But it’s worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit.
Cory Doctorow
Another excellent banger of an article by Cory Doctorow. Even here on OSAlert, I fully support anyone who uses an adblocker to remove any ads you might find on this website. Your computer, your rules. Sure, it’d be nice to get some income from the ads, and we do offer more direct and far better ways to support the website (Patreon, Ko-Fi, Liberapay, merch), but even if you choose to block every ad, and not send us a single cent in donations, that’s entirely within your rights. As someone who runs a website accessible to anyone, I consider your right to only see on your display what you want to see to be sacred. Just because you opened this website to read some tech news does not mean you also consent to seeing ads.
We could probably make a lot more money by filling this site with SEO crap, boatloads of ads, countless newsletter prompts, and god knows what else – but not only would that be the death of OSAlert, I would also just find it personally revolting. I regularly get emails from people interested in enshittifying OSAlert, but I’ve never budged, and I hope I never have to thanks to those of you who choose to support us financially.
Websites are the easiest to “downgrade”, ad Doctorow calls it, and we’ve all seen how the wider tech news landscape has been downgraded a lot over the years. I hope I can keep OSAlert as it’s been since its launch way back in 1998.
In theory it makes sense, in practice this becomes really hurtful for consumers.
We can argue, in the recent Sony situation, where people would lose access to the Discovery content they paid for on the PlayStation platform is “part of the business”. And this is true, even when there is no recourse to make people whole. (No refunds, no vouchers on other platforms, not even an option to download the files offline. In fact, according to one legal expert, if you somehow managed to backup those files, since you lose the license, you have to legally destroy the backups as well).
Why did this happen? Sony did not negotiate a better license term with owners of Discovery. And when discovery pulls content from Sony as their delivery platform, it would be illegal for Sony to offer them. And owners of Discovery want to sell the service, so any “purchases” (in other words indefinite leases) are now void.
But everyone can see this is a “b.s.” situation. The customers had no knowledge about intricacies of copyright licensing law. They did not know Sony did not have perpetual rights to redistribute content. And they definitely were not asked when Discovery did not want to renew they partnership with Sony. Worse? Technically the agreements are binding, and they cannot even sue and hope to win.
Yet, just for customer satisfactions, Sony could have:
1. Agreed to pay more money to Discover in whatever form in leu of their customers,
2. Provided a refund, even though they most likely only got 10% of the price.
3. Negotiated a “transfer” to a platform of Discovery’s choosing
In all of them they would lose money, but retain customer trust. Who was the guy who said it?
ah yes…
“I Would Rather Lose Money Than Trust” — Robert Bosch
Who would buy any video content on Sony from now on?
sukru,
Assuming the user’s original license was valid and didn’t contain a revocation clause, then users wouldn’t have any obligation to delete their legal copies.
If the original license was invalid and/or violates an agreement that users weren’t party to, then they ought to have legal standing for a refund over a fraudulent sales agreement and failure to deliver what was paid for. Of course few people actually have the time, money, and lawyers to go to court over things like this. It could cost a lot more than the reward of winning, but at least in principal it seems like a case a good lawyer could win.
Alfman,
The license is valid. The problem is, it is only valid for a limited amount of time, and that is set by Sony or third parties.
From their TOS:
and also
source: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psn-terms-of-service/
So, when you “buy” a content, unlike a physical media, you only buy a “license” to use it, as long as it is available on the platform. They may or may not keep it accessible to you, and might stop at any time for almost any reason.
That is why, I would only buy digital media on deep discount, as I see that as a “rental”.
One additional note.
They would also argue you buy a license with physical media, too. Technically it is encrypted, and you get to access the decryption key (at least in AACS 2+) by using an online service (or bundled with the firmware, but that I think expires).
I am not sure that would hold the same scrutiny on court, though.
sukru,
In that case I agree the license stipulates a limited viewing period, as long as they didn’t add these terms retroactively. While it is the norm for contracts to say things like “subject to change at any time without notice to you.”. Courts do invalidate such terms. In traditional contract law one party does not have the right unilaterally amend an agreed upon contract without sufficiently communicating such to the other parties. Some courts have even ruled that “you agree to all our changes” without clear information about what has changed may still result in the changes being voided.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/business-law-today/2016-may/online-contracts/
With that said, it looks like these terms did exist from the first snapshot on waybackmachine, so the license would probably hold up.
There may still be a case for false advertising if buyers were mislead, but I’m not familiar with Sony products/services so I can’t say if anyone was mislead.
I wouldn’t say the method of distribution changes the fact that the content/software are still licensed. I’ve seen software on disk with a term limited license. It wasn’t very common in the consumer space, but it reminds me of DVDs that had a chemical layer which destroys itself after about a day of being opened.
https://www.theregister.com/2005/10/05/ms_play-one_dvds/
Of course these days DRM and remote activation controls are the method of choice to control content remotely.
Speaking of website downgrading, I haven’t been able to load gemini://gemini.osnews.com/ ^in a very long while.
I just counted 22 ads on the OSAlert main page. I think that is already well above the threshold for “boatloads of ads”.
And every time I’m clicking on a link from this site, I get a full screen banner like on a warez site from 2000
Thom does say “Your computer, your rules”, so I guess they consider visitors’ responsibility to fight enshittification.
I love you, Thom.
“banger” over used slang of the 2020’s whats next articles titled “lets gooooooooo!!!!!”
“Enshittification” should have been the word of 2023. It sums everything up in one word.