this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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Licenses are a copyright concept, but this isn't a copyright issue. You're buying a copy of a game, and you should own the copy after the purchase (which of course, means the company who sold it to you shouldn't be able to revoke your access at will). That's the part that sony is apparently not willing to do. But copyright-wise, it would be a license either way, so I don't think it's a good idea to confuse people with only tangentially related concepts here.
licenses are a very IT central idea.
I have to buy licenses of Windows, Acrobat, etc.... It lines up with what Sony is trying to say too
No, that's just the implementation you're most familiar with. Licenses are a copyright idea that IT adopted and made digital. Every physical movie and game you own also comes with a license that authorizes your retail use of it, but forbids your commercial use of it. You can't rent your copy of Shrek out to people, nor can you charge admission to people to watch Shrek at your house, nor are you allowed to make copies of your Shrek DVD and sell them, for example.
Care to back that up? You wouldn't need a license to do something that copyright laws already allow you to do on their own. For example, making additional copies for your own personal use is perfectly legal, if allowed depends on your local fair use or private copying exemption law (provided you do it without circumventing DRM, e.g. via the analog hole), even though of course the movie studio wouldn't give you a license for that.
Of course, DRM is the real issue here, as due to anti-circumvention the movie industry controls who can legally make players for movies on DVD/Blu-Ray (unlike on VHS and CD).
That's literally how Netflix got started.
Netflix had a different type of license they negotiated with the rights holder. They didn't just buy DVDs retail and start mailing them around.
Yeah… I don’t think you are right about that…
I don't really see what that has to do with what I said? Unless you are saying that licenses exist for other things than copyright (in response to “licenses are a copyright concept”). That's definitely true, I oversimplified to make my point, but I'm also pretty sure that copyright licenses are the only kind of license that are relevant here in the first place.
Copyrights are a type of license not the other way around.
Copyrights are rights. A license grants others (parts of) that right. A copyright isn't a license.