they hired various tool manufacturers to produce for them.
Black and Decker bought the trademark from Sears in 2017, but don't use the trademark themselves; instead, they licensed the name right back to Sears for 15 years for free (that license will expire in 2032), and Sears (now Sears/Kmart) is still using it the way they used to; getting tool manufacturers to produce tools for them and selling them to consumers under the Craftsman badge.
So it depends on how you want to look at it? Sears never actually made the tools themselves, and don't own the trademark any more, but they're still the ones using the trademark and they're still selling tools made in the same way as they did before. So.. nothing's really changed? Except that the ownership of the name has been transferred to a different company.
Craftsman is as dead as RCA. Those brands are now just trademarks, names sold to the highest bidder, not the company that built the quality products that the words now lead you into thinking they might still represent. At least "Craftsman" is still Stanley-Black&Decker, ...if indeed that means anything anymore. RCA is nothing: Sarnoff weeps from the beyond...
>Craftsman owes me a torque wrench; they promised a lifetime warranty.
Did they? I have two Craftsman torque wrenches from the 1990s when they had lifetime warranties on tools, but as I remember, the torque wrenches were specifically exempted from this.
A better example would be a Craftsman socket wrench.
Sure, but in this case, maintaining the digital properties surely won't bleed Sony dry.
Letting people download the content DRM-free for a period of time while sunsetting the service wouldn't bleed them dry either.
It's not even a mistake Sony made (unlike Allianz or whichever firm it was), it was a deal that they decided to renege on after taking money simply because they can.
> Expecting otherwise is delusional. Who can I sue for breach of contract? Their ghost?
You can make a claim against their estate.
> 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.
Courts have generally seen things differently, except in cases of bankruptcy.
One 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.
Lifetime 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.
BoingBoing 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.
Adding 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.
same. 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.
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.
Also 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.
(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.
On 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.
Ah 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.
I 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
hmm, 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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).
If 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”.
For 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
I was going to say. More recent blurays seem harder to rip ( which I do for my own personal library ). MakeMKV sadly is no longer enough for those. My only solace is that I am not a quality snob and DVDs are sufficient 9/10. Still, it feels like the actual battle is being lost.
Yes, there are other avenues, but legally my options are starting to become limited.
You're allowed to make backups of your physical media with copyright-protected works and replace them with fresh perfect digital copies if they degrade.
The 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
Regardless 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.
Some 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?
Major 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.
I 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)
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.
The 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.
This 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).
The 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.
"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".
Surely 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?
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.