Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever”
Casualties afoot as Sony merges Funimation with 2021-acquired Crunchyroll.
Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people "bought".
You know what say: if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing.
Pirating isn't stealing because it's addition not subtraction. You're creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don't.
More like guidelines than actual rules
PaRleyyy!
Here’s my risky comment of the day.
I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.
IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.
Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.
Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.
To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical
I get your point, especially when it concerns smaller/independent artists. But how would a "fair compensation" look like? Do top selling artists deserve the millions (or even billions) of dollars? Does someone even deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars? Does any artist deserve more money for doing something they love and where they can express themselves than a nurse working night shifts? Is it fair to keep earning money for some work that was done years ago? Does that mean a nurse should get a percentage of the income of every person's life they helped save?
I think the only ethical thing to do is to decouple consumption and support. E.g. I might support some artist by buying their album (or going to their shows), because I think their voice is important, not because it's an album I listen the most to. Or I might not pay artists at all and give money to political causes or other people that need support. Or I might support them in some other way etc.
This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn't be able to "sell" digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to "purchase" digital content, it must plainly tell you that you're renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox... It's almost like companies don't actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it's infuriating that it's literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
It's entirely unreasonable to assume that the average person has the time or knowledge necessary to read, comprehend and agree to every terms of service agreement shoved in their face. Legislation should reflect this fact, and there should be something similar to game and movie ratings that give an easy to understand summary of the agreement.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… [...]
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it's worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games -- especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers' right to the content they've purchased.
edit: Here, I'll bold the important part.
I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC--while it had questionable game performance for some folk--the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they're more than 100GB, what's stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can't imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Yeah if I have to go all digital that's the last console I get. At least with a PC I can get DRM free copies.
A rent economy is toxic and rotten,
Not always. I would gladly pay to rent something I need only every now and then instead to buy it.
But that is the concept of renting rather than a rent economy.
An industry or economy based entirely around renting with 0 other options is almost always rotten to the core.
I've been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven't regretted my decision yet.
I forgot about that whole thing. For those that need a reminder like me:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/imMRzBzQm1U?si=JI8oEYGIN48E16Bu
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Same here!
Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.
“The bar you had to clear was on the ground and y’all brought shovels.”
We're lowering the bar all the way to hell
Enshitification is at phase 2
🏴☠️ sharing is caring.
I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This Deal's Getting Worse All The Time | Robot Chicken - YouTube
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sony won the case against Universal that allowed people to record TV shows with their VCR. I wonder how they'd feel if I pointed OBS at their streams.
Does OBS even work with all the DRM they've put on things? I thought that's the whole point why it's there, to keep people from screen capturing or restreaming videos
Probably not without some tinkering, but DRM can always be defeated.
It may not work directly, but there's always a way to misdirect it, like a vm!
Android smart TV can use some foss screen capture apps while being undetected by PlayStation, of course there's trouble with sound capture, but since tv is yours, it can be bypassed
If what they're doing isn't theft, then digital "piracy" isn't theft either.
And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.
Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can't even respect ownership rights for digital goods?
Tbf I left the console market a decade ago and haven't really felt like going back. Computers do everything I need in the gaming sphere
it begs serious questions.
Nope. It just raises them without beggaring them.
I fear we are rapidly approaching (or have already reached) the point where the definition of "begs the question" is going to be changed to include "raises the question," much the same way "literally" now also means "not literally."
I am not pleased by this development, but I was also not consulted.
What do you mean monopoly? If anything it's a duopoly with Nintendo.
Do you think a software monopoly by Microsoft is better?
Sony should be fined for each unit they delete.
if they pull this shit with music, i'm gonna have to look for self hosted music streaming apps.
Why stream music when SD cards are approaching TB?
i have a total of 512GB of storage in my Phone already, but my dad has repeatedly run into the storage limit of his 256GB phone. he's not even that into music, and he stores his music compressed.
i can see all of the songs i listen to now taking up more than 300GB easily in lossles. plus i would be able to access the music from my phone as well as my PC without having to store duplicates, and having cross-platform playlists.
there's a lot of benefit with streaming, and self-hosting is becoming more accessible by the day. if you have the bandwidth, i see no problem as long as your provider doesn't fuck you over (which is on the horizon for spotify, we aren't getting lossless and the prices are going up regardless)
I'm using jellyfin and it just works fine.
There are others more specialized in music. But I kind of like only having to use one service for all my media.
i already run jellyfin, i'll check out how it works.
What makes you think they won't? It's a matter of time.
I use musicolet and just have a few GB loaded on my phone at any given time
May I suggest cloudplayer
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doubleTwist.cloudPlayer
Not compatible with Android 14, and doesn't seem to receive updates anymore (the last one was 2 years ago). So that looks like a terrible choice.
When my plex server does what Sony won’t/ can’t.
This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.
It wasn't even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few "forever" is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.
Good news, physical media can still have revocable DRM
I think I'm alone with that on here but I don't really like buying physical media. I get that that way you own it but it's still just a storage medium with data on it, putting that data directly on my hard drive achieves basically the same thing. Since I can pirate basically anything anyway, I just think that even if a company takes away my access to something digital I bought, I can always just pirate it and I have it again. To me, physical discs are kind of a waste of money, space and resources because of that. I don't have it anything against people who buy physical media tho, I do get the point of that.
Same, and I've already had to do this. Google started revoking things I "bought". When they announced it I immediately went into Google Play, made a list of everything I "bought", and pirated it onto my home media server.
It's mine, and it's on "physical media", which I call an SD drive in a NAS.
I don't need or want optical disks of things--they are subject to rot, more so than my NAS, and they are far far more fragile than the NAS+the backups. They take up space and collect dust. If I wanted cover art, I'd own the art and have it on my wall.
You can truly own things, and you don't have to have plastic covers on a shelf to do that.
I actually like that thinking, haven't thought of it that way. Should the day come when Sony decides to kill all digital copies of games people have collected over the years, who's stopping them from just jailbreaking/rooting/cracking/CFW-ing their console to just download the games they want from dedicated communities who have dumped those games on the internet ages ago?
I did the same thing with my 3DS when the eShop was officially closed, and now I can't imagine a 3DS without access to anything I could want on there.
I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media.
I suppose it depend on what you buy. Some things are worth to have the physical copy, some not.
I’m with you on most of this except I’m the physical media person, and also run the Plex server for my f&f ;)
I’m going to be setting up a self-host game streaming server soon too, because I won’t -buy- digital-only.. but I will pirate it and throw some money at the indie devs when I can!
Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy
Well, copyright proponents succeeded in persuading the majority of people that buying something you can't copy or share is still ownership, despite it being against human instincts.
Only instincts matter more, not less, than laws. Because instincts work first.
So in fact they persuaded us that it's normal to own less, rent more, buy a cat in a bag, buy something without any guarantees, buy something with unclear obligations, because everybody around does that and it's socially shameful otherwise.
Which is amusingly similar to what fraudsters do.
So the next stage is the amount of obvious fraud from those big copyright-reliant companies increasing. Good night, sweet prince.
Yes, I'd like one cat please. No, not that one...the dapper tabby gentleman in the back...yes, that's the one. What's that? No, no thank you, I don't need a bag.
...on second thought, yeah, go ahead and give me the cat in a bag. What's the damage?
Aye-aye, Captain! 🫡
We gonna go after every company that does this because pretty much all of them are.
I'm game.
And my axe
Everybody seems to say this to me until I tell them that the companies that own the rights they are selling to distributors are also at fault and we should blame both. Then people are like "what? No! Why would we punish Paramount or Fox, or Universal?"
I’m down to one streaming service left. Just need to… ahem… acquire the rest of what I want to watch there before I no longer pay monthly for services I barely use, where anything can be ripped away from us at any time.
Never again.
Someone is going to be a high seas king after this for sure.
But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code. Subscribers to the Funimation streaming service could add those digital codes to Funimation and then stream the content from the platform.
Okay, I honestly feel bad for anyone not old enough to remember the last few times big media firms pulled this kind of crap. This kind of thing is always a trap, or at best a temporary add-on to the media you purchased. If you buy a DVD or BluRay, anything other than the videos on the medium have a short shelf life. Plus, anything having to do with internet websites are considered disposable by big business*, but doubly so in this kind of scheme.
In the past we've had bolt-on features to media that have aged poorly. 1-800 support numbers for video games. Websites with supplementary media. Executable programs on disk that only work on Windows95 or MacOS 9. Console exclusive content. Extra media on disk in formats like Flash. Heck, there are even old cassettes and LPs that have C64 BASIC programs on them. Downloadable game content through redeemable codes. The end result is less a product value-add and more of a novelty.
Then there's the litany of broken-by-design media, like DivX. And of course, let's not forget about formats that have no modern release and are only viewable on players that haven't been made in a dozen years or more.
Yes, Sony/Funimation should be taken to task for misleading advertising. But we should also be vigilant and look for the warning signs too.
(* - If that makes you uncomfortable about IoT devices, you're paying attention.)
This is nothing new. Buying digital and streaming only versions of media just means you are licensing it. If you care, either break the DRM and reencode, or just pirate it directly.
I feel more and more justified about piracy every article I read about licensing and stuff just getting taken away after having paid good money for stuff
Especially since they suddenly become not so sure when talking about feeding things under IP to "AIs". It seems that when some process is not too open, like dataset collection, people doing it get used to bending laws they themselves rely on.
Actually this should be leveraged.
One approach - IP is solid, so those big companies championing "AIs" will have to pay royalties for everything produced by an "AI" which had been fed something of that IP. That's just logically a Gordian knot.
Another approach - IP is an artificial concept which is complete bullshit, then "digital piracy" is not a crime, and neither is commercialization of fan works over some IP without paying royalties.
Anything in between would mean that a company has more rights under the law than an individual. Would be a good analogy to cutting that knot IMHO, but a bad outcome.
Laughs in 64TB Plex server
In other news, the only thing that has ever axed my library was a stray bolt of lightning
I wasnt so lucky...
The library in a nearby suburb i loved was replaced by a daycare, erm... I ment... place... with books and kids and overly protective adults that stare into your soul if your an "outsider".
Text Resistbot at 50409 and have it write and send a letter to your representatives. All of them.
Just give it a news article and it’s AI whips it up for you to proof read.
Give it a try and make your voices heard.
But does it whip the llamas' ass?
I couldn't imagine a faster way to make our voices useless than to fill our representatives' inboxes with AI spam...
This service is the most dystopian thing I've seen in a while.
"You know what's gonna fix democracy? Reducing civic engagement to having AI generate letters based off AI-generated articles to send to our representatives, who will filter and summarize them using AI, and plug the input into the law-making AI! The downfall of democracy was humanity's capacity for independent thought!"
This is a bad idea to end all bad ideas.
Let's give them an excuse to close their means of communication to the people to "combat AI spam".
And what's best is they now have a new cell number for marketing they can then sell to companies!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers' digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2.
For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code.
For people lacking the space, resources, or interest in maintaining a library of physical media, this was a good way to preserve treasured shows and movies without spending more money.
It also provided a simple way to access purchased media online if you were, for example, away on a trip and had a hankering to watch some anime DVDs you bought.
Regarding refunds, Funimation's announcement directed customers to its support team "to see the available options based on your payment method," but there's no mention of getting money back from a DVD or Blu-ray that you might not have purchased had you known you couldn't stream it "forever."
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 56%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Capitalists make a liar out of the promise of The Internet.
I think we should drag em through the streets four different ways at once over it.
