this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
93 points (98.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43807 readers
730 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Sony is Sony is about to delete Mythbusters, Naked and Afraid, and tons of other Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries even if they already “purchased” them.

So, if you bought a DVD licensed by Sony, can they now legally enter your house and take your DVD?

Or can Sony have some sort of DRM that prevents the DVD from playing when Sony loses the license agreement?

I'm just trying to reconcile how digital purchases can be subject to license terms changes, while a DVD apparently can't be.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That makes sense, but then the next part is:

Or can Sony have some sort of DRM that prevents the DVD from playing when Sony loses the license agreement?

Surely that would still be a possibility?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I mean, sure. That's basically how always-online DRM for games works. But the fact is that you do still have the disc with data on it, so generally it's just a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to bypass or spoof the DRM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I think it's set up this way so buyers can't get back to Sony to ask for a free replacement if the media can't be used anymore.

Let's say you buy a disk that contains a movie. You din't buy the right to watch that movie forever, because if the disk breaks, you need to buy a new copy.

However, we could argue that this is just a symptom of a short industry... If my backpack breaks, even after 10 years, the company will replace it free of charge!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If there is ever a next successor to Blurays, for VR film or something, their DRM could be linked to a validation server. Once it's always online what you describe becomes possible.

Currently Blurays and dvds are designed for offline playback, and are read only, so their licenses are always valid and perform no verification.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Physical players disconnected from the internet can still receive offline firmware updates included on the discs themselves. The moment you insert a new disc, it automatically executes BD+ code that in theory could patch the firmware to blacklist an arbitrary old disc that you own. This has never yet happened with a previously-legal disc, but then again for example Amazon has never deleted purchased copies of the 1984 book from customers' kindles, until one day when it did.