PlayStation putting out a legal notice saying they’re removing 500+ movies from user accounts days before announcing they’re getting rid of physical discs for games is an interesting choice
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Saw an interesting take on bsky that was basically like... okay look, physical media is great, but so is digital. Owning something digitally rules--it takes up less space, it's easier to transport, it weighs less. This move by Sony is not bad because it forces people to digital, it's bad because digital media does not have the same protections that physical media does.
And I think I agree. Like, once you buy a disc, that's yours, the company that owns the store where you bought it can't come in and yank it away from you. The problem with digital media as it exists right now is that the store that sold it to you CAN take it away. We all agree this is bullshit! But the solution is not always a hard pivot to physical media, because not everyone has the physical space to store all that media. A spacious hard drive takes up less physical space than even one of those dvd storage books, to say nothing of a dedicated dvd shelf.
So I think where I've landed is that if a company is only going to offer digital titles, it must also agree to be held liable if it ever takes something you have paid for away. At minimum the company must offer a refund. At maximum, fines not for the company as a whole but for individual executives. Make the CEO of Sony pay for each and every title you bought through them that it takes away.
(Remember the wisdom of John Rogers (one of the Leverage guys): if the fine is levied on the company as a whole, then it becomes merely a cost of doing business and not a deterrent.)
Anyway, I like both, and I think owning a digital product should be as robustly protected as owning a physical product, including secondhand sales.
You know, revocability isn't inherent to digital. When I buy something on Bandcamp and download it, that file is mine. It's on my hard drive, it's as much of a physical thing in my possession as if it were on a CD. (Which is, after all, just a different disk holding a digital file!)
Even if Bandcamp got possessed by Satan they couldn't take my music back. They're not putting DRM on it now, they're not forcing me to stream it from their server every time I want to listen now; so in the future they don't even have the option.
We don't need to go back to schlepping physical media. We don't even need to force companies to keep behaving a certain way forever. We just need to stop accepting that they'll ACTIVELY CIRCUMVENT our innate ability to own our own media in the name of intellectual property and shareholder profits.
