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- Hacker News
- Selling something to customers without having the rights to it yourself is very clearly illegal. I wish some government agency had the guts to prosecute this.by paxys
- Presumably at the time of sale they had rights to it. They lost it later, but should have at least had secured rights to people who bought the damn thing.
- Sounds like the PlayStation Store is planning to stop selling and renting any movies?
Otherwise Sony would have refunded these Studio Canal purchases to maintain the trustworthiness of their store
by intexpress - Buying a physical DVD means you own the item and have it in your hands.
"Buying" a streaming movie means that you enter into an agreement with an online service that promises to make your experience the rough equivalent of physical ownership. But to do that they have to solve a pile of problems, and solve those forever for as long as your purchase is valid.
Realistically, Sony will have service outages, they will have contract disputes, they may have data loss, security incidents, etc., all of which can make your "bought" content unavailable either temporarily or permanently. The real question is what type of agreement Sony had with StudioCanal.
None of this would ever affect your DVD. So the word "buying" wrt a streaming movie is easy to understand, but a bit misleading in practice. It's clear what Sony is signing up to provide; it's just hard to see how they can provide that consistently over the time period involved.
- Consumers went wild over digital media distribution, because of its quality, its lossless copying, and the ease of reproduction and transmission. When CDs and DVDs appeared on the scene, I never dreamed that they would only be a temporary stepping-stone to intangible cloud downloads. But Napster happened.
The RIAA, MPAA, and entire industries were vehemently opposed to digital media (and recording in general) and fought digital distribution every step of the way, tooth and nail, until all the DRM and gatekeeping was in place.
Perhaps we were both on the wrong side of history?
- Its because of things like this that I self host all my media.
As an example why buy games from Steam when I can get them on gog.com DRM free and make them portable (without a setup or installation step on future machines)? So, I run my own Steam Store/Library like experience on a home server using Game Vault.
I use JellyFin for video. It works for music files, but I don't really like it for audio. So, I wrote my own music app that works in the browser/phone securely across the internet from my own server.
This is so much better than paying for subscriptions..
- I deleted my Steam account recently after I realized I hadn't logged in for 5 years. I just can't tolerate a store also being a launcher middleman.
- It's really nice - and it's not really the cost ... it's the avoidance of the rugpull.
I've spent WAY MORE on my hardware and setup in time, money, and DVDs than I ever would have for streaming services, but I know if it goes down, it's on me.
by bombcar - I have to wonder what small claims court judges would think of it. Get a few hundred cases filed across the US and the travel expense for Sony could be significant.by crooked-v
- Why would Sony bother to show up? 1000 cases x $19.99/movie = $20,000.by tiahura
- I'm confused why everyone here seems to accept that this just happens when you buy digital-only content. What if Sony deleted previously bought games? Or Valve? I don't think people would just shrug it off and say "you should always buy physical".
I'm surprised this is even legal without doing a refund or transferring the digital rights to an alternative service.
by cubefox - Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip (or redeem the digital code version that often comes with modern releases, though those tend to have DRM). Even then, why do people buy from the playstation store? I could maybe understand that when the Vita was still around, but nowadays it seems like an odd choiceby mghackerlady
- If you're going to watch it multiple times it's cheaper to buy than rent (especially if you see it on offer). With streaming you're relying that at least one of the providers has what you want and then you have to pay for a month to watch it if you're not already subscribed. I've also found streaming services are way more likely to censor older content.by basisword
- Kids and convenience. 99% of the movies I’ve bought from iTunes are kids movies. Some of them were watched over and over and over.
DVDs and Blu-rays I purchased from the same era required a) advance planning and b) care. To the second point, most of the physical media is now destroyed (scratched, stepped on, lost, or just degraded), but I still have access to the copy of Cars I bought almost 20 years ago from Apple.
by happyopossum - For me it's usually just a cost thing. Some movies I just know I'm going to watch multiple times, certain ones even annually. Clicking buy generally already makes sense if you're going to watch it twice. Wouldn't buy it from the PS store though, it seems like such a niche outside their core business that I'd be worried they would pull exactly what they pulled here.by notapenny
- Because I’m actually not going to lose much sleep if Apple revoke my license for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and given I’ve had digital purchases from them since [checks notes] literally two decades ago and not one of them has to my knowledge been revoked I’m reasonably comfortable that they’ll probably stick around for as long as I do, after which I’m going to rapidly cease caring about my collection of films and TV.by jon-wood
- > Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip
You're forgetting there's a slice of people who want to "own" a movie library but don't have the technical acumen to rip and/or (more importantly) host (consider that you'd have to stand up a Jellyfin server and have a good amount of HDD space -- I personally have 50TB).
Again, it's not _that_ hard in general but daunting enough and with high enough startup costs to dissuade a lot of people.
by xienze - Yes, it doesn't sound like a wise decision given what we know about the usual practices of those services. But the average consumer is not as savvy as us HN users. I would not blame someone for expecting to own permanent access to the content if they purchase it. This only happens because big Sony and such are not held accountable of their actions, they are the one to blame.
- Convenience is 99% of the answer.
Plus, when "renting" a movie costs $3.99, and "buying" it costs $5.99, there's not a particular reason to not click the "purchase" button.
by pavel_lishin - I "bought" a few digital kids movies because kids want to watch them over and over and I didn't want to deal with handling physical media.by fullshark
- Discussion: "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 26-jun-2026 208 comments
- I suppose they started with 451 and decided it was too on-the-nose.by theonemind
- I don't consider anything digital as being bought unless I own it free and clear, unencumbered of any encryption. Not interested in anyone's "digital locker" or storage scheme. I have 20 years of music bought digitally through iTunes and Amazon. I can still play them to this day without needing to check-in with a licensing server. That is ownership. That is why I don't buy encrypted movies.by yardie
- I think Heinlein said, "You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run."
I think something similar applies to digital media - you don't truly own anything that's not stored in bits on a hard drive that you can pick up and put in your pocket.
by pavel_lishin - The industry has yet to adapt from physical media to digital media consisting of binary ones and zeros that costs next to nothing to copy and file transfer. Despite saving a fortune in manufacturing, printing, distribution, shipping. They still try to milk every penny.
Meanwhile the pirates are laughing their arse off...
Type in the name of any media and you can have it in less than 5min with none of the silly DRM restrictions. All you need is the know how.
Until they make it that easy and stop trying to screw over the consumer. They will lose to piracy.
Game of Thrones was the most pirated show on the planet. Eventually HBO realized what they had to do. They offered an HBO streaming subscription globally everywhere for a reasonable price. It bypassed 50 year old cable tv agreements, etc. People could cancel the subscription at any time. But they also had access to the full HBO catalog of shows. Although it didn't stop piracy entirely it did reduce it significantly. HBO made a large profit off the decision.
Open your eyes, figure out what people really want by analyzing what makes piracy better than the legit marketplace. Then do what HBO did and set aside your old school perspective and look at the larger untapped market. Restricting access and going after pirates does not increase your market share. But catering to what people want will open up millions in sales. If you just make it crazy easy and consumer friendly without overcharging.
by Nerdrotic - > due to our content licensing agreements
Aka, due to their mistake. When Sony originally signed an agreement, they should have insisted on a perpetual license for anything already in the customer's library.
I was initially inclined toward some minimal sympathy for Sony here, but I see no good faith reason why they'd sign a licensing agreement which allows the other party to do this.
by Wowfunhappy - They could still refund all those purchases and come out good here, but we all know they won't.by ajsnigrutin
- A friend and I were talking about this. What would you pay for it?
When iTunes + came out, you had 2 options, you could buy a song for $0.99 or you could be the plus version for more, I don't remember but it was like $1.35 or something. Plus had a higher bit rate and it wasn't encrypted.
Suppose you could buy a movie for $12.00, how much would you pay for the forever version? $30?
by TheCondor - A mistake suggests that it's accidental and they didn't mean it. To the extent a corporation can know things, they knew exactly how this was set up. This is fraud.by wat10000