Sony is erasing over 550 movies from PlayStation libraries without offering a single refund. If clicking "Buy" only grants access until a corporate licensing deal expires, the service is fundamentally broken.
I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.
Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.
As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.
Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.
I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.
Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).
I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.
I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.
Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.
As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.
Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.
I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.
Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).
I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.