Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of the party imposing these terms.

Courts often look at these contracts differently, but around the world, they allow them to exist because they are useful. A good example are the "terms of service" for public or private transit. If the carrier can't define some common-sense rules, like that you can be kicked out or fined for not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus, it'd complicate things.

The legal standard is basically that the rules hold unless they're unreasonable or unconscionable. But of course, what's seen as reasonable depends on the country, the state, and the judge.

Honestly, nowadays I'm tending towards the idea that huge TOS or EULAs (at all) should be criminalized.

It's ridiculous that rich people just get to use the justice system as a goon to harass normal people.

Disney argued that the family of a man who died at one of their parks couldn't sue because he had signed up for Disney+, which has binding arbitration terms: https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit...

This pretty much flies in the face of what any reasonable person would think the law should allow IMO

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...

Guest died from allergic reaction despite informing staff multiple times of the risk, but the case was dismissed because they had signed up for Disney+ years prior.

Here’s a decent up-to-date report on this (now-resolved) case: https://www.allergicliving.com/2026/03/03/lawsuit-against-di...

Since I stopped being a poor student, I pay for media that I consume so that the creators can continue to create. I told my wife that I’d renew my Disney+ subscription after the clocks change and we have less hours of daylight. But now I think it’s morally wrong to give Disney any money – even if they do make great shows like Andor.

Binding arbitration as an abstract concept seems fair (really, the entire court system is a complicated system for binding arbitration)

However, in practice it isn’t fair at all.

To be fair, this example doesn't work because those chip bags are two physically different objects that one can consume.

Sony is trying to argue that because they are selling digital copies, that consumers cannot be granted rights to their copy because they can't transfer the intellectual property rights, which is complete nonsense. I have a 1999 DVD copy of The Matrix that I have owned for 27 years, and short of the physical disc-rot, I will be able to play that DVD until the day I die, and Warner Bros can't do anything about it unless I try reselling new copies, or claiming authorship because, despite owning the disc, I do not own the rights to the movie...

A download isn't any different just because it lacks a physical form.

But consumers still pay it. No one has to play video games.

I am in no way defending Sony here but I think it’s beside to the point to chastise them for selling a worse product (I mean revocable license) for the same price because consumers continue to choose to pay that price. And this is not a purchase made out of necessity or duress such as food or housing.

> Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.

Because property law is not defined in terms of hashes. Why would you expect that property law operates on a mathematical construct that was discovered centuries after it?

It's about how copyright law was originally conceived. It did not particularly care about what you did with the information, apart from when you copied it. Copyright is only about the right to make more copies of a work (hence the name!), it doesn't give you any particular rights on its own to what anyone does with any given copy of a work, such as reselling it. This has changed more recently with (first with software) the concept of buying a license to a work as the primary means of purchasing it, which is far more restrictive.

Two copies means two copies. I have a copy, my house burns down, your copy is fine.

Hashes have nothing to do with it.

I can sell my copy of the book to a third person without interfering with your copy. And I can do so without the involvement or permission of the publisher or book store.

If I buy a game, and my friend buys a game, we can both own a copy of the game, without owning the same copy. My disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is not the same as my friend's disc of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

If I buy a Billy book case from IKEA, is it not the same as your Billy book case?

Hashing said book case is left as an exercise for the reader.

games are actual physical bits stored somewhere.

It is a distinct physical object. Whether anyone stored digital information about it in a bit-wise manner, does not change that fact of a physical object being unique. The same book can not co-exist at the very same place and location and time in this universe. That makes no sense.

> Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.

That wasn't the direction I was going towards. Sony treats digital copies as if only one can have the ownership rights attached to it. This logic can be extended to any other right.

> Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.

The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce. The license is attached to the content of the DVD, not the plastic disc per se. This license gives me the right to read that disk and send that digital copy to my output device. It's also why I can't just copy the content to a disc I own and call it a day. So a digital copy read straight from Sony's storage and sent to my output device can very well have the same license attached to it.

To be honest, I think it's a stupid defense but one that may just fly in places with the best justice money can buy. And there's a lot of money trying to buy a carte blanche to not give ownership rights to digital content, coming from every producer or distributor of such content.

> the people in California have lost the plot

I say this constantly about many topics.

Californians are a super different breed

They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.

More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.

But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.

They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.

So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.

They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.

The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.

Oh, I do. I mean part of what is so great about these cameras is their everyman quality — plus secondhand availability.

There is a Sony mirrorless camera at essentially every secondhand price point you can imagine.

At heart, I am a Nikon guy. My wallet, though, is a proper little Sony fanboi.

It's ridiculous to me that trying to play some recent games from Microsoft-affiliated studios requires me to sign in with a Microsoft account even just to play also malone. Paying them for Halo MCC or Gears 5 isn't enough to be able to play the campaign alone; the main menu is literally blocked by a sign-in screen. There's no reason whatsoever this should be allowed.

One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.

The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.

On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life

Xbox already lost one console war over plans to stop the second hand market so they know how important it is to players. Their new disc to digital feature is proof they are looking at Sony's mistakes and slowly moving in the opposite direction. It basically removes the most serious thing that made physical games less convenient.

If the PS6 is digital only and Xbox doubles down on discs it might be a slam dunk victory. Not all players understand or care about it now, but if they explain it well in the launch window and combine that with their back compat history I think they have a good chance to win.

Even Microsoft knows that gaming is a competitive market and pulling customers from PlayStation is better than trying to extract as much as possible from your existing user base. One Game Pass sub is worth more than marketplace fees from 3 extra games you would normally buy used.

> Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony

That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.

The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.

Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.

No of course not, they merely license it from the government /s (or not /s? this whole thing is confusing)

everyone believes something different, everyone knows a different set of facts, everyone thinks of themselves as reasonable, and the law depends on what a reasonable person might believe. absent some objective standard of reasonability it's all just places where you can inject ambiguity and then leverage that ambiguity to make the law shift like sands in the wind while still thinking of it as absolute and immutable. "Reasonable people understand that words don't always mean what their common definition would imply and it's on the consumer to know the difference" for Sony immediately followed "reasonable people assume words mean what is implied by their common definition and it's on the producer to account for that" for the California Dairy Council, then when we accuse them of crafting separate laws for separate clients they can say "well we just applied the reasonable person standard here the same way we would for anyone else".

PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.

You're right! that's a bug in my comment then (or more like a spec redundancy I guess) :)