Sony has dropped a bombshell that sets off all the alarms about digital ownership. The company has announced it will remove 551 movies from PlayStation Store accounts, including classics like Terminator 2, Rambo: First Blood, The Deer Hunter and Bridget Jones’s Diary. If you bought them digitally, they will disappear from your library and you won’t be able to watch them again.
The reason is that Sony has lost the distribution rights to these titles, which belong to the French studio Studio Canal. When you buy a movie on PlayStation Store, what you really acquire is a license to watch it as long as the store has permission to offer it to you. If that permission expires, the platform can remove it from your library without you being able to do anything. It’s the same logic used by other platforms like Netflix or Amazon, but here the difference is that you paid for each movie, you don’t pay a subscription.
This case proves something that digital rights advocates have been repeating for years: when you buy digital content —movies, music, video games— you’re not really the owner of anything. You only have a temporary permission that the company can revoke whenever it wants. Meanwhile, if you had bought those same movies on DVD or Blu-ray, nobody could come into your house and take them away. The question left hanging is: will we keep accepting paying for things that don’t belong to us?
— Marta, for inteligencia intermitente.
