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I don't think this type of legislation will have any kind of real world effect. Apple App store labels all their buttons with "Get". Google Play Store just prints the price on the button for paid apps/games.

I've wondered how they'll draw the line on this. If Amazon or Apple has a buy button and it means you get to have ongoing access to the content for as long as Amazon/Apple is around, then for a 30 year old person there's a decent chance that's as good as buying the thing. But if it's hazier, as in the case of Sony's revocation based on losing rights in later years, then you're obviously not getting the same thing. How does CA's law apply to this continuum of circumstances?

Remember that the power is always with the people. We can enact any law we want

Amazon still shows me a buy option for movies?

Effective after most people likely bought their movies.

Is it working/being enforced? Anecdotally I haven't seen or heard of any changes in verbiage, but I haven't been paying that much attention.

Not even a defense of Apple here… but I think most everyone does know. We just agree to bury our heads in the sand and not to do anything about it as long as service continues in good faith.

It comes up occasionally ever few years, whenever Amazon claws back an ebook or something like this (particularly egregious) thing happens. But then we just go back to normal.

Blurays are obscenely customer hostile too, but I decided a long time ago that they’re as close as I’m getting to owning a copy.

At least I have way to inoculate myself against this scenario without outright stealing.

But now even Blurays are getting harder to buy. Some of the bigger titles I try to buy aren’t being made… or never were (streamer exclusives).

So basically "you should have expected to be scammed because everyone knows we are always scamming everyone"

Then the button should say "Buy Revocable License."

Inevitably people will ask what that means. That will lead to a FAQ on the company's site somewhere, and various videos on the social media explaining it periodically with lots of comments. That will be a good thing.

Corporate marketing teams will eventually settle on something better sounding but technically legal, something like "Premier Anytime Access" for specific movies (versus "Bronze 24-hr Access"), or similar.

Selling someone a license, and then revoking it is like destruction of property. The injured party is owed a refund in the amount of the present day replacement cost.

It's the same as if someone sold you a toaster with a remote self-destruct feature, and then invoked the self-destruct. They owe you a new toaster.

They will argue that, but this is unlikely to hold up in front of court even in the US.

The problem isn't it being illegal.

But they instead bank on most people not having the means (money/time) or will to sue them over this. Especially given that the actual "damages" you can effectively sue for often relatively small for most users (likely <15€ per movie, so for most account <100€ per person "per situation where you could sue").

And if there is an exception (someones losing hundreds of movies or class action law suite) settling is likely still cheaper for Sony.

This is the problem with many laws the cost of breaching them is often too small (but only IFF you are a huge company with their own lawyer department etc.).

If management would be personally liable with _mandatory prison sentences_ for the CEO/Company Owners if it seems the law was knowingly breached because penalties are cheaper then benefits (or repeated offenses etc.) things probably would look quite different.

Other approaches to counter this includes things like penalties of base+%of yearly revenue, %yearly Profite etc. The problem here is this approaches are often a mix of unfair (e.g. same revenue with large profit margin is penalized way less) and/or can be fudged/circumvented (e.g. if based on profit, but even if based on revenue it can be partially circumvented in some situations. So I think making executive personally liable might be the only way to fix this.

The problem is that we've always been buying licences, it's just that the licence used to be attached to a physical object, so transferring the licence was as easy as transferring ownership of that physical object.

It's never been legal to copy a book, film, or music album and sell the copies, for example, because the licence doesn't allow it. Hence freeware, shareware, and copyleft licences.

"Stealing" in basically all common law jurisdictions requires intent to deprive the rightful owner of the property.

Copying something isn't stealing by any legal definition. It's copyright infringement.

Piracy isn’t stealing because copies don’t destroy the original

What? "You never had a license" - no, of course not, that's not what buying is. You had a phonograph record or whatever, and it didn't get replaced when worn out in the same way that the shoe manufacturer doesn't replace your worn out shoes which you have bought. Region locking, what about it? It's interference with ownership too.

Things you can buy have to be accurately described as what you actually get, so "buy this" ought to be an accurate description of what the deal actually is, too.

A $10m fine for mobile telcos is a rounding error. “Softer quarter due to outstanding legal and regulatory obligations…” The fines need to be a standard percentage of income or the personal assets / freedom of officers needs to be on the line if we want those punishments to change behavior.

Why, do you want Sony to add mandatory Digital ID to their platform?

Respectfully, and for the pun: all of those are as ass as IANAL.

I don’t understand what is wrong with NAL/NLA not a lawyer/not legal advice.

That's a truly weird analogy.

>I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation

As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete.

I don't think there is a mass exodus coming up, but a slow decline in console gaming for certain types of gamers, peaking in ps6 and digital only coming out is possible - whether that is more of a hit than the control of the market Sony will get from digital only is another question though.

For example I doubt it'll stop many playing GTA 6, but general purchases on Sony vs PC may be weighted to the latter a bit more now than previously as that physical collection part is dead now for Sony, and arguably worse than the PC market in terms of there being only one store front for digital.

Splatoon is mainly a competitive multiplayer shooter but the new Raiders game is a more traditional adventure game, I expect the sales for it will be insignificant as far as actually pushing new consoles.

The main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.

Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with settings and drivers. I think we've all had that experience on PC (cough Bethesda cough), but I doubt to the degree the console-side would have you believe. Most AAA games will self-optimize their settings to a playable state, and indie games don't tend to demand more than your standard gaming laptop can provide...but I'm sure we've all been burned some 10-odd years ago buying a Steam game that just wouldn't run on your iGPU...that experience sticks around in the brain a while

> Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.

This has almost never been true. GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.

Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't. Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows, except for GPUs, which should probably be renamed to Model Training Units.

I would posit that what we're seeing is a reflection of a content problem, not hardware. Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base. People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.

That doesn't really make sense. Consoles have always occupied a different space to PCs, not least because they plug into living room TVs. Very few people are going to trade that for a (considerably more expensive) PC.

Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc. Consoles are pick up and go. I very much doubt they're dead yet.

I think they still make sense for the non technical user. Having an idiomatic control makes setup far easier than on a PC and the UI for a console is designed to be used with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. This makes dealing with a television easier. I don't see consoles disappearing ever for those reasons.

Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.

Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.

>Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands

This is entirely wrong. Consoles have been riding consistency and ease of use. Sure, if you look just at the spec sheet consoles make no sense. But when you look at the whole experience combined with price, this is where consoles have always won. It's always been easier to hook my console up to the TV and start playing. The Steambox closes this gap with the overall experience, but still loses out on price.

If consoles continue to enshittify, this might change.

Another appeal of consoles is being able to sit on a couch and play. Most PC chairs are not as comfortable.

The thing with PCs is... they are open. Open means piracy and more importantly it means cheats.

A console is a far easier thing to defend against cheaters than a PC - absent true hardware vulnerabilities (which become more and more expensive, now that stuff like voltage glitching, clock cutting and whatnot is all known and accounted for), you are basically limited to botted input and AI-assistance based on what can be seen on the screen.

Specialized graphics hardware hasn’t been the selling point of having a console since at least 2002 with the first XBox.

The selling point of consoles is that they’re a software platform, with development incentives, standardized hardware, standardized UI conventions, and a centralized storefront to be able to conveniently and natively play stuff on your TV without fussing about.

Valve has barely started to muscle in on the platform benefits of gaming on a PlayStation or XBox, but the more they start to do so the more they end up making design trade-offs that start to look like another console.

Consoles are suffering from the RAM price crisis just as much as PCs.

Video game streaming requires a high quality internet connection to a nearby data center. It can work in certain places but there's always going to be places where it doesn't work, and consoles don't have that problem.

The thing about PC though is that there is no exclusivity. Steam built an extremely well respected brand but if that were to turn, the moat is shallow, install a competing client and buy games from there instead. The only internal competition for consoles is digital or physical retail (Or I guess buying game codes could be pseudo-digital).

The difference is that there is no one steward. You don't need steam, there are lots of other ways to get your games. GoG, Itch.io, Windows Store, or just the developers webpage.

On PlayStation, switch, or Xbox you have only one gatekeeper, and they do not respect you

HNers continue to never know that they are in their own bubble. The same reason why Linux on the Desktop is an ongoing meme.

Yeah. I gave up a couple of years ago after Epic broke my account and I lost my purchases irrecoverably. I have actually started playing board games with people now. This is so much better for me. And cheaper. And you can't taken them away.

Some adults then lose that living room to their offspring and have to go back to playing in the bedroom.

I speak from experience

I think the steam deck proved otherwise too..

I haven't had enough motivation to sit on my couch and game after a long day ..

But the same game, in bed, on my deck was so much nicer..

All I can now say is having a dedicated device, that's not your laptop/computer to play games is definitely a market - be it Steam machine (/custom builds), hand held gaming, or just regular consoles..

Yeah so get a PC and install some games

The cloud gaming echo chamber has conveniently arrived to save the day by mimicking the solution to fix the problem the same industry created. Problem, Reaction, Solution.

Sadly, the future might be phone gaming. The mobile gaming market is as big as the console and PC markets combined.

Its ok for some thing but the lag is simply too much for popular genres of games.

What is that, like stadia?

Sadly, I agree with you. I don't like it, but it seems pretty clear.

Doesn't matter. It should be up to the corporation to figure it out or else it's illegal and they get fined 300% of their total yearly revenue for each affected person.

This is nothing new and the reason I went from being the biggest media collector to collecting nothing now.

To put it in perspective, I bought Get Him to the Greek on Prime video shortly after it came out.

A month later, the "exclusive broadcast rights" changed, and I was no longer able to access it.

First, I think people should buy from GoG for exactly this reason.

But also, the difference is that Steam has as far as I can tell never yanked a game from someone's account and failed to refund them for it. Games either get delisted and you retain access to them or they're removed entirely and they refund you. The only exception is online-only games whose developer stops maintaining the server, but I think it's reasonable for steam to not claim responsibility for the developer's malfeasance.

So Steam has this model of licensing-not-ownership on paper but in practice treats purchases as much closer to ownership. Sony clearly does not.

Time for libraries to start carrying hard drives full of pirated copies, I guess.

Depending on your library, you might be able to stream the same movies online for free. Check their web site.

Remember Meraki?

Blu-Ray key revocation does not work that way. Players with revoked keys simply can't play discs that were encrypted to disallow them.

Discs that worked with a player will continue to work, as long as the physical mechanisms are still good.

Technically, maybe, since the player authenticates with the drive, if you updated the firmware on the drive you could lockout the player. I could see windows update potentially helpfully pushing a bd-rom drive firmware update, but it's not happening on a standalone player.

It's not ideal that your existing player might not read new discs, but hopefully you use your discs soon after purchase and you could return them if you can't get a firmware update with a new key. (Of course, I'm guilty of buying discs to watch eventually; will be annoying if my keys were revoked)

How does that work if my player is offline? A dedicated BluRay player has no reason to connect to the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... outlaws circumvention of DRM.

It is legal to rip a digital copy of a movie you purcahsed from itunes to your hard drive?

I would have assumed it would have at least been against whatever TOC you agreed to when signing up to itunes.

Well I'd say these are different risks. It's either tied to the agreement Sony has with the movie provider, or with the platform itself. Either one could pull out. Or, my point, the company could also go under.

What is the agreement tied to?

It'd be a case where the spirit of the law clashes with the letter of the law.

Sony's lawyers would argue about how things are, while your defense has to argue about how things should be.

Which way it goes likely depends on how sympathetic the judge is rather than actual arguments being made.

I wonder if their use of a "buy" button would potentially weaken their case regardless of the language they put in the EULA.

Into and Beyond the Spiderverse are flawless movies.

Madame Web anyone