Sony Is Trying To Clean Up Its Crunchyroll Mess, But It’s Still Messy Indeed
from the clean-up-on-aisle-Sony dept
The mess is getting a little messier. We had talked days ago about Sony’s decision to shutter its Funimation platform in favor of a more recent acquisition in Crunchyroll. Anyone with a Funimation account would be transitioned into a Crunchyroll account, which sounds all good until you realize that Funimation users had plenty of digital streaming copies of content they had bought and which were promised to be available “forever” which are instead simply going away. As in deleted. Another example of people thinking they were buying and owning something, only to find out that their purchases live solely at the pleasure of the seller that could disappear them.
After some public outcry, Sony said it would offer Funimation users “an appropriate value” for these lost digital libraries. What does that mean? Who the hell knows! Here is Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on the matter, speaking on the Decoder podcast.
The executive claimed that Funimation is “working really hard directly” with each affected customer to “ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially.” When asked what “appropriate value” means, Purini responded:
“It could be that they get access to a digital copy on any of the existing other services where they might be able to access it. It could be a discount access to our subscription service so they can get access to the same shows through our subscription service. So we are trying to make it right based on each user’s preference.”
The thing is that all of the “could bes” and “trying” isn’t really a plan. It doesn’t offer the people that paid for something thinking they owned it clarity on whether they are still definitely going to get access to the content they paid for or not. And discounts to a subscription service to get access to content already paid for is unlikely to placate the majority of customers anyway.
And it appears that Purini’s comments are at least slightly premature, since tests for getting “appropriate value” for this content through Funimation’s support, which is where customers are required to inquire about all of this, haven’t exactly gone off without a hitch.
But even if you did happen to demand some sort of refund from Funimation, you might not have been offered any relief. The Verge’s Ash Parrish, who has a free-tier Funimation account, reported today on her experience trying to receive the “appropriate value” for her digital copies of Steins;Gate and The Vision of Escaflowne. Parrish noted that Steins;Gate isn’t available to stream off Crunchyroll with a free subscription, meaning she’d have no way to watch it digitally come April 2. Parrish said Funimation support responded with two “boilerplate” emails that apologized but offered no solution or compensation. She followed up about getting compensated for a premium subscription so that she’d be able to stream what she used to digitally own through Crunchyroll but hadn’t received a response by publication time.
Following up with Funimation’s PR department didn’t provide any clarity. Brian Eley, Funimation’s VP of communications, reportedly told Parrish via email: “Funimation users who have questions about digital copies can contact Funimation here. A Funimation account associated with a digital copy redemption is required for verification.” Ars Technica reached out to Crunchyroll for comment but didn’t hear back in time for publication.
So, is there plan to make this right? According to Purini, yes! A vague one, though, where it all feels like it’s half-baked and up in the air. And requires the user to initiate the request for it to be made right. And with solutions that may or may not be available, but certainly are not being offered through the support channel that the company says should be used to get this compensation.
So in the end we’re in the same place as before. Sony has ripped away paid-for content from its customers and will decide for itself exactly what those customers will get in return.
Filed Under: content, ownership, rahul purini
Companies: crunchyroll, funimation, sony
Comments on “Sony Is Trying To Clean Up Its Crunchyroll Mess, But It’s Still Messy Indeed”
i ‘d be interested in Sony explaining why they couldn’t just merge the services’ content.
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The content exists in both services, in many cases. The issue isn’t merging the services, it’s merging the backend to account for a completely different licensing scheme than the ala-carte streaming one.
I mean, yes the digital movie copies that came in a dvd/bluray combo pack would meed to be merged in, but a lot of wholly digital content people purchased is svailibld on streaming, but at a premium charge. Just tithing a person to see that one show is new code that violates assumptions of the old code, which is a lot more difficult than some people seem to think.
So money. Funimation and crunchyroll aren’t sony, not legally. Merging libraries can mean new licensing agreements, royalty renegotiation, etc
Re: Re: Before jumping in, check for rocks: Not just for swimming
And the proper time to figure out how to do all that would have been before the deal was finalized in order to ensure that customers would face a smooth transition during the merger, rather than rushing it and screwing over customers who suddenly found out that they ‘owned’ a hell of a lot less than they’d been sold on because the companies couldn’t be bothered to consider the impact on them until after it blew up in everyone’s faces and they were left scrambling to do damage control.
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The question I addressed wasn’t why they didn’t merge the libraries. The question was why they couldn’t just merge the libraries.
Absolutely the time to figure out how costly that would be would be before a merger. That is absolutely the appropriate way to go about it. I’ve never known a merger that considered it. As IT and Accounting, I’ve gone over horror story after Lovecraftian horror story of incompetent executives demanding a merge of incompatible services that should have been known to be incompatible long before the merger finalized.
While the failures of foresight in the merger certainly impact Sony’s liability (as in they should have some liability) going forward, the reasons they can’t simply merge the systems (technical incompatibilities) are unaffected by what Funimation and Crunchyroll should have done before the merger (Accurately Determine feasibility of a library merge and prepare a solution) or after (paid the cost to integrate necessary licensing systems to Crunchyroll).
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I’m guessing that’s exactly what Sony did, and why not everything from Crunchyroll was slated to disappear. Re-license what’s likely to remain profitable, and fuck whoever bought the other stuff; we’re Sony, so they’ll take it. (I suppose they got more pushback than expected, maybe from people who matter.)
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Eh… kind of. In practice, seemingly-obsolete corporations can lumber along indefinitely. For example, most people in Canada seem to think that Canada Trust went away decades ago. In fact, “The Canada Trust Company” remains a CDIC-insured bank at which people can still deposit money (by purchasing “mutual fund” TDB8159; it’s insured separately from The Toronto-Dominion Bank, its owner, which is useful knowledge for those who might otherwise exceed the “per-bank” limit). They also service pre-merger accounts so transparently that people might not even realize their money is not with “TD” (the physical banks, the bank cards, and the online banking website all say “TD”; but each statement has an “account issued by” line revealing the truth).
So, yes, Funimation is not “Sony”, strictly speaking. But in the absence of any optional actions taken by Sony, it remains an extant corporation, with valid licensing agreements, that Sony owns. In other words, “merging libraries” is a free choice. And it’s very likely possible to “merge” them in such a way that the licensing agreements remain valid and no customer notices they’re different data sets. (Put both “sites” behind a central authentication and listing portal and a content-distribution network, and if that CDN sometimes acquires data from a server owned by Funimation, how would you know?)
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When something is stupid, illogical and way more effort than it should be, the reason is usually licencing. My guess is that Sony either can’t do it due to the previous terms, or it would cost too much money to do the sane and logical thing.
Technically, he’s not wrong. You can promise anything you want when your go-to option has always been “the customer can get sweet fuck-all because weebs need to get used to not owning their anime”.
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And this mindset is exactly what encourages piracy.
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Indeed. Whenever these things happen, the unspoken logical thing is that the people who didn’t try to do the right thing are unaffected. Only the people who tried to pay for their content are affected.
I’ve said this before I’m sure, but I’ve always hated when people post that meme of dusting off the old pirate hat whenever companies do anything that limits what people can watch, but now I just feel stupid. More and more people are finding out that digital downloads have no value, and guess what, people are going to treat them like they have no value. Good job Sony.
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But it’s appropriate here: come April, Sony is gonna be taking people’s property without permission.
(Okay, it doesn’t involve the ocean, and the fine print told people it wasn’t actually “property” like the ads said. I still think they deserve a hat.)
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Its not their property. You can’t own someone else’s work. You only get a license, or permission to view their work privately in your home, which can be revoked because its their right. You’ve never owned copyrighted material. That’s the whole point of copyright. The author has exclusive rights to their work.
Physical media is basically a loophole since you own the physical item the copyrighted material is on. They can’t take your physical media. At worse they can sue you for copyright infringement should you violate the license agreement.
IMO these kinds of shenanigans should be illegal. If you promise that something is available forever, then you must make it available forever by whatever means necessary. If that means requiring your users to download it, then so be it.
Thinks back to the time when it was discovered that Funimation, who was hugely anti-pirate, was using the pirates subtitles to dub content b/c the pirates did better work than the studios.
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And then there’s Crunchyroll, which started out as a site for people to upload videos—mostly anime in practice—with no regard for copyright.
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Links.
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For what? To download anime? If you just want to confirm Crunchyroll’s history, see Wikipedia and citations 1 and 17 in particular.
'If you won't hold up your end of the deal why should I?'
The more companies pull stunts like this the more they are training potential customers to bypass them entirely since they’ve shown that paying for content doesn’t actually mean you get or get to keep said content.
Sony Is "Trying" To Clean Up Its Crunchyroll Mess
You forgot the scare quotes around what Sony is pretending to do
I feel it's only fair...
… that if you were promised access to your digital media “forever” and then the rightsholder decides that “forever” actually means “until we find it inconvenient”, you should fire up your favourite screencap software and create your own personal Forever Copy before the content is permanently deleted.
But..but.. piracy hurts our ability to steal from our own customers. How will we survive?
-Sony definitely.