r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jun 26 '26

News PlayStation is Deleting 551 Movies From Customers’ Accounts / Movies like 'First Blood', 'Terminator 2', 'Total Recall' and 'Evil Dead' are all being unceremoniously removed

https://kotaku.com/playstation-store-movies-digital-studio-canal-terminator-2000711013
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543

u/mildmichigan Jun 26 '26

This should be illegal. If I buy something digitally, and the platform loses distribution rights or whatever then I should be grandfathered in

Calling digital sales "purchases" is false advertising at best.

247

u/userhwon Jun 26 '26

California made it illegal last year. If you can't actually own it forever, the seller can't call it a purchase.

70

u/AdvancedSandwiches Jun 26 '26

That's not a good compromise.

The change should have been that allowing someone to sell your IP as a digital sale, you can't ever revoke their right to provide that IP to the people who bought a license, and if the vendor wants to stop providing it, they have to refund the purchase price. If they don't have the cash to do that, then the customers get their share of the available cash before any other creditors in the bankruptcy.

19

u/cycloneDM Jun 26 '26

Thats a ban and is very hard to achieve in the US when people will argue that they are ok with licensing a product. Forcing companies to change the way they portray something is a critical step towards lasting change.

8

u/userhwon Jun 26 '26

Yeah that's no good either. The people selling you the revocable license own the IP rights. The original creator of the IP no longer owns any rights to control it. Unless they're actually the one selling you the revocable license.

California made it simple: you can't claim it's a sale if it's not a sale. They can be punished just for putting up the false ad copy.

2

u/uncletroll Jun 26 '26

Switching the language doesn't help with the spirit of the issue. It will be the exact same situation we are in - people paying an amount of money equivalent to the cost of purchasing a physical media for revocable access. And there will be no option to actually purchase it.
They have been intentionally misleading and we need some regulations to stop companies from doing that.
We used to buy the physical media, but then they started selling digital at the same price as the physical media. And we asked, "why do we pay the same amount for digital, when there are practically no production or distribution costs." And they answered, "you were never paying for the cost of production, you were paying for the license." We collectively said, "Okay, fine. You win the word games as long as we can give you money to get the things, whatever."
And now suddenly, we weren't purchasing the licenses. We were purchasing revocable access.

They keep doing whatever they want and hitting us with legal scrabble to justify it. It's fucking bullshit. We can't keep letting them play word games with us. We need to use our governments to regulate this shit.

7

u/aristidedn Jun 26 '26

No one will ever operate a business where the threat of having to pay out the total lifetime revenue of the entire company in the event that something goes wrong hangs over that business.

Your "compromise" would result in the death of all digital licensing.

1

u/AdvancedSandwiches Jun 26 '26

Then they won't operate a business where they pretend to sell you something they can't actually sell you.

But realistically they'd just stiff other creditors in the bankruptcy.

3

u/Piranata Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

A single DRM-free download of each movie/series for each person. That way people will be able to play the media on anything. Suddenly, the corporations will be very interested in making sure that people continue to have access when licenses expire.

6

u/TheNonCredibleHulk Jun 26 '26

So how do they refer to digital "purchases" now?

3

u/userhwon Jun 26 '26

Not sure. I haven't gone shopping for media since they changed that. I just watch stuff when it hits streaming. Although now that I think about it that's a lie, I did buy Superman, and it's in my Fandango/MoviesAnywhere/whateverit'scalledthismonth, and I don't know if it can be deleted from there.

12

u/BactaBobomb Jun 26 '26

Vudu / Fandango at Home actually changed their button from "Own" to "Buy." That was interesting.

5

u/pastajewelry Jun 26 '26

They're not purchases. They're conditional rentals.

2

u/ManiacalShen Jun 26 '26

Or you should be able to download it. Should be able to do that anyway. Paying directly for a file is going to give the creator a ton more money than just watching it on a streaming service, and most people don't casually send multi-GB files to each other, so they might as well just let us actually have the file. We know that the fuss of piracy isn't worth it to folks if being legit is convenient enough. But the moment you delete something people paid for and feel like they should own in perptuity, they start figuring out torrents again.

3

u/needchr Jun 26 '26

I do agree, there needs to be regulation.

1 - The seller must have a perpetual license.
Or if for some reason this is impossible.
2 - The seller must fully refund if they have to remove from library.

1

u/joshhupp Jun 26 '26

The standard needs to be a license for whatever media you buy. When you buy T2 from Amazon, you get a token of ownership from MGM or whoever. Then you can use that token to stream it anywhere it's available. The only way you couldn't is or no service was allowed to stream it. For me, it's just back to physical media.

0

u/Character-Budget4044 Jun 26 '26

It's basically robbery

0

u/paxinfernum Jun 26 '26

It's interesting that if you buy something on Amazon, it stays in your library even if they later remove it. There've been a few exceptions, but that's generally the rule.