culture – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Nintendo Releases App For Game Music And The Reactions Are Priceless

from the all-that-for-this? dept

For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans’ celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of a few hundred videos, before that exploded into the thousands. Both those YouTubers and fans alike have pointed out throughout all of this that much of this music remained entirely unavailable to fans through any sort of legit means.

That led to some speculation over the past few years that Nintendo was planning to release this music through some official means and was clearing the way for that release. Well, it turns out that speculation was somewhat true, with Nintendo recently announcing its Nintendo Music mobile app. Here’s the announcement video from, ironically, YouTube.

Now, some outlets, and even some fan feedback, have had some positive things to say about the app. Much of that positivity is geared towards the slick, minimalist nature of the UX. You know, the exact thing that Nintendo is quite famously good at pulling off.

But much of the other reaction is roughly what I’ve been saying about this for years. The music catalogue is a fraction of what was available via YouTube. Much of the rest of the video game industry has already released its music via streaming services like Spotify, or else they have just let the YouTube videos be, noting that they serve as a multiplying force for bringing and keeping fans of their games top of mind.

In other words, Nintendo didn’t have to build its own dedicated app for fans to enjoy its music. There are professional platforms out there already that know precisely how to do that and have tons of subscribers already. All Nintendo had to do was relinquish a modicum of control over its IP.

Look, I love video game music. I’ve been writing here about it for years and listening to it for longer than that. That Nintendo decided to build a legit method for streaming some of its excellent video game music is a good thing in and of itself.

But street-sweeping away music content from YouTube and other places in order to do so is a huge miss.

Filed Under: culture, music, video games
Companies: nintendo

Warner Bros. Still Cutting Off Harry Potter’s Nose To Spite His Face

from the no-fun-zone dept

It shouldn’t be news to any regular readers here that Warner Bros. has been a ridiculously jealous protector of all things intellectual property when it comes to the Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter themed fan festivals? That’s banned magic, according to Warner Bros. Want to make a parody condom called “Harry Poppers”? Here comes Warner Bros. to kill the mood. A non-profit dinner with a Harry Potter theme, mostly to make a mother’s daughter happy? The Warner Bros. did its dementor thing to shut down all that joy.

Now, what should be obvious in all of those examples is that this all works against the interests of Warner Bros., the publishers of the books, and J.K. Rowling. After all, does anyone really believe that these fans showing off their fandom, gathering to celebrate the Harry Potter franchise, in any way is a threat to sales of these books and movies? Of course not! If anything, they build upon the Potter community and serve as an interest multiplier that can’t possibly do anything but drive more interest in the books and films.

Like a library that put together a Harry Potter program for children, only to have it threatened out of existence by Warner Bros.

It’s a sad day for little witches and wizards in Jackson Hole. The Teton County Library’s (TCL) slate of Harry Potter programming has been canceled due to copyright infringement. TCL announced the news on Wednesday, Oct. 2. TCL said it had received a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., which owns and controls all things Potter.

“Prior to receiving the letter, Library staff was unaware that this free educational event was a copyright infringement,” TCL’s announcement reads. “In the past, libraries had been encouraged to hold Harry Potter-themed events to promote the books as they were released.”

While other festivals have attempted to rebrand to generic names and themes to get around all of this, the library in this case isn’t bothering. It’s just shutting the whole thing down. And while the library is making conciliatory noises about respecting the intellectual property of others, this is completely idiotic.

Precisely what about a library building some programming around children’s love for Harry Potter represents any kind of threat whatsoever to Warner Bros.? I’ll wait, while someone tries deperately to grasp enough straws to formulate an argument for this. But really, don’t bother. This is protectionism for the sake of protectionism.

And it’s incredibly shortsighted to boot. The fans who grew to love the Harry Potter universe have grown up and now have children of their own. And that new generation could be loyal Potter fans too, if Warner Bros. would let them. Instead, the company appears far more interested in shutting down what are essentially entry points of interest for an entire new generation of potential fans and customers.

It appears Harry Potter will no longer have a nose, with Warner Bros. having cut it off to spite his face.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, fair use, harry potter, kids, learning
Companies: teton county library, warner bros. discovery

from the incentive-structures dept

One of the arguments sometimes made in defense of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say, to prevent less innovative creators from producing works that are closely based on new, successful ideas.

However, this approach has led to constant arguments and court cases over how close a “closely based” work can be before it infringes on the copyright of others. A good example of this is the 2022 lawsuit involving Ed Sheeran, where is was argued that using just four notes of a scale constituted copyright infringement of someone else’s song employing the same tiny motif. A fascinating new paper looks at things from a different angle. It draws on the idea of “first-mover advantage”, the fact that:

individuals that move to a new market niche early on (“first movers”) obtain advantages that may lead to larger success, compared to those who move to this niche later. First movers enjoy a temporary near-monopoly: since they enter a niche early, they have little to no competition, and so they can charge larger prices and spend more time building a loyal customer base.

The paper explores the idea in detail for the world of music. Here, first-mover advantage means:

The artists and music producers who recognize the hidden potential of a new artistic technique, genre, or style, have bigger chances of reaching success. Having an artistic innovation that your competitors do not have or cannot quickly acquire may become advantageous on the winner-take-all artistic market.

Analyzing nearly 700,000 songs across 110 different musical genres, the researchers found evidence that first-mover advantage was present in 91 of the genres. The authors point out that there is also anecdotal evidence of first-mover advantage in other arts:

For example, Agatha Christie—one of the recognized founders of “classical” detective novel—is also one of the best-selling authors ever. Similarly, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer—a canonical work in the genre of cyberpunk—is also one of the earliest books in this strand of science fiction. In films, the cult classic The Blair Witch Project is the first recognized member of the highly successful genre of found-footage horror fiction.

Although copyright may be present, first-mover advantage does not require it to operate – it is simply a function of being early with a new idea, which means that competition is scarce or non-existent. If further research confirms the wider presence of first-mover advantage in the creative world – for example, even where sharing-friendly CC licenses are used – it will knock down yet another flimsy defense of copyright’s flawed and outdated intellectual monopoly.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: copyright, creativity, culture, first mover advantage

French Collection Society Wants A Tax On Generative AI, Payable To Collection Societies

from the corruption-corruption-everywhere dept

Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would see a tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU’s AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoked as another reason why just such a system should be set up. The French collecting society SPEDIDAM (which translates as “Society for the collection and distribution of performers rights”) has issued a press release on the idea, including the following (translation via DeepL):

SPEDIDAM advocates a right to remuneration for performers for AI-generated content without protectable human intervention, in the form of fair compensation that would benefit the entire community of artists, inspired by proven and virtuous collective management models, similar to that of remuneration for private copy.

This remuneration, collected from AI system suppliers, would also help support the cultural activities of collective management organizations, thus ensuring the future employment of artists and the constant renewal of the sources feeding these tools.

That sounds all well and good, but as we noted last year, collecting societies around the world have a terrible record when it comes to sharing that remuneration with the creators they supposedly represent. Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), quotes from a report revealing “a long history of corruption, mismanagement, confiscation of funds, and lack of transparency [by collecting societies] that has deprived artists of the revenues they earned”. They also have a tendency to adopt a maximalist interpretation of their powers. Here are few choice examples of their actions over the years:

SPEDIDAM’s press release is interesting as perhaps the first hint of a wider pan-European campaign to bring in some form of levy on the use of training data for generative AI services. That would just take a new bad idea – taxing companies for simply analyzing training material – and add it to an old bad idea, that of hugely inefficient collecting societies. The resulting system would be a disaster for the European AI industry, since it would favor deep-pocketed US companies. Moreover, this approach would produce no meaningful benefit for creators, as the sorry history of collective societies has shown time and again.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: ai, ai tax, collection societies, copyright, culture, fairness, tax
Companies: spedidam

UK Court Ruling Has Potential To Free Up The Public Domain; But Museums Might Still Block It

from the keep-the-public-domain-public-domain dept

There’s a post on the Creative Commons blog with some important news about copyright (in the UK, at least):

In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

In setting the copyright originality threshold, the court stated: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch.” Crucially, the court affirmed that “this criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.”

The post points out that the case is potentially a “game-changer in the UK open culture landscape”:

Because by setting the standard for copyright to arise based on “free and creative choices” it effectively bars copyright claims from being made over faithful reproductions of public domain materials (i.e., materials that are no longer or never were protected by copyright).

This touches on a topic that Walled Culture has written about many times: the fact that many museums and art galleries around the world try to claim copyright on faithful reproductions of artistic creations in their collections that are unequivocally in the public domain. Their argument, such as it is, seems to be that taking a digital photo or making a 3D copy requires such an immense intellectual effort that a new monopoly should be granted on it. It’s really about money, of course.

The Creative Commons post mentions “A Culture of Copyright”, a useful report by Dr. Andrea Wallace that looked at how widespread the problem was in the UK. The blog post also refers to a CC Open Culture Platform working group that developed proposals for “technical, legal, and social interventions” to address the problem of “PD BY” (that is, the use of CC-BY licenses to share reproductions of public domain works).

Although the group’s idea of adding some kind of courtesy (non-binding) request to all deed pages is interesting and well intentioned, it takes a dangerous step towards compromising the public domain, which is already under constant attack from copyright maximalists. The full and undiluted version of the public domain must be maintained – that’s the supposed bargain of copyright: after being locked down by an (over-long) government-backed intellectual monopoly, works enter the public domain without restriction.

In any case, as an important analysis by Douglas McCarthy points out, just because a UK court has ruled that faithful reproductions of public domain works are in the public domain doesn’t mean that galleries and museums there will gracefully allow us to access to millions of images, and to use them for any purpose. Once people become hooked on the powerful drug of a copyright monopoly, they are very reluctant to give it up. McCarthy explains how some UK cultural institutions are likely to respond:

I anticipate that THJ v Sheridan will accelerate the existing trend towards contract law replacing copyright law as a means of controlling access to public domain collections. If this happens, one shouldn’t assume that access policies will become any more open – the old status quo may simply persist in new form.

Basically, before people can access a Web site with the public domain images of public domain artworks, they are forced to accept terms and conditions that require them to pay for the privilege:

The model of restricted access to digitised public domain works, governed by contract law, has been around for some time. It is, to take one example, practised by Tate Images, enabling Tate to charge fees (on the usual sliding scale of cost, based on the scope and scale of intended reproduction) for licensing images without copyright.

The Tate Gallery should be ashamed of this approach, as should any other public institution that adopts it. In case they have forgotten, they are entrusted with the masterpieces of the past on behalf of the public, which has generally paid for them and their preservation. As such, the public should have free and unrestricted access not just to the works themselves, but also to the public domain reproductions of them. If they refuse to allow this, museums and galleries are not only abandoning their mission, and betraying the trust placed in them, they are thumbing their nose at an important court ruling.

If this shift to contract law becomes common, it will be a further proof that copyright not only harms the public and artists, as Walled Culture the book (free ebook versions) lays out in detail, but also seems to cause those who are obsessed with it to lose their collective minds.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: contract, copyright, culture, public domain, uk
Companies: creative commons

Techdirt Podcast Episode 379: Is the Internet Killing Culture? (No. Don’t Be Stupid.)

from the sky-is-rising dept

A couple weeks ago, we released the 2024 edition of our Sky Is Rising report about the state of the entertainment industries. Last week, Mike and I joined Corbin Barthold on Techfreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast for a discussion about the report and, more broadly, the state of culture in the internet era and the conversations that surround it. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: corbin barthold, culture, entertainment industry, podcast, sky is rising, techfreedom

The Sky Is Rising 2024 Edition: Rather Than Destroying Culture, The Internet Has Saved The Content Industries

from the the-sky-is-rising dept

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute »

Twelve years ago, we released our very first research report, the Sky is Rising. Back then, in 2012, the commonly accepted wisdom was that the internet was killing various creative industries, from the music industry (especially!) to movies, TV, and books among other things. This didn’t seem to match with the world that we were seeing, so we dug into all the data (and, wherever possible, sought to use the industry’s own numbers) and found that while some industries were struggling to adapt to the internet, the data actually showed that the sky was rising, not falling.

We found that more content than ever before was being created (though not all through traditional channels). We found that people were engaging with more content than ever before. And, contrary to the narrative spun by some legacy industries, we saw that people were more than willing to spend money on content. They were just focused on having it be convenient and accessible where they wanted it to be.

Over the years with support from CCIA, we released additional editions of the Sky is Rising report via our think tank The Copia Institute, but our last one was five years ago in 2019, before the COVID pandemic. Last year we set out to revisit not just the data, but the structure of the whole report. The process took almost the entire year, but we’re excited to release our latest edition of The Sky is Rising.

In the original report, a decade ago, we were focused just on countering the misleading narrative that the internet was killing the creative industries. Not only is that myth dead and buried, the latest report suggests quite the opposite: that the internet has saved those industries and basically become the lifeblood of all creative industries.

Throughout the report what we saw time and time again is that the growth in these industries is happening because of the internet. It’s making it easier than ever to create, to share, to distribute, to promote, to sell, and to engage. Creativity is thriving, and much of it is entirely due to the internet.

Indeed, we saw this most directly in industries most heavily impacted by COVID. One of our concerns going into this report was looking at how the pandemic impacted things, and the data certainly confirmed that some industries had huge problems: namely live music and movie theaters. But, in both cases, the amazing thing that the data showed was how the internet rushed in to fill the void, providing new ways to experience content that traditionally had required performance spaces, helping to tide things over during the periods of lockdowns, and then easing the rebound after lockdowns loosened.

The internet helped spare those industries, and helped billions of people around the globe continue to engage with and experience wonderful art, even in the midst of a global pandemic.

Over and over again we saw examples of the internet helping these industries out. The most stark and clear example is the recording industry (which, as a reminder, is just one segment of the music industry). This was always Exhibit A for an industry supposedly being destroyed by the internet. Except, just as we saw, with the ability to create more music, distribute it, and enable more convenient access to everyone, the business models have sorted themselves out, and now the internet is responsible for the industry reaching new highs.

On the video side of things, while COVID took a huge bite out of the box office, when lumped together with digital streaming, the larger market for video basically has continued to grow.

For what it’s worth, that chart highlights a change we made with this year’s report. Ever since the original edition, we had been combining movies and TV into a single “video” section. This turned out to be prescient as the line between movies and TV started to blur quite a bit during the streaming era. As we were putting together this year’s report, we started to lean in on this thinking, and we retitled the sections and expanded a few. In the old reports, we covered Music, Video, Books, and Video Games. This year, we have switched it to the activity involved: Listening, Watching, Reading, and Playing. This allowed us to expand some of these categories, and slot in some newer things like TikTok videos, digital magazines, and podcasts.

Also, we’ve added a “mini-chapter’ on AI. We’re way too early into the generative AI world to have that much data on what it means for creativity and the creative industries. However, from what we’re seeing, it feels like “generative AI” is taking on the misleading role that “the internet” had in the early 2000s, of a new technology that some are predicting will destroy certain industries. And, while it’s early, what we’re seeing is (again) quite the opposite. AI has all the makings of an incredible tool to help people be even more creative and to create more wonderful works that people will enjoy.

There’s a lot more in the full report, which weighs in at 80 pages, chock full of details, charts, and graphs. But the key takeaway from it should be that the story from the early 2000s about how the internet was going to kill the creative industries and creators was not only wrong, it had everything backwards. The internet has been a huge boost to the creative industries, opening up new ways for people to create, to distribute, and to engage with content of all kinds.

The sky is truly rising, not falling. And, we should keep that in mind as we live through yet another apparent moral panic about the next “threat” to these industries.

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute »

Filed Under: books, copyright, creativity, culture, internet, movies, music, reading, sky is rising, tv, video games

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal: And Generative AI Does The Marketing For Both

from the understanding-creativity-and-art dept

The attacks on generative AI started out claiming that it was all about protecting the creators whose works were being “stolen” in some mysterious way by virtue of software analyzing them. In some cases, that high-minded stance has already degenerated into yet another scheme to pay collecting societies even more for doing next to nothing. But beyond all this unseemly squabbling, there is a much deeper and more interesting question. It concerns not what goes into generative AI systems, but what comes out.

Generative AI finds subtle patterns in the works it analyzes, which it then uses to create new material, guided by the prompts that are provided by users. Some want to call that “theft”, but it’s a key element of all human creativity too. A fine post by Mike Loukides on the O’Reilly site acknowledges this, and goes on to make an important point:

It’s naive to say that creativity isn’t partly based on the work of predecessors. You wouldn’t get Beethoven without the works of Haydn and Mozart. At the same time, you don’t get Beethoven out of the works of Haydn and Mozart. An AI trained on the works on Haydn and Mozart wouldn’t give you Beethoven; it would give you some (probably rather dull) amalgam, lacking the creativity of either Haydn or Mozart. Nor can you derive the Beatles by mixing together Chuck Berry and Little Richard, though (again) there are obvious relationships.

Loukides explains how this kind of creative borrowing occurs in all the arts:

While borrowing in literature is usually more covert than overt, T. S. Eliot famously said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”

And:

As in literature, copying in painting is usually covert rather than overt. Pablo Picasso also may have said “good artists copy, great artists steal,” joining Eliot, Wilde, and others. Copying paintings by great artists is still an exercise for aspiring artists – although most of us recognize that more paintings in the style of Vermeer aren’t interesting as works of art.

The examples mentioned by Loukides all underline the point that simply analyzing artistic works does not guarantee that the output will be art. In fact, there is already evidence that generative AI is struggling:

Creativity sets a high bar, and I don’t think AI meets it yet. At least one artist thinks that tools like Midjourney are being trained to favor photorealism, rather than originality. In “The Curse of Recursion,” a research group shows that generative AI that is trained on the output of generative AI will produce less surprising, original output. Its output will become pedestrian, expected, and mediocre, and that might be fine for many applications.

Rather than reflexively demanding a cut of what is likely to be very little revenue from the “pedestrian” and derivative material generated using AI, artists should see it instead as a superb advertisement for their unique creative skills that software algorithms simply can’t match.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: ai, copying, copyright, creativity, culture, generative ai, homage, insipiration

In A Couple Of Weeks Mickey Will Be Free*; And Our Public Domain Game Jam Will Be Open

from the it's-public-domain-time-mickey-mouse! dept

It’s that time… Get ready for the Gaming Like It’s 1928! public domain game jam! The game jam, like all our public domain game jams, runs from January 1st through January 31st, and we’re eager to see what kinds of games, both digital and analog, you’ll make by building on newly public domain works. As always we’ll have awards in six different categories: best analog game, best digital game, best adaptation, best visuals, best remix, and best deep cut.

In January 2019, work in the US from 1923 entered the public domain. It was the first time in decades that works in the US had entered the public domain, as certain copyright interests, led by the Walt Disney Company, had continually pushed out the term of copyright again and again and again.

A while back Tom Bell coined the term the “Mickey Mouse Curve” to describe how copyright extensions seemed to keep happening just before Mickey Mouse would be entering the public domain.

Image

However, in part because of widespread activism and the calling out of this curve, the legacy copyright industries admitted in the late teens that they were pretty much done with copyright term extension and that, finally, Mickey Mouse might enter the public domain. 2019 was the first year in decades (thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act two decades earlier) that anything went into the public domain: works from 1923.

At the time, we launched our very first public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1923. We’ve done one every year since then. Here are the 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 versions. But this year is the big one.

The very first Mickey Mouse short, Steamboat Willie, was released in 1928. Leaving aside that Steamboat Willie itself was a clear play on the film Steamboat Bill that also came out in 1928 and used the song Steamboat Bill from 1911, it’s pretty incredible that this one short from 1928 was the basis on which so much culture and content was locked up.

Until… just a few weeks from now. And, so we’re certainly expecting a few Mickey-themed games for the game jam this year, and we welcome them all.

Our friends over at Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain have put together a nice guide to what it means for the 1928 Mickey to be in the public domain, which includes explanations of what you can and cannot do with Mickey. It includes a lovely graphical representation that you might like:

Image

There are, of course, lots of other works entering the public domain on January 1st, and we’re always excited to see what interesting and unique works people find and remix for use in the submitted games. Copyright Lately has a good starter list for some of the many other works entering the public domain. It includes things like the Peter Pan play (which has a tricky copyright history as it was performed long before 1928, but not officially published until then).

We know that John Oliver got a bit of a head start on using Mickey Mouse a bit early, and as far as I know, Disney’s lawyers (for once!) actually sat on their hands and did nothing about it. But, on January 1st all of you will be able to use Mickey and lots of other newly public domain works, and we hope that you’ll try to come up with some games for our jam.

If you’re looking for inspiration, please check some of the earlier game jams, each of which have the various winners listed, and check out our spotlight posts for last year’s winners. And we look forward to what you’ll be creating this time, whether or not it includes some variation of Mickey. Head on over to the game jam page on Itch.io to sign up and see all the rules and details.

* As explained above, Mickey is only partially free, as new works must be based on the original Mickey, not later updates, and you have to make sure there are no trademark issues, such that anyone would think that your use was an official Disney offering.

Filed Under: analog games, copyright, culture, game jam, gaming like it's 1928, mickey mouse, peter pan, public domain, public domain game jam, video games
Companies: disney

You Still Don’t Own What You Bought: Purchased TV Shows From PS Store Go Bye Bye

from the you-bought-the-right-to-be-disappointed dept

Thank you for joining us for your latest lesson in how you don’t actually own the things you buy when you buy them digitally. Over a year ago, we discussed a story out of Germany and Austria where a deal expired between Sony and movie distributor StudioCanal, which resulted in 100s of movies being delisted and deleted, both from the PlayStation Store and from the PlayStations of those who bought them. Yup! People bought a thing, got a thing, and then had that thing clawed back from them once the licensing agreement wasn’t renewed. You can guess for yourself whether members of the public who “bought” these movies had any idea that them disappearing long after purchase was even a possibility, but don’t overthink it, you know the answer.

But maybe you thought, “Sucks for Germany, but that wouldn’t happen here in America.” Well, turns out it sucks for some of us, too, as the exact same thing happened here, only with shows and content produced by Discovery and purchased through the PlayStation Store.

The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. “Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library,” read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.

It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery’s penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more.

And MythBusters, too, which feels like that show missed an opportunity to bust the myth that you own what you bought when you purchase something digitally. The reality is that there is no good way to actually retain these shows in cases like this. Some that “bought” Discovery content are freaking out, understandably.

“Is there a way I can save this content?” asked one panicked PlayStation user on Reddit. “I use PS4…But I have bought many seasons of shows such as Dual Survival that I do not wish to lose. I was actually under the impression since I owned it, I wouldn’t ever lose it…”

Whatever else is true, it’s obvious that platforms aren’t doing nearly enough to actually inform customers of what they’re buying, leasing, renting, whatever. It would be one thing if this content was ripped away and everyone on all sides realized that was a possibility. That just isn’t the case.

And just as in the Germany instance, there’s no chance that any of this comes with any refunds or givebacks. Well-meaning customers who paid money for this content simply don’t have it anymore. And it just isn’t like having a Netflix account or something like that, where the product catalogue is constantly in flux. It’s people who are buying a show, or the season of a show. But they’re really not. They’re renting it until some combination of Sony and the licensee decides they’re not.

And that just isn’t a tenable future.

Filed Under: culture, licensing, ownership, playstation, tv shows
Companies: sony, warner bros. discovery