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.
With the obvious caveat that IANAL, I think there’s a distinction to be made between the physical medium that an IP is distributed on, if any, and the IP itself. Like, when you buy a movie on DVD you obviously don’t own the IP. But strictly speaking, you don’t even own that particular copy of the movie as encoded on the disc you bought. But you do own the disc itself, which just happens to have a copy of the movie on it. So while a publisher can always pull their IPs, and make it illegal for people to distribute them, they can’t come and take the discs that you already legally own.
That makes sense, but then the next part is:
Surely that would still be a possibility?
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.
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.
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.
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!