Comment by kelvinjps10
3 days ago
I feel these license agreements have to be set up in such a way people that already bought their movies get to keep them, like okay Sony lost the licences and they shouldn't sell it to new customers but existing customers should get to keep their movies. Since companies don't care the government needs to force their hand and put it into law
Exactly. Sony/Playstation can lose their right to issue further licenses, but the existing licenses should be honoured. As that's apparently not baked into the existing contracts, someone needs to legislate that such basic consumer rights are required, and all existing and prior contracts interpreted as if these rights were in place.
Make it work the same as delisted games where you can go into your purchase history and click download.
The problem is that existing customers don't "have" anything. They stream the movie on demand from Sony's servers. And Sony can't keep the movie on their server anymore. The entire delivery model is broken.
It's just a matter of negotiating sensible licensing deals. But that would require the distributors to actually care a little bit about not screwing over their customers.
Look how it works over at Steam. If a license expires, even if the publisher goes out of business, Steam removes a game from its storefront, but the files are still on their servers and they keep them available for anyone who purchased a license. I think the only cases where they actually removed files from their servers and blocked redownloads were when there was an actual legal or liability issue forbidding them from continuing to offer the files (for example if they contain malware).
Both parties are incentivized for this abuse of consumer ownership. When this deal was arranged, there was plenty of precedent. Sony probably got a better price from Studio Canal by including the provision to mandate removing the films from customer accounts when the contract ended. The studio would be ok with the discount because it would improve leverage with the next customer, to whom it could pitch that their market is larger. No one (or at least no PlayStation customers) currently own their product.
Even if they did download the movie, Sony would be legally required to remotely delete it, because they can. The only way that doesn't happen is if they can't, such as when you download an mp3 on a PC from a company that is not Microsoft.
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