List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games

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.

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.

It's ridiculous that rich people just get to use the justice system as a goon to harass normal people.

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.

However, in practice it isn’t fair at all.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/congress-no-one-should...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't forget that retail is cheaper than online for consoles from day one!

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.

Hashes have nothing to do with it.

Hashing said book case is left as an exercise for the reader.

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.

I say this constantly about many topics.

Californians are a super different breed

(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)

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.

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 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life

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.

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.

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.