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Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund
- lschueller 3mo agoThis includes titles like "End of Watch" and "The Shameless"
- HelloUsername 3mo agoDiscussion: "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 26-jun-2026 208 comments
- theonemind 3mo agoI suppose they started with 451 and decided it was too on-the-nose.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- throw0101d 3mo ago"Purchased".
- tribal808 3mo agosilk road... torrent...
- nativeit 3mo agoI get the latter, but were you also looking to buy some drugs?
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoYou expect them to sit through "Big Ass Spider!" sober?
- CivBase 3mo ago"I buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."
- trashb 3mo agoI hate this phrase, it is not a good analog for the situation and it slanders piracy. I understand the idea behind it and I hate the streaming/renting/digital purchase model as much as the next guy. If you don't want to pay for streaming own up to it, buy it on physical or steal it (make an illegitimate copy). But don't pretend you would pay for it if it was delivered in a different agreement. Do you expect to keep driving a rented car forever? Even if the car is only available through rent?
- wtetzner 3mo ago> Do you expect to keep driving a rented car forever? Even if the car is only available through rent? TBH I'd be a lot happier if they just called in "renting" instead of "buying" the movie. If you don't get to own it, why do they get to refer to it as "buying"?
- mghackerlady 3mo agoWhy do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip (or redeem the digital code version that often comes with modern releases, though those tend to have DRM). Even then, why do people buy from the playstation store? I could maybe understand that when the Vita was still around, but nowadays it seems like an odd choice
- fullshark 3mo agoI "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.
- bombcar 3mo ago17,059,798,573 views for Baby Shark and climbing ...
- mghackerlady 3mo agoIf I ever have kids, I'm only letting them watch PBS kids and the disney movies I own
- LollipopYakuza 3mo agoYes, 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.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoConvenience 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.
- yardie 3mo agoI 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.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoI 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.
- Wowfunhappy 3mo ago> 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.
- TheCondor 3mo agoA 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?
- jerf 3mo agoI feel like you're kind of making this more complicated than it actually is, either because you're overcomplicating it or because you're trying to tee up some rhetorical point, but the answer to your question is really quite simple and objective: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=movie&rh=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A2650304011%257C2650305011%257C6259461011%257C9397930011&dc&ds=v1%3AdwgsNDE3qfgq6s5PL%2FpAO7h2O02yNqZR%2Be4LEZ%2F6C8U https://www.amazon.com/s?k=movie&rh=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A... You don't need to ask a hypothetical, the market has an answer. To the extent your reply is "but that's not exactly what my question is", my point is that the market is already pricing all sorts of situations and the market would have no problem pricing just one more possibility into the already complicated market. Including "piracy", and people like me who are treating the vast majority of DVDs and BluRays as just a delivery mechanism for streams rather than "discs".
- nekusar 3mo agoRight now, I won't pay a fucking cent. I'll pirate it off of Usenet or Torrents. I get a strictly better experience if I pirate. Whereas I'm treated like a criminal and sold a much worse experience if I pay. So, fuck paying. I'm not going to pay for abuse.
- crooked-v 3mo agoI 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.
- tiahura 3mo agoWhy would Sony bother to show up? 1000 cases x $19.99/movie = $20,000.
- paxys 3mo agoPeople also forget that the burden of collection is on you. Good luck chasing Sony for that $20 even if the court has ruled in your favor.
- triceratops 3mo agoYou're saying I can't just turn up to the nearest Sony store with a sheriff's deputy and take some shit?
- nikanj 3mo agoDoes Sony have stores?
- triceratops 3mo agoHmm I guess not. Nearest corporate office then.
- tantalor 3mo agoSony doesn't operate their own brick & mortar stores
- triceratops 3mo agoI thought they did for some reason.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nekusar 3mo agoAnd this smells of fraud. If it was a real sale, then they could not do this remote control/deletion at a distance. Shit I buy at Walmart can't be physically taken away from me later on. Its legally mine. This? Its fraudulently sold as a "sale" but is really an indefinite rental with the terms of "fuck you I'll do what I please when I please". And on top of fraud, I'd also throw in the CFAA as well, a criminal statute. Its established law that if I set a timebomb in software at $company where if I'm fired/laid off, that's criminal access. No boilerplate from some shitty clickwrap can excuse criminal law. Time to start jailing Sony execs and the like.
- stronglikedan 3mo agoI think they meant "Studio Canal Movies rented on PlayStation Store removed without refund because they are rented"
- Libcat99 3mo agoI think it would be reasonable for the typical person to believe that when you click a button labeled "buy", you are buying the item, not renting it. Don't defend theft/fraud based for billion dollar corporations. It's not a good look.
- tiahura 3mo agoDoes anyone have a link to the relevant terms of service from the sony store?
- austin-cheney 3mo agoIts 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..
- bombcar 3mo agoIt'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.
- austin-cheney 3mo agoAbsolutely. If there is a fiber cut in my driveway I still have my home network running just the same. If hardware ever cheaper I will also run an instance of Project Nomad: https://www.projectnomad.us/ https://www.projectnomad.us/
- hack1312 3mo agoIf you don’t need the local LLM feature that I don’t see why that shouldn’t just run on a Raspberry Pi 4+.
- add-sub-mul-div 3mo agoI 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.
- pixelatedindex 3mo agoSteam is probably the best example of how you can be a middleman and a store. I’ve never felt wronged by them unlike Sony and Discovery.
- paxys 3mo agoSelling 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.
- pixelatedindex 3mo agoPresumably 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.
- paxys 3mo agoIf the contract has an end date then there’s no reason not to mention it during the sale.
- crazygringo 3mo agoIt's not very helpful if the contract gets renewed 99.9% of the time, but in this case it didn't happen to.
- dewey 3mo agoYou don't always know that, you can have an open ended license with an option to get it revoked in the future with some notice period. I'd be pretty sure that PlayStation also had that in their terms and covered themselves legally for that option.
- NekkoDroid 3mo ago> I'd be pretty sure that PlayStation also had that in their terms and covered themselves legally for that option. Hiding behind hidden T&C should just straight up not be allowed. Imagine if you go to a store and any item you wanted to buy you'd have to read 20 pages on a book next to the item before you'd be able to put it in your cart, else the product producer may just at some time in the future barge into your house and destroy the item.
- 3mo ago
- shermantanktop 3mo agoBuying 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.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoConsumers 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?
- johnwheeler 3mo agoMan, instead of "Thank you" they should've said "Fuck you"
- caycep 3mo agobetween this and their mucking around with game studios (no new PC versions of marquee titles like ghost of yotei etc, unceremoniously shutting down bungie and laying off artists/game devs prior to vestment etc), Playstation management is a disaster at the moment
- lkghds 3mo ago"Enshittification complete. Thank you, PlayStation Store"
- Nerdrotic 3mo agoThe 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.
- msie 3mo agoI'm slowly getting into buying physical media of my favourite tv shows and movies.
- intexpress 3mo agoSounds 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
- cubefox 3mo agoI'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.
- newsclues 3mo agoif buy isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.
- lencastre 3mo agocan‘t people receive any kind of forewarning and prepare themselves? it‘s not like they will try to download a chariot or something
- jimmydddd 3mo agoWhy do you guys "buy" movies? Like, you plan to watch the movie many, many times in the future? How many times do you watch a movie? Just curious, because I've never had a desire to watch a movie more than once.
- taurath 3mo agoEither you have a perfect memory, or you’ve never been touched or moved sufficiently by a movie or show.
- jimmydddd 3mo agoDefinitely not a perfect memory. But yeah, I can't say I've ever been "touched" or "moved" by a movie. I'm usually looking at my watch trying to figure out how much longer I have to sit there. :-)
- effnorwood 3mo agothey got waldo and carman sandiego off mine
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]