Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

by kugelblitz • 23 days ago

241 130 23 days ago

Discussion: "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 26-jun-2026 208 comments

theonemind• 23 days ago

I suppose they started with 451 and decided it was too on-the-nose.

throw0101d• 23 days ago

"Purchased".

tribal808• 23 days ago

silk road... torrent...

nativeit• 23 days ago

I get the latter, but were you also looking to buy some drugs?

pavel_lishin3• 23 days ago

You expect them to sit through "Big Ass Spider!" sober?

CivBase• 23 days ago

"I buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

trashb• 23 days ago

I hate this phrase, it is not a good analog for the situation and it slanders piracy. I understand the idea behind it and I hate the streaming/renting/digital purchase model as much as the next guy.

If you don't want to pay for streaming own up to it, buy it on physical or steal it (make an illegitimate copy). But don't pretend you would pay for it if it was delivered in a different agreement.

Do you expect to keep driving a rented car forever? Even if the car is only available through rent?

wtetzner• 23 days ago

Do you expect to keep driving a rented car forever? Even if the car is only available through rent?

TBH I'd be a lot happier if they just called in "renting" instead of "buying" the movie. If you don't get to own it, why do they get to refer to it as "buying"?

mghackerlady4• 23 days ago

Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip (or redeem the digital code version that often comes with modern releases, though those tend to have DRM). Even then, why do people buy from the playstation store? I could maybe understand that when the Vita was still around, but nowadays it seems like an odd choice

fullshark• 23 days ago

I "bought" a few digital kids movies because kids want to watch them over and over and I didn't want to deal with handling physical media.

bombcar4• 23 days ago

17,059,798,573 views for Baby Shark and climbing ...

LollipopYakuza• 23 days ago

Yes, it doesn't sound like a wise decision given what we know about the usual practices of those services. But the average consumer is not as savvy as us HN users. I would not blame someone for expecting to own permanent access to the content if they purchase it. This only happens because big Sony and such are not held accountable of their actions, they are the one to blame.

pavel_lishin3• 23 days ago

Convenience is 99% of the answer.

Plus, when "renting" a movie costs $3.99, and "buying" it costs $5.99, there's not a particular reason to not click the "purchase" button.

bombcar4• 23 days ago

I wish more platforms would let you rent for $4, and then show you an "upgrade to buy for $3" or similar for a week afterwards.

Netcob2• 23 days ago

Depends on your habits. I don't re-watch most of the movie I see.

com2kid2• 23 days ago

I don't own any way to play physical disc media anymore, and for the handful of movies I watch multiple times (so far 2), it made sense to buy them.

I only buy through Amazon Videos, with the logic being Amazon is going to be around awhile.

xienze2• 23 days ago

I only buy through Amazon Videos, with the logic being Amazon is going to be around awhile.

Sony will be around a while too, but as you've just seen here, it's not about how healthy the company hosting the video files is.

xienze2• 23 days ago

Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip

You're forgetting there's a slice of people who want to "own" a movie library but don't have the technical acumen to rip and/or (more importantly) host (consider that you'd have to stand up a Jellyfin server and have a good amount of HDD space -- I personally have 50TB).

Again, it's not _that_ hard in general but daunting enough and with high enough startup costs to dissuade a lot of people.

clintonb• 23 days ago

I have the technical acumen and money, but zero desire or time to spend ripping discs. It's far too easy to raid the "five dollar bin" at MoviesAnywhere (like I used to do at Wal-Mart and Best Buy).

Licensing issues like Sony's aside, the studios did MoviesAnywhere right. I can buy the disc (often used) and redeem the code, or buy digitally, and download/stream everywhere that matters to me and my family.

darrylb42• 23 days ago

And time. I have archived some of my collection, but it does take a lot of time to rip the disks, test that they worked correctly. Then years later find out you did something wrong and there is no sound anymore, or you just got stereo and the surround mix is broken.

Streaming is so easy, don't need to find a disk. Load it, watch all the ads and warnings.

mrguyorama• 23 days ago

Owning a shelf and a blueray player requires zero "Technical acumen" and gets you far cheaper media than any of the online services, but requires you to plan at least a couple days ahead of time. That's the crux.

People are willing to give up everything for not having to wait a couple days to watch a movie.

eduction2• 23 days ago

Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient)

You answered your own question very efficiently.

mghackerlady4• 23 days ago

Right, but I was referring to the concept of watching a movie digitally in general, whether that be streaming, renting, buying, torrenting, ripping, whatever. My question is why do people buy movies digitally as opposed to any of those other options

basisword2• 23 days ago

If you're going to watch it multiple times it's cheaper to buy than rent (especially if you see it on offer). With streaming you're relying that at least one of the providers has what you want and then you have to pay for a month to watch it if you're not already subscribed. I've also found streaming services are way more likely to censor older content.

notapenny• 23 days ago

For me it's usually just a cost thing. Some movies I just know I'm going to watch multiple times, certain ones even annually. Clicking buy generally already makes sense if you're going to watch it twice. Wouldn't buy it from the PS store though, it seems like such a niche outside their core business that I'd be worried they would pull exactly what they pulled here.

happyopossum• 23 days ago

Kids and convenience. 99% of the movies I’ve bought from iTunes are kids movies. Some of them were watched over and over and over.

DVDs and Blu-rays I purchased from the same era required a) advance planning and b) care. To the second point, most of the physical media is now destroyed (scratched, stepped on, lost, or just degraded), but I still have access to the copy of Cars I bought almost 20 years ago from Apple.

jon-wood• 23 days ago

Because I’m actually not going to lose much sleep if Apple revoke my license for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and given I’ve had digital purchases from them since [checks notes] literally two decades ago and not one of them has to my knowledge been revoked I’m reasonably comfortable that they’ll probably stick around for as long as I do, after which I’m going to rapidly cease caring about my collection of films and TV.

smackeyacky2• 23 days ago

Convenience. I don’t buy many movies digitally but it’s usually because the family is over and they want to watch something new.

Of course I may then pirate it afterwards so I can keep a backup of my purchased movie.

mghackerlady4• 23 days ago

Right but wouldn't you just stream or rent it then? afaik PlayStation, amazon, and itunes all have a rent option

yardie• 23 days ago

I don't consider anything digital as being bought unless I own it free and clear, unencumbered of any encryption. Not interested in anyone's "digital locker" or storage scheme. I have 20 years of music bought digitally through iTunes and Amazon. I can still play them to this day without needing to check-in with a licensing server. That is ownership. That is why I don't buy encrypted movies.

pavel_lishin3• 23 days ago

I think Heinlein said, "You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run."

I think something similar applies to digital media - you don't truly own anything that's not stored in bits on a hard drive that you can pick up and put in your pocket.

Wowfunhappy• 23 days ago

due to our content licensing agreements

Aka, due to their mistake. When Sony originally signed an agreement, they should have insisted on a perpetual license for anything already in the customer's library.

I was initially inclined toward some minimal sympathy for Sony here, but I see no good faith reason why they'd sign a licensing agreement which allows the other party to do this.

TheCondor• 23 days ago

A friend and I were talking about this. What would you pay for it?

When iTunes + came out, you had 2 options, you could buy a song for $0.99 or you could be the plus version for more, I don't remember but it was like $1.35 or something. Plus had a higher bit rate and it wasn't encrypted.

Suppose you could buy a movie for $12.00, how much would you pay for the forever version? $30?

jerf• 23 days ago

I feel like you're kind of making this more complicated than it actually is, either because you're overcomplicating it or because you're trying to tee up some rhetorical point, but the answer to your question is really quite simple and objective: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=movie&rh=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A...

You don't need to ask a hypothetical, the market has an answer.

To the extent your reply is "but that's not exactly what my question is", my point is that the market is already pricing all sorts of situations and the market would have no problem pricing just one more possibility into the already complicated market. Including "piracy", and people like me who are treating the vast majority of DVDs and BluRays as just a delivery mechanism for streams rather than "discs".

nekusar4• 23 days ago

Right now, I won't pay a fucking cent.

I'll pirate it off of Usenet or Torrents.

I get a strictly better experience if I pirate. Whereas I'm treated like a criminal and sold a much worse experience if I pay.

So, fuck paying. I'm not going to pay for abuse.

madduci• 23 days ago

If I buy a DVD, it costs a fixed price.

Why should it be variable, if we talk about digital media? Storage and content streaming is cheaper than embracing a whole logistic (producing DVDs/BlueRays, packaging, shipping).

But here we are again: if you buy something digital, you just pay for a "usage license", you don't own anything at all. After all these years or decades, I am still surprised that people expect to own digital content, forever

dfxm124• 23 days ago

Terminator 2 is currently $8 for a bluray on amazon. $10 for a DVD. This is reasonably a forever version.

lstodd4• 23 days ago

I would pay zero. I would just use torrents.

ksec• 23 days ago

On a similar scale, if I am paying 35% more for the plus on music, I expect the same for movies around $15 or up to $18.

Netcob2• 23 days ago

Depends on what those $12 "buy" me. In Sony's case, "buying" meant "renting until Sony's license expires", which they could have displayed on the product page.

I very rarely re-watch movies within a few months. So if I buy one, I want to know that I can watch it again in one, 10 or 30 years (if the format can still be played). Which is not guaranteed even with blu-rays mostly thanks to DRM. But what I'd be buying is not having to think about any deadlines.

If I'm okay with a deadline, I might as well rent the movie for a weekend, in which case I expect it to be less than $12.

robinsonb5• 23 days ago

I would pay what I used to pay for DVDs.

breezeTrowel• 23 days ago

You'd pay for it what you paid for it. Did the "Buy" button specify that you were buying the movie or did it say you were simply leasing the film and that it can be removed at any time due to licensing agreement over which you (as the buyer) had no control over?

js2• 23 days ago

$1.29 - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/05/30Apple-Launches-iTun...

18 months later the entire library became DRM-free iTunes Plus quality and you could upgrade existing songs you had already purchased or that you had in your library via iTunes Match.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/01/06Changes-Coming-to-t...

nosrepa• 23 days ago

I have fond memories of buying those 99 cents songs with coke caps my grandparents collected for me that had codes for itunes on them. Then I'd burn those to a cdrw and rip them again to remove the drm. I still have those files to this day.

snapplebobapple• 23 days ago

Zero dollars. Because the marginal cost of production is zero and the movie production budget is just a sunk cost. We need to cut copyright terms back to the original term of 14 years and call it a day. Instead of the commons being ceded to benefit itself with hifher content production, the commons was just robbed to give us current copyright law

wat10000• 23 days ago

A mistake suggests that it's accidental and they didn't mean it. To the extent a corporation can know things, they knew exactly how this was set up. This is fraud.

ajsnigrutin• 23 days ago

They could still refund all those purchases and come out good here, but we all know they won't.

crooked-v• 23 days ago

I have to wonder what small claims court judges would think of it. Get a few hundred cases filed across the US and the travel expense for Sony could be significant.

tiahura3• 23 days ago

Why would Sony bother to show up? 1000 cases x $19.99/movie = $20,000.

paxys3• 23 days ago

People also forget that the burden of collection is on you. Good luck chasing Sony for that $20 even if the court has ruled in your favor.

nekusar4• 23 days ago

And this smells of fraud.

If it was a real sale, then they could not do this remote control/deletion at a distance.

Shit I buy at Walmart can't be physically taken away from me later on. Its legally mine.

This? Its fraudulently sold as a "sale" but is really an indefinite rental with the terms of "fuck you I'll do what I please when I please".

And on top of fraud, I'd also throw in the CFAA as well, a criminal statute. Its established law that if I set a timebomb in software at $company where if I'm fired/laid off, that's criminal access. No boilerplate from some shitty clickwrap can excuse criminal law.

Time to start jailing Sony execs and the like.

stronglikedan• 23 days ago

I think they meant "Studio Canal Movies rented on PlayStation Store removed without refund because they are rented"

Libcat99• 23 days ago

I think it would be reasonable for the typical person to believe that when you click a button labeled "buy", you are buying the item, not renting it.

Don't defend theft/fraud based for billion dollar corporations. It's not a good look.

tiahura3• 23 days ago

Does anyone have a link to the relevant terms of service from the sony store?

austin-cheney2• 23 days ago

Its because of things like this that I self host all my media.

As an example why buy games from Steam when I can get them on gog.com DRM free and make them portable (without a setup or installation step on future machines)? So, I run my own Steam Store/Library like experience on a home server using Game Vault.

I use JellyFin for video. It works for music files, but I don't really like it for audio. So, I wrote my own music app that works in the browser/phone securely across the internet from my own server.

This is so much better than paying for subscriptions..

bombcar4• 23 days ago

It's really nice - and it's not really the cost ... it's the avoidance of the rugpull.

I've spent WAY MORE on my hardware and setup in time, money, and DVDs than I ever would have for streaming services, but I know if it goes down, it's on me.

austin-cheney2• 23 days ago

Absolutely. If there is a fiber cut in my driveway I still have my home network running just the same.

If hardware ever cheaper I will also run an instance of Project Nomad:

https://www.projectnomad.us/

add-sub-mul-div• 23 days ago

I deleted my Steam account recently after I realized I hadn't logged in for 5 years. I just can't tolerate a store also being a launcher middleman.

pixelatedindex2• 23 days ago

Steam is probably the best example of how you can be a middleman and a store. I’ve never felt wronged by them unlike Sony and Discovery.

paxys3• 23 days ago

Selling something to customers without having the rights to it yourself is very clearly illegal. I wish some government agency had the guts to prosecute this.

pixelatedindex2• 23 days ago

Presumably at the time of sale they had rights to it. They lost it later, but should have at least had secured rights to people who bought the damn thing.

paxys3• 23 days ago

If the contract has an end date then there’s no reason not to mention it during the sale.

shermantanktop• 23 days ago

Buying a physical DVD means you own the item and have it in your hands.

"Buying" a streaming movie means that you enter into an agreement with an online service that promises to make your experience the rough equivalent of physical ownership. But to do that they have to solve a pile of problems, and solve those forever for as long as your purchase is valid.

Realistically, Sony will have service outages, they will have contract disputes, they may have data loss, security incidents, etc., all of which can make your "bought" content unavailable either temporarily or permanently. The real question is what type of agreement Sony had with StudioCanal.

None of this would ever affect your DVD. So the word "buying" wrt a streaming movie is easy to understand, but a bit misleading in practice. It's clear what Sony is signing up to provide; it's just hard to see how they can provide that consistently over the time period involved.

ButlerianJihad• 23 days ago

Consumers went wild over digital media distribution, because of its quality, its lossless copying, and the ease of reproduction and transmission. When CDs and DVDs appeared on the scene, I never dreamed that they would only be a temporary stepping-stone to intangible cloud downloads. But Napster happened.

The RIAA, MPAA, and entire industries were vehemently opposed to digital media (and recording in general) and fought digital distribution every step of the way, tooth and nail, until all the DRM and gatekeeping was in place.

Perhaps we were both on the wrong side of history?

johnwheeler• 23 days ago

Man, instead of "Thank you" they should've said "Fuck you"

caycep• 23 days ago

between this and their mucking around with game studios (no new PC versions of marquee titles like ghost of yotei etc, unceremoniously shutting down bungie and laying off artists/game devs prior to vestment etc), Playstation management is a disaster at the moment

lkghds• 23 days ago

"Enshittification complete.

Thank you, PlayStation Store"

Nerdrotic• 23 days ago

The industry has yet to adapt from physical media to digital media consisting of binary ones and zeros that costs next to nothing to copy and file transfer. Despite saving a fortune in manufacturing, printing, distribution, shipping. They still try to milk every penny.

Meanwhile the pirates are laughing their arse off...

Type in the name of any media and you can have it in less than 5min with none of the silly DRM restrictions. All you need is the know how.

Until they make it that easy and stop trying to screw over the consumer. They will lose to piracy.

Game of Thrones was the most pirated show on the planet. Eventually HBO realized what they had to do. They offered an HBO streaming subscription globally everywhere for a reasonable price. It bypassed 50 year old cable tv agreements, etc. People could cancel the subscription at any time. But they also had access to the full HBO catalog of shows. Although it didn't stop piracy entirely it did reduce it significantly. HBO made a large profit off the decision.

Open your eyes, figure out what people really want by analyzing what makes piracy better than the legit marketplace. Then do what HBO did and set aside your old school perspective and look at the larger untapped market. Restricting access and going after pirates does not increase your market share. But catering to what people want will open up millions in sales. If you just make it crazy easy and consumer friendly without overcharging.

msie• 23 days ago

I'm slowly getting into buying physical media of my favourite tv shows and movies.

intexpress• 23 days ago

Sounds like the PlayStation Store is planning to stop selling and renting any movies?

Otherwise Sony would have refunded these Studio Canal purchases to maintain the trustworthiness of their store

cubefox• 23 days ago

I'm confused why everyone here seems to accept that this just happens when you buy digital-only content. What if Sony deleted previously bought games? Or Valve? I don't think people would just shrug it off and say "you should always buy physical".

I'm surprised this is even legal without doing a refund or transferring the digital rights to an alternative service.

newsclues• 23 days ago

if buy isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.

lencastre• 23 days ago

can‘t people receive any kind of forewarning and prepare themselves? it‘s not like they will try to download a chariot or something

jimmydddd2• 23 days ago

Why do you guys "buy" movies? Like, you plan to watch the movie many, many times in the future? How many times do you watch a movie? Just curious, because I've never had a desire to watch a movie more than once.

taurath• 23 days ago

Either you have a perfect memory, or you’ve never been touched or moved sufficiently by a movie or show.

jimmydddd2• 22 days ago

Definitely not a perfect memory. But yeah, I can't say I've ever been "touched" or "moved" by a movie. I'm usually looking at my watch trying to figure out how much longer I have to sit there. :-)

effnorwood• 23 days ago

they got waldo and carman sandiego off mine

lschueller• 23 days ago

This includes titles like "End of Watch" and "The Shameless"

Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund

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