https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Sony_PlayStation_digital_game_...
I buy a book. I now own the copy of that book. My friend buys the book. They also own a copy of that book. We do not own the same copy of that book
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.
Why not? If you hash the book, it’ll match. It’s word for word the same book (editions not withstanding). It’s not the same if you tie in account permissions, of course. Or is this on a philosophical level?
Edit: the downvotes make no sense, aren’t we talking about digital copies here?
In the physical world, no two letters "a" are exactly the same, not even printed ones.
Or do you suggest that all those letters "a" here are completely distinct from each other?
I don't think ownership works conceptually for digital stuff. There's no owning a letter "a" and there are no two letters "a" that are distinct from each other, unless you count the Cyrillic "а" which is completely different from "a".
Each of these letters "a" might be a different instance, but they are the same letter: "a". Similarly, two copies of a file are still the same exact copy. Just different instances of it.
I saved a copy of your unique comment on my pocket supercomputer, including the letter "a". I didn't ask first; I just did it. It's fine because it doesn't really exist.
Now it's my comment.
Hashes have nothing to do with it.
Hashing said book case is left as an exercise for the reader.
If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend. When the online store eventually goes offline, I can still play all the games I have on disc. If I lose access to my online account, I still own the game. I can just get another console and play it.
If digital purchases let you do all that, I’d be all for them. They’re more convenient and better for the environment. But Sony and friends want to take these rights away from us, without choice. And without a corresponding drop in game prices. I want the PlayStation store (and steam and Nintendo and so on) to let me remove a game from my account and give it to someone else. Let me do that and I wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. But the current online store system is too greedy.
It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?
If Sony stopped trying to push a worse product on their customers, their customers wouldn’t be mad about it.
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.
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.
Don't forget that retail is cheaper than online for consoles from day one!
I like physical media, but this is not objectively true. Digital purchases come with benefits consumers want like quicker access, less materials waste, and (in general) more longevity since a digital product cannot rot or be damaged. Obviously that last one is lessened because the seller is able to yank your "license" at any time, but it generally holds that you're in less danger of a little brother snapping a disc in half or a roommate borrowing and losing it.
FWIW, everything I ever bought digitally in the Nintendo E-Shop for my 3DS (gone since March 2023) still works, can't be disabled remotely, sits on a MicroSD card that I can freely remove and back up, etc. Although Nintendo did implement a system that's supposed to prevent it from working on another 3DS.
I'll listen to Sony management and lawyers whining about copyright after they paid the damages and fines and get out of jail for every rootkit they deployed. Should be any century now.
"own" kind of seems buzzwordy and divisive here. I noticed on re-reading my own post I said you "have" a license. I guess I could say you "own" a license, but that seems a bit weird. Do you own it if it can be revoked? Police/TSA can take your possessions legally.
I'm not on Sony's side here but I think fighting over "ownership" of intangible goods may be the wrong fight. It's a shame more games aren't free software and free culture as that seems easier to reason about and a better cause to fight for. When you go from the free software community bubble to the major video game bubble it feels like regressing 100+ years.
I guess the issue is that in Sony's walled garden they have near total control and we have to chip away at that control with legislation until it's closer to what we expect in other contexts.
But yeah, hopefully the community and ecosystem is aligned enough to massively fuck Sony over this, vote with your wallets people.
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.
Heh, isn't that a move against resale as well? The disc will only work once for disc-to-digital won't it?
And possibly get tied to a specific xbox account.
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.
Personally to me the value of a temporary license to a game is at best $10. Why would I rent a game for $60?
Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.
Still, not as bad as the "digital licensing" hell we're in when it comes to video games, but there is zero ownership at the end of it.
This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.
Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.
And in some cases your car's on-board software needs a constant connection with the vendor's servers (meaning it must be up and you must pay for a license too). https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-happens-to-a-car-w...
It's even worse with houses. Most gen Zs will never ever own their homes, they are implicitly forced to rent only (no ownership in sight). https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-giving-up-on-buying-a-home...
Brave new world.
As is usual in the modern world (and probably since the beginning of time since there's nothing new under the sun for the last ~2,000-3,000 years), not enough people will care for it to have any measurable screwing effect.
It doesn't.
If I bought a game at GameStop we aren't required to continuously reach back out to them every once in a while to check that they're okay with me playing the game I bought from them. And if GameStop goes out of business they aren't going to come knocking on my door to make sure I never play the game again or take it back from me.
Once a game or any other product is purchased from a digital store, it should not require the stores continued existence or permission.
Yes there are some drawbacks in that maybe they could argue then that they could stop allowing redownloading a game you've already purchased but so be it, they'd just be offering a worse experience and users would move away.
We also need to stop allowing unclear language. When we lease a car at a dealership they never use the term "buy" or "own". That's strictly reserved for ownership. We should require the same for other licensed/leased products.
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.
I think I'm just gonna ask Astra to hack this nonsense out of the games I have.
Which would be awesome which is why it won't happen.
Later when the agency considers the software to be "abandonware", it publishes the method.
We absolutely need reform, but it seems difficult (nearly insurmountable) when we have an ineffectual congress and highly effective lobbyists.
So their argument really is that it is unreasonable for anybody to believe they own any of the things they download or purchase digitally? What a leap there.
I mean thats as plain english as you can get to an official rubber stamp on "you will own nothing and you will be happy".
And then they want to have it both ways by interchangeably using the words "revocable license" and "ownership" when it suits their needs. License in small writing/text, but "own" in anything the user might actually reasonably read.
> revoked
I think the dispute is right here.
Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident.
This "opt out" mechanism is made to let Sony lawyers argue that accepting it was your choice so it can't be struck down as forced, even if 99% of users have no idea it exists, by design. Evil all the way down.
Requiring written notification while the TOS being accepted entirely via digital means should be illegal.
Not to mention I think its insane that we allow companies to be able to dictate how citizens are allowed to utilize their legal system.
Hijacking to link to another website that has good information about how binding arbitration is stacked against the consumer/employee:
However, in practice it isn’t fair at all.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/congress-no-one-should...
But yeah; don't join the military.
As far as the military goes, that's very much a special case, and it should remain so. The fact that you can give up certain fundamental legal rights by joining the military is not an argument for being able to give up certain fundamental legal rights by accepting a click-through agreement from Sony.
This pretty much flies in the face of what any reasonable person would think the law should allow IMO
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.
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.
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.
The problem for some of us here is that we're left without a viable transit option, as the yes-pants-no-bagpipes model of transit essentially has a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I suspect if market forces were allowed to operate in this area, we'd see fewer pants and more pipes.
It's ridiculous that rich people just get to use the justice system as a goon to harass normal people.
I studied a bit of this in a university course. Between a lot of organizations, binding arbitration is more efficient (i.e. cheaper) than the legal system. If your company wants to make a deal with another company, binding arbitration often makes sense.
Ditto for 2 individuals: If they had to go through the legal system, it could end up being a war of attrition - the one who has more money to pay lawyers wins. Binding arbitration is a way to "level" that field.
The down side (at least in many, if not all, states) is that you have little recourse if the arbiter is totally unfair. With the legal system, you can appeal, etc.
But between an individual and a large company - no way!
In my last job, the (very big) company automatically enrolls new employees into a binding arbitration agreement, but they do give a timeline to opt out. I was surprised I had that option. I even paid a lawyer to review the docs. He said "Yep, you can (and should) opt out. I'm surprised they even gave you that option."
Having no enforcement would be cheaper too. What makes arbitration preferable is whatever meaningful protection it provides. So what protections does it give consumers in this case, and why are those adequate? "It's more efficient" doesn't answer that. There are practical limits to the number of individual claims Sony can lose. Of course if it's within their rights Sony would very much want to steal ~$1,000 from everyone that uses their services.
This all assumes that the arbitrator isn't getting kickbacks which they are more likely to than the traditional legal system.
Well, that led me down a wild rabbithole.
You buy a car. You pay cash. It’s yours. Afterward, the seller says “oh, and you have to agree to these terms before you’re allowed to start it.” Proper response: fuck off, I already paid you. It’s the same here. If you want to apply extra terms and conditions, negotiate them before the conclusion of the purchase. Anything afterward should be utterly laughed out of court.
Normal human beings had to tore the sticker in order to get the CD-ROM and install Windows, so they automatically 'agreed' to the TOS.
Until it was found out you can actually open a jewel case at the other side by carefully disonnecting the little plastic lids on the other side, thus never damaging the sticker.
My feelings are different where there's grave power imbalances like you describe, but there's very little about dealing with a large corporations that is just or dignified these days.
> In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law
47/50 states also provide for this right in their constitutions. the remaining three don't have it in their constitution but still have legislation or rules supporting it
Seems like probably a good feature of American justice?
I was recently reviewing a collective bargaining agreement (after being approached by a campaign to add my job category to an existing union at my employer), and was surprised to find that it forced arbitration for all employee disputes, with no opt out. It's not just employers that use binding arbitration to take away workers' rights.
Just like being able to commit yourself to showing up to work everyday restricts your freedom. But it's essential to getting the other party to give up something in consideration.
Of course, you can argue that consumers should be treated like legal babies that can't enter into agreements.
But in any case, employment contracts are weirdly restricted in many places, exactly because lawmakers think workers are metaphorical babies.
You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
To be fair, there's a long history of abusive employers, so it's wise to try to tilt the law in favour of the employee as otherwise they get exploited even more than usual. The nature of employment is typically skewed as employers will have a lot more power than the employees - that's why Unions were invented to try to redress that balance.
> You can have a look at contracts between equals to see that being able to restrict yourself is important.
There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
See eg how here in Singapore we have no minimum wage and basically no unions worth that name, and yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
> There's an important distinction between restricting yourself and signing away inalienable rights. You can certainly agree to restrict your speech so as to not embarrass your employer or give away secrets, but signing away your right to liberty is different.
Granted for the sake of argument. I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
In theory that should work, but I have heard of U.S. companies that try to use non-compete clauses in employment contracts to prevent workers from being able to exercise their right to work in the same industry for a different company.
> here in Singapore we have no minimum wage
Just looked that up as I am not familiar with Singapore (apart from half a day due to airplane issues) and it appears that there is instead a sector specific Progressive Wage Model (PWM) that is mandatory for some of those sectors (e.g. food, retail, cleaning).
> I don't see what that has to do with binding arbitration over licensing of some computer games?
It's the notion of giving up your right to legal redress if Sony suddenly revokes your license to use what you've already paid for.
If you still pay, that's on you.
The US does as well if they can pretend you made it up with "tips".
The reality is that staff then just work for peanuts.
Not when only one person gets to write the contract and terms are take-it-or-leave-it. If there is no chance to negotiate, it is clearly little more than the wealthy abusing the less wealthy to their own advantage.
At some point, the money doesn't flow anymore to the people who refuse to play the extractive game that causes problems in the first place.
* 16 years old Joe buys a $70 cartridge/disc game, already assuming and counting on the $35 that he'll get back on second-hand sell.
That's it. A simple idea that should never cease to be possible, regardless of the medium.
This particular example made games affordable, and it also inadvertently put a concrete price on several other factors like how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase, and how much it costs to keep it for your collection vs. allowing the product to flow back into the community.
If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.
Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.
Nitpick, but in your example, they would cost exactly the same eventually (other than the effort it takes to sell it secondhand), so no reason to wait.
But 30 years of boiling the frog and now we have a megacorp that has absolutely no qualms about maximizing their profits by doing the moral equivalent. The popular conception of what constitutes a transaction, what constitutes ownership, and what is fair use has swung so far away from what consumers want and expect, that I can't believe they're arguing, stupidly, in court, that ownership is "not possible" because one person can buy a game, and then a second person can!
Whatever happened, I dunno. I hate that consumers have become so powerless in the face of relentless erosion of basic transactional norms.
It just reinforces how much I will not be participating in that economy.
That's a very interesting defense. I wonder if it opens up a door maybe Sony would rather keep shut. If I can't own a copy of content because someone else has another copy, how does this play out for piracy? According to Sony's own argument, pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.
Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.
This lawsuit is wasting a lot of time by not simply addressing the long-standing norm of buying a physical object which bundles the content, the license, and it many cases the copyright protection mechanisms.
Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.
Digital goods lack these distinct features but the language looks the same so people are now feeling the rug pull. Hence, the pushback against abandoning disc sales.
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.
Fair point and I should have used less ambiguous terms. I'm also thinking about the "Permitted for Home Use Only" nature of DVDs. Playing DVDs on a projector for profit (assuming no prior permission) is, of course, a breach of their protected rights no different than those who re-stream live sports over IPTV.
It's easy to get caught in the details so I think it's useful to remind ourselves that "Intellectual Property" is fundamentally a temporary legal protection and that everything released to the public becomes public domain eventually, either de jure after N years or de facto (ie. "abandonware").
After all, Sony isn't selling the source code and IP for Resident Evil, they're selling a copy of the packaged software.
E.g. meat and milk industry want us to believe that a "reasonable person" is dumb enough to be confused by labels like "soy milk" or "vegan burger".
I have had three mirrorless Sony cameras (albeit two secondhand), and I think they made what is one of the low-key best hobbyist cameras of its class ever [0], and I don't even much mind their current camera software, which I installed somewhat reluctantly.
But back on the distributable content side, this is a company that hacked customers' PCs with a rootkit. They are a big enough and clumsy enough company to make bad decisions regularly.
[0] the NEX-6, a true joy that I would recommend to anyone who wanted an old knockabout camera even now, though even fourteen years since it was released, its used prices hold up almost too well because I am clearly not the only person who thinks it is lovely
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.
The ones making cameras are Sony Corporation (headquartered in Tokyo).
As far as my understanding goes, the Japanese part is pretty good, while the people in California have lost the plot.
I say this constantly about many topics.
Californians are a super different breed
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.
Wait wait wait. Secondhand you say? We need to dig into that now. Was it a purchase by a binding agreement? Was it an original camera or did the owner made a 3D-printed copy? We have more questions, hold on... :P
(It is, of course, not really out of the question that the first sale doctrine will always completely cover things like subscription-upgradeable cars and cameras)
I bought a few e-books on Apple’s Draconian Store over the years and discovered its ".epub" format is some DRM protected trash.
The whole industry needs correction. Not just Sony.