> Sony discontinued global sales of movie and TV content in August 2021, but at the time, it was promised that content already purchased would remain accessible in future.
> As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
I had a Sony Bravia TV for several years, and bought it because it came with a "Netflix compatible" sticker.
Netflix however wasn't really compatible from the get-go, and they promised it would work in the next upgrade. I wasn't in US/EU so simply returning it wasn't possible.
They kept promising it would work in the next upgrade, and I would upgrade, even though each time it was making the TV incredibly sluggish.
Eventually five or six years passed and the TV stopped receiving upgrades and it never had Netflix.
Older Sony Bravia TVs that just barely met the specs for streaming applications had to go through such roundabout ways to actually stream the content. They did not support the latest streaming standards (DASH/HLS) and basically had to stream raw MP4 files. They were a very exceptional case device at least at Prime Video. Newer devices obviously supported the regular streaming standards.
At this point (and even 5 years ago), getting a little streaming HDMI stick will provide an infinitely better customer experience for a ~$35 investment. Most smart TVs just don't have a great user experience compared to the devices designed around that.
Doesn't your country have laws against false advertisement? Such bullshit would have gotten them a (not huge, but still, it's a Matt of principle) fine in the EU.
Seems like they should have agreed on better licensing agreements.
I see the point for subscription based services, but in this case they should have an agreement to continue streaming for those who have purchased it. The content provider has been paid for it too, right?
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think licensing agreements like this is not enough in a consumer court. When you purchase something, the consumer expects to be able to access it for as long as the distributor exists.
The services use the term "Purchase" or "Buy". If that is not actually the case, they should call it something else. Otherwise it is misleading the consumers, no matter where they hide the small print in the license agreement.
At a minimum I would expect a refund, as they are no longer providing the service that was paid for.
If complaining and asking for a refund doesn't yield a result, you will have a very hard time finding a lawyer to get this through the courts, given the rather marginal value of the content that you "purchased".
Legal repurcussions differ. IMO it comes down to: what’s the likelihood someone pursues me, and will I survive the expected cost of my defense. Nobody likes love letters anyway.
Individuals may have a lower risk, but the cost is high if someone decides to come after you. Large corporations can take the legal costs far more easily.
There's ways to reduce your risk in this sort of thing. The reason why people come after individuals is because BitTorrent is an insanely risky system. The achilles heel of P2P is that it has no privacy whatsoever, so whoever wants to extort[0] individual pirates can do so.
However, direct-download sites generally do not confer risk onto their users in the same way. Even if the site gets taken down or sued, copyright owners generally don't care about following their logs to find individual downloaders. While they still probably can be sued[1], there's no reason for a legitimate party to do so. At that point the copyright holder got what they wanted, and marching down to everyone in the server logs' house to make sure they delete their infringing movies is absolutely stupid.
For the same reason I've never liked the idea of "P2P YouTube alternatives". People rightfully complain about how they mishandle anything related to copyright, and they do, but the alternative is having every copyright holder with a chip on their shoulder financially cripple anyone who watched a video they didn't like.
[0] Legal scholars will probably object to my use of the word "extort". Yes, if you have a legal claim for relief then threatening to sue for it is not extortion, it's just the law. However, the only way to actually make antipiracy enforcement at an individual level not financially crippling is to cross the line into actual extortion. The Prenda Law and Strike 3 Holdings incidents are good examples of how easy it is to do so.
[1] The law is actually somewhat ambiguous on where the infringement actually is when you download something. I used to think "uploading equals infringement", but there's been some court opinions arguing that either both uploading and downloading are infringements, or that they infringe different parts of copyright. Nobody's bothered to prosecute a direct-download pirate to the point where this matters.
Of course there's also Japan which has a law that explicitly makes mere downloading infringing. There be dragons.
I generally agree with you. I’d rather not play the odds on exposing my identifiers anyway, whether p2p or direct. Might as well go the extra mile and make sure whatever IP is non associated with me, so direct download over tor or whatever — you get the idea. Why give someone the chance?
> As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studiocanal content and it will be removed from your video library
Sounds about right for Sony.