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.

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.

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..

"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.

Otherwise Sony would have refunded these Studio Canal purchases to maintain the trustworthiness of their store

I'm surprised this is even legal without doing a refund or transferring the digital rights to an alternative service.

Thank you, PlayStation Store"

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.