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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't own any way to play physical disc media anymore, and for the handful of movies I watch multiple times (so far 2), it made sense to buy them.

I only buy through Amazon Videos, with the logic being Amazon is going to be around awhile.

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.

> 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.

>Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient)

You answered your own question very efficiently.

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.

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.

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.

Why would Sony bother to show up? 1000 cases x $19.99/movie = $20,000.

I get the latter, but were you also looking to buy some drugs?

I 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.