> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...

Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.

It’s less about the money and more about:

1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)

2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.

3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.

However, you will stop owning that copy the moment the DVD deteriorates to the point of becoming unreadable. Physical media is a good start, but DRM-stripped digital is the ideal.

punishing customers for not using BitTorrent seems like a weird strategy but I’m not an MBA so what do I know

They'll combine the "buy" and "rent" buttons if there's ever any realistic pressure to change. The typical consumer doesn't care.

It's almost already like this. Buying a movie is sometimes the exact same price or only a dollar more. They know what they're doing.

Initially, the new button might say "buy license" and then eventually it will go back to just "buy".

With Apple, you can at least download the media you bought and keep it.

Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?

Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”

I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?

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

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

So... I used to work in the "digital movie & TV selling" industry. Our product detail pages, like pretty much all our competitors, had language on the call-to-action buttons that said "purchase" (and also, as an alternative, "rent," for 48- or 72-hour viewing).

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

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

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

That's a big can of worms, since it applies to approximately 100% of all software. You only ever buy a license that allows you to use software, almost never actually buy software.

Yes, 100%, and that end date should be very clearly listed too.

Renting what? The non-exclusive, revocable license? Because that's what purchase or buy means.

Pretty sure the Terms of Use say just that. They should update the language on the frontend though.

Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ? what did you actually own ?

I get the feeling, but this whole outrage about what words mean is sterile if you don't actually engage with what is sold here, by who from who, what was the contract, how it was setup and why.

How do you feel about the right holders who also didn't bother providing simple "buy, download and it's forever yours" avenues to get that content ? Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ? (that's what I'll do, because I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing, and I see the current situation as a logical equilibrium, including what happens on the seven seas)

Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.

Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.

The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.

That's just how Valve's license agreement works. You publish with Steam and you grant Valve the right to publish the work in perpetuity.

The licensing deal made by movie studios does not work like that because the studios are intentionally predatory. The distribution agreements are temporary and can involve periodic payments. Literally Netflix rents movies from the studios and rents them back to you. The studios reserve the right to cancel distribution deals at any time.

> How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues, etc?

Steam isn't innocent either. The instance that comes to mind is Order Of War: Challenge (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remov...) but I've also seen people say other games have been removed from their libraries or silently replaced with "remastered" versions that removed things like licensed music. Publishers have also taken games from people's libraries by revoking their keys. Steam says publishers can do this whenever they want. In one case, after the sale they thought a player should have paid them more money (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/w9jpd5/warning_publi...)

They did get away with it in 2024:

https://filmstories.co.uk/news/funimation-streaming-app-to-s...

(For those without the background: In 2020, Sony bought Crunchyroll and in 2024 merged it with Funimation (acquired by Sony subsidiary Aniplex in 2017). Since Crunchyroll had the larger streaming service, this was done by moving the Funimation library to Crunchyroll. However, Funimation also has a business selling digital copies, not just streaming access, which was discontinued including access to purchased media)

they can do it as many times as they want until it works, then that's precedent

I'd recommend qbittorrent over transmission tbh.

N5105 boards are also super cheap, and low power draw, but still with the transcoding hardware. Great experience with mine.

The game discs hold digital data. They're certainly not analog.

If you're not experienced in media servers, I'd recommend a QNAP NAS and then install either Jellyfin or Emby. (Plex has really gone downhill in the last 10 years imho.) QNAP is terrible for experienced users, but as Baby's First NAS it's absolutely sublime.

> If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing

A queerly sticky ego defense mechanism.

I believe you’d lose in small claims court as all of the streaming companies make it clear you’re purchasing a revokable license.

Movies have been pushing political agendas pretty much since the beginning of cinema.

Buddy I hate to tell you, but this already happened several years ago.

I'm more cynical here. I suspect these are films (or many of them at least) are ones "they" don't want you to see... ever. It's censorship, so no remastering.

"due to our content licensing agreements" ..so this is just Sony placating to someone else's demands. The question is who are "they" and why these films? Maybe these films end up being revised with alternate endings or tweaked characters.

If you see these films, what sort of person will you become? Is that someone who is undesirable?

Terminator 2, Rambo 1, Cliffhanger and Total Recall. We can't have that!

It's just a theory.

Are PlayStation users younger than average? That's important to note too.

Also interesting: recently YT removed the ability to see Likes in one's uploaded video list, only views and comment counts. The message could be: "be well-known, but don't be popular" Why?

Yet I think "Sort by Likes" would be a boon for YT creators and that never even existed, with the Likes column even removed a week or two after I suggested it.