Here We Go Again: Sony Disappears Digital Content That Was Pitched To Customers As ‘Forever’
from the poof-it's-gone dept
And here we go again. We’ve had many, many posts over recent years discussing how, in the digital age, you often don’t actually own what you’ve bought. And before the comments section gets filled with perplexed but rather educated folks talking about how the all these cases involve products in which the terms of service clearly outline that this is a license and not an actual product being bought, just stop. We all know that barely anyone reads a ToS these days and the confusion and anger that occurs in the public is proof of it. So clearly companies are not doing nearly enough to inform their customers of what they are actually purchasing. And if you think that problem is easily solved by staunchly insisting that Nancy down the street steep herself in legalese, then you’re completely divorced from reality.
Which brings us to Sony. Late last year we discussed how when Sony’s deal with the Discovery network ended, it caused a bunch of content to simply disappear from PlayStation owners who bought the content in the PS Store. Due to something completely outside of the public’s control, people who bought content, or thought that’s what they were doing, suddenly lost that content. Without refunds. Or an apology.
And now it’s happening all over again, due to Sony’s acquisition of Crunchyroll all the way back in 2021. Sony-owned Funimation is shutting down its app and website in April, with the company converting Funimation accounts to Crunchyroll accounts instead. All good right? Well…
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers’ digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
But soon, people who may have discarded or lost their physical media or lack a way to play DVDs and Blu-rays won’t have a way to access the digital copies that they were entitled to through their physical copy purchase.
Funimation’s announcement is roughly as tone-deaf as it gets. They explain all of these libraries won’t carry over to Crunchyroll because that platform doesn’t support Funimation’s digital content and then makes some vague comments about how Crunchyroll is continuously looking to make itself better. Which, whatever, because that doesn’t change the fact that a bunch of people bought a bunch of digital content that was pitched mostly as being theirs “forever” only to have it all nuked into oblivion as a result of a Sony acquisition. Good times.
Here again, we see that people don’t actually own what they’ve bought, much to their confusion.
Funimation’s support page for digital copies (which, as of this writing, says it hasn’t been updated in four years) notes that Funimation’s idea of forever includes restrictions and links to Funimation’s Terms of Use. Those terms state that Funimation can “without advance notice… immediately suspend or terminate the availability of the Service and/or content (and any elements and features of them), in whole or in part, for any reason.” It also says that the Funimation website, apps, service, and all of its content are owned by Funimation and its partners.
So even if you, understandably, thought you were buying a “forever” digital copy, the wordy truth is that you never really owned it. Yet, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that someone relying on digital copies to preserve their purchased media didn’t properly understand (or read) those terms before discarding their physical copies.
Thanks for the money, suckers! Hope you enjoyed the years-long forever!
Filed Under: digital content, digital library, license, ownership
Companies: crunchyroll, funimation, sony
Comments on “Here We Go Again: Sony Disappears Digital Content That Was Pitched To Customers As ‘Forever’”
And companies wonder why they haven’t been able to eradicate piracy despite spending so much money bribing politicians.
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Because the entertainment industry is addicted to using the North Wind approach to piracy rather than that of the Sun.
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Wouldn’t be surprised if they actually embrace piracy.
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Like XKCD pointed out (https://xkcd.com/488/), even if you purchase stuff legally, sooner or later you end up a pirate
What does that even mean? Sony own both; it’s completely their choice which platforms support what, and which platforms they’ll keep running or shut down. But if these series are already encoded to DVD, what the hell doesn’t support DVD these days? VOBs and all that are a pain in the ass—I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s partially Sony’s fault—but VLC supports them just fine, and of course there are things like Handbrake that can convert them to sane formats easily enough. Nevermind that those conversions have been done and are ready to download.
The statement is not merely tone-deaf. It’s total bullshit.
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This situation is bullshit for a number of reasons. But there is absolutely a world where there is a genuine incompatibility and Sony is refusing to pay to fix the issue, and this excuse is not bullshit, but a tone-deaf approach to announcing a fiscal decision.
TL;DR: A lack of support for perpetual licenses exists. Thats not bullshit. YMMV on whether or not the failure to mention that the barrier to compatiility is a cost they can’t recoup for a service they don’t want to provide means the statement is bullshit or not.
Crunchyroll does not have support for perpetual individual purchase licenses. At all. The platform does not support the perpetual individual license system Funimation used, nor any perpetual licenses. To convert the purchases over to Crunchyroll, Sony would need to hack the license system into Crunchyroll. That’s the system incompatibility. It was told to users when the libraries started to merge. And at the time Crunchyroll was already hinting they wouldn’t have a solution.
As someone who was waiting for Funimation premium digital content to get ported over, I’ve been worried about this outcome. Sony doesn’t want to pay to build (or refactor the funimation code) and support the digital license database, refactoring the crunchyroll software itself to accommodate perpetual licensing, overhaul of the UI to support perpetual licenses and provide royalties on streaming that content. Particularly since Crunchyroll doesn’t directly make money from that. In the streaming boom, Crunchyroll might have shelled out the cash to retain it as a lure future paying subscribers.
It is important to note that from my brief time doing software development, I am of the belief modifying the Crunchyroll software stack to factor in individual perpetual licenses to the existing Crunchyroll software which assumes a streaming only environment could be an expensive development ask because it may require ‘refactoring’. This involves changing fundamental assumptions of the code. This generally will present problems as large portions of the code are rewritten and that creates follow on problems, and the larger the software, the harder to solve all those problems.
Still shit. They could add that support. But Chrunchyroll doesn’t seem to want to sell perpetual content licenses. And to the point, after a huge PlayStation Video push in the PS4 era, on the PlayStation Sony has seemed to downplay non-streaming video content, with purchasing being moved to a different, less obvious storefront. So for Sony, the cost of support is all cost, no benefit.
So whether or not it ‘total bullshit’ comes down to if you consider the Ommissions made by Sony enough to invalidate placing blame very real technical and financial issues of introducing a new ownership model into Crunchyroll.
Re: Re: Also a developer of 30 years experience
Alternatively, rather than requiring a re-factoring of the codebase (which seems unlikely to me), they could just import the records from the Funimation system into the Crunchroll one, setting the expiry date to a looooong time in the future, and the existing code should Just Cope(tm).
Someone high up at Sony just doesn’t give a shit.
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What Crunchyroll system? Crunchyroll seems to have no system of per title per user licensing. That was my point. If the system wasn’t built to support that, such a system needs to be built.
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It was built. It exists, and is simply called “Funimation” rather than “Crunchyroll”. Probably one programmer and one administrator could manage that well enough, on a part-time basis, to keep it going indefinitely. Without touching “Crunchyroll” at all. As the Funimation series age, they’ll be watched less and less frequently; and bandwidth and storage costs will decrease, and there will be no new subscribers, so it’ll only get cheaper to run.
Which makes Sony’s question “Should we—a corporation with revenue around 82 billion dollars a year, who spent 1.32 billion dollars to acquire Funimation and Crunchyroll—spend a few hundred thousand dollars a year (roughly equivalent to a 0.007-billion-dollar one-time cost) to avoid fucking over our customers?”
(Just kidding. It’s Sony; of course that was never a question.)
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That’s precisely why it’s bullshit. Not because it’s wrong on a technical level, but because Sony has made a cold and calculated fiscal decision to screw their customers (yet again; because no matter what Sony does, people will apparently keep giving them money).
Well… yes, that statement is bullshit, in that it’s not true. So what if Crunchyroll does not have support? You’re missing the point: nobody’s forcing Sony to shut down Funimation’s platform, which has support, and move stuff to another platform. They chose to do that, over several cheap and realistic options, beceause they know they can get away with it; there’s still no viable movement demanding anyone get actual rights to the things they “buy”.
There are 1990s web sites still online, with ancient CGI and everything. There are people still running pre-internet programs from the 1960s on mainframes. At a previous job, I once remarked to a co-worker that it’d be nice to see what some source code looked like before the earliest version I saw on the “Subversion” server. Well, I’d worked there for a decade before learning they were still running a CVS server, and some pre-Bugzilla problem-tracking server to go along with it. I don’t know whether it was on an ancient machine in a dusty closet, or had been ported to a rarely-used virtual machine. Either way, the people in charge had kept running it because it cost basically nothing, and provided value to users perhaps several times a year.
Funimation’s platform, by contrast, dates back only to 2009 according to Wikipedia. What’s changed that makes it non-viable today? I’ve got some RealMedia fansubs from the late 1990s, which at the time were quite difficult to get working on Linux; these days, they “just work”, at the same shitty quality but with no shitty software required. The video technology used for Funimation’s platform is probably still newer than what continues to be shipped on Blu-rays, and as the platform ages it will only get cheaper to run.
If Sony decide it’s not worth the cost to keep streaming this stuff, they could have some low-level employee spend a week to rip some DVDs or Blu-rays—as so many people have done before—and stick them on a website, or even upload them to Youtube if streaming’s important. They could waive copyright entirely on the “worthless” titles. But they’re Sony—they don’t care; they don’t have to.
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You seem to be a bit confused:
Sony via Crunchyroll doesn’t own these shows. Crunchyroll licences streaming rights. Crunchyroll can’t Just dump them for free on the internet. At a fundamental level you aren’t operating within the here and now. You are operating in a fantasy. Which ties nicely into this:
Jesus. Where to start – I would gamble everything against the claim you dont need any software to play real media video files. Unless you’d want to claim the shitty qualifer was your attempt to strawman my argument?
More seriously, you continue to talk like my claim is the video file/format itself is incompatible. That’s why you make a comparison to the age of the encoding on bluray disks.
But I am talking about other parts of the software stack. Unlike a geocities site, a secure website delivering content covered by copyright to remote users will need to be regularly updated both to maintain compatibility with fast moving browser development and to maintain security against web threats.
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What claim? Nobody said any such thing. RealPlayer was famously shitty, but once ffmpeg and VLC came along, RealMedia files could be played in non-shitty software; that’s been true for over 20 years now. The point is that no matter what format the media is in, there are ways to make it work, and that only gets easier with time.
You can’t expect people to divine what wasn’t said. The claim was that something was incompatible; not that it would become incompatible or unmaintainable in the future.
Sure, security updates will be needed. This platform is subject to the Video Privacy Protection Act, and leaking a subscriber’s viewing history could get Sony into trouble. And maybe “fast moving browser development” will cause future problems—but I’m sceptical such problems will be major, because browser developers usually try pretty hard to maintain backward-compatibility.
But if Sony didn’t want to deal with any of that shit, they could absolutely just throw some files onto a website. Hell, archive.org would host them (including streaming) for free, and I’ll bet some of them are already there unbeknownst to Sony. Sony has made the decision, not supportable for technical reasons, that maintaining a hard-line stance on copyright is more important than treating their customers well.
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Okay. That was unclear from the article, and given how many copyrights Sony owns, certainly couldn’t have been inferred.
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“It’s not possible because Sony has decided not to do it” isn’t the defense you seem to think it is.
Not forever
Forever, as in, the Republican respect for the Constitution.
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But only those pesky ones that are not the 2nd Amendment
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.
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Yep. The basic fundamental choice being given to consumers is “Be a pirate, or get robbed”.
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Why is anyone still uncritically accepting Sony’s premise that other people are the pirates? Sony’s own actions get pretty close to taking people’s property away.
That’s not quite true: the large print lied and said the “buyers” would own it, but people also agreed to the fine print that can be summarized as “ha ha, just kidding, you’ll own nothing!”. That makes it fraud, not theft, but it’s still illegal and seems much more deserving of the term “pirate” that anything anime fans have ever done.
Of course, this’ll end in settlement, not conviction. Maybe ex-Funimation customers will get a $10 credit to get re-fucked by Sony (and some lawyers will get millions). Most of them will probably take Sony up on that offer.
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“Piracy” isn’t ‘stealing’ anyways — that’s why it’s called ‘copyright infringement’ instead.
Corporations want to turn everything into a subscription service, and private ownership of ANYTHING is an enormous threat to their business model.
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They want private ownership, that’s what allows them to keep everything out of the public domain.
They want to eradicate personal ownership.
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“enormous threat to their business model”
What business model?
/s
“And before the comments section gets filled with perplexed but rather educated folks talking about how the all these cases involve products in which the terms of service clearly outline that this is a license and not an actual product being bought, just stop. We all know that barely anyone reads a ToS these days and the confusion and anger that occurs in the public is proof of it. So clearly companies are not doing nearly enough to inform their customers of what they are actually purchasing. And if you think that problem is easily solved by staunchly insisting that Nancy down the street steep herself in legalese, then you’re completely divorced from reality.”
That ain’t gonna stop them, because they can’t read.
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That’s not really fair. Some of them just can’t write, either.
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True.
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So it’s not the subscribers to these services who can’t read, is it? It’s you.
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They agreed to the fine print, which said the large print was just lies and there’s nothing any customer can do when they realize that.
People need to learn that if a deal comes with “fine print”, they should probably stay away from it. I don’t need to agree to a damn thing to pump gas at a station or buy some bananas in a Wal-mart. But somehow, doing almost anything online requires hours of poring over fine print and consulting case law.
“Fine print” should be outlawed, more or less literally. In other words: the legal system will offer the writers of such print no help in relation to it. Courts should go with a “common sense” approach instead. If you provided a credit card number and received what was shipped, you can’t weasel out of payment; if you didn’t receive it, the seller can’t weasel out. No “privacy policies”: use the data to process the transaction (maybe keep it awhile for fraud prevention), not to put people on spam lists. And if you say “buy forever” and it turns out not to be forever, fuck the “terms and conditions”: there had better be a full refund if you expect the court to uphold the copyright.
Re: Re: Re: NerdyCanuck
it’s almost like, someone could invent something called the… hmmmmm… thinking face …
…
…
…
… “common-law!” YUSSSS that’s IT!!
A Law for dealing with common disputes, among common people, in the interest of the common good!!
Imma legal genius!! ;P
/s lol
(i think it’s a good idea tho, to be clear! just couldn’t restrain my snark, sorry)
Quiet part out loud
Saw an ad last night – the closing frame was “Buy it on Digital, Own it on Blu-Ray”.
Finally admitting it.
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It should be illegal to use the word “buy” this way.
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It is: it’s straightforward commercial fraud (advertisement says one thing, fine print says the opposite), which the F.T.C. have authority to prosecute. They just don’t.
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According to Wikipedia, the Department of Justice did conduct (and extend) an anti-trust review of Sony’s acquisition. I guess they didn’t think to add any useful binding conditions, like “keep the promises you made”.
And the punchline yet again is...
Copyright infringers, as always, remain completely unaffected.
Media mergers continue every year some big corporation takes over another small streaming service or tv company. Sony probably decided certain progams anime series were not supporting in the future or paying the licensing fees to the producer . They could offer refunds to the subscribers who bought programs or anime films which are no longer available .
Looks like false advertising, I doubt they intended to continue support beyond profitability. SOP.
If it is not making money it goes in the trash, no matter what was promised to the customer. They are all liars to some extent, some are way over the top. Pay me now for services later is and always will be a scam. That rug is way too easy to yank out from under the unsuspecting public.
At least lately, I’ve seen more instances of a separate, more clearly visible marking of “This product is licensed, not sold.” Though granted, they don’t explain what “licensed” is for the layperson.
To think, Disney is outsourcing physical media distribution to them now.
I stopped being a Sony customer since the CD rootkit disaster of the early 00s. They haven’t even tried to earn my trust back since then.
I hope what comes of this is some regulation similar to what happened with cell phone/internet carriers (e.g. AT&T) when they kept advertising “unlimited” that wasn’t really.
IMO, companies need to forced to put clearly marked, plain language labels telling customers that services can stop at any time, regardless if money is exchanged for said services. It’s time to CA Prop-65 it.
*Note: I think prop-64 is stupid, but at least it tells people that the entire world around them causes cancer, which isn’t entirely untrue. 😀
Literally every single day, media companies make piracy more and more attractive and wonder why people do it.
Talk about a clownshow of stupid.
How about a Surgeon General’s style warning, like so:
WARNING
The Surgeon General has determined that ignoring the fine print when exchanging money for this product is hazardous to your mental health.
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That warning is fine, but the real problem is that you often have to jump through hoops in order to get to the point where you can actually display the fine-print on your screen. I’ve seen some mighty cunning ways of “hiding” buttons from the general viewing public, just to lure people into thinking that they’ve read all the details necessary, only to get duped later (as in this very situation with Sony).
Moreover, in the Internet Age, baldly stating “forever” is just asking for someone to sue you for not providing your product/service literally forever. Internet time moves about a billion times faster than meat-space time, and that means profits are measured in nano-seconds, not real time. No wonder there’s a dichotomy, and it’s not going to be easily rectified in what I jokingly refer to as “the near future”.
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Stating “forever” doesn’t necessarily mean providing a product or service forever. Had they been selling people MKV (H.264+AC3) files, for example, they could’ve stopped after a year and the customers would still have had those “forever” (provided they managed backups well). Sony could actually still do that, if they cared or if any courts would actually hold them to their “promises” (whether negated by fine print or not).
“Internet time” may move fast, but the Internet also has large groups of people collecting old data and maintaining old computers and software. There are even festivals, like the Vintage Computing Festival, where people demonstrate working 50-year-old systems. By contrast, the Internet’s been used by “average people” for a mere 20 or 30 years. There’s no excuse for “forever” running out already, in relation to companies that haven’t gone bankrupt.
People who pay for digital content that they can’t (or at least don’t) physically control deserve to get ripped off like this.
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Get pegged
If a business uses the terms ‘own’, ‘buy’, ‘purchase’, ‘lifetime’, ‘perpetual’ or any other term that denotes ownership by the customer or a specific period of time, and they disable, remove, delete, or otherwise make unavailable to the customer that product or service before that period of time has expired, the business shall be liable for damages equal to double the original value of the item, payable directly and immediately to the customer harmed.
RIAA is wrong again:
“””“Fair use cannot be perverted into forfeiting a sound recording’s protection under copyright law just because the recording is copied, distributed, and performed in something other than its cleanest sound. If ever there were a theory of fair use invented for litigation, this is it,” they write.”””
In this miracular snippet, RIAA tries to argue that by destroying the sound recording, copyright does not simultaniously get destroyed. This is complete false statement, as evidenced by the famous VCR lawsuits: “in VCR case, the vcr’s ability to copy (and further distribute) the video recording was declared legal simply because the hardware had enough errors that only 10 copies could be made for each user purchase, and thus the copying was limited and easily controllable by the content owners.”
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Great, you finally realized your RIAA gods are wrong.
I don’t think that’s going to shift your needle into actually being reasonable when it comes to the rest of copyright law though.
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I never claimed to be reasonable “under US law”. My statements are reasonable in rest of the world, just not in the land of the free.
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The RIAA themselves are run under US law. US law forms the basis of what you demand for copyright. This claim that you’re completely divorced from US law doesn’t pass muster, but it’s been proven time and time again that you’re not interested in actually being reasonable despite your constant attempts to shill on the RIAA’s behalf.
Yeah, no. No one in the reasonable world follows your statements, either.
Finland obviously doesn’t consider your statements reasonable, otherwise they’d have made you rich and you wouldn’t be here constantly being angry about it.
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I dont think you understand the finnish system. Most of the money goes to pensions and social security, and that is not visible in the balance sheet.
We get awesome doctors as an offset.
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None of that has to do with copyright.