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Affected titles include Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, and The Deer Hunter; Sony's message says the content "will be removed from your video library."
Readers noted the pattern: Amazon remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 from Kindles in 2009, and Sony itself shipped a DRM rootkit on music CDs back in 2005.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
Sony removed StudioCanal movies that customers had paid for on the PlayStation Store, no refund, because the licensing deal behind them expired. The thread linked two near-identical removals from the same week, including 551 movies deleted from accounts.
The core reversal: a buy button that was never a sale. As one commenter put it, your purchase lives in someone else's garage. Another pointed at first-sale doctrine: buy a paper book and you can resell or will it to your kids; buy the ebook and you own nothing.
The legal page is plain: 'due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed.' No refund. Titles named in the thread include End of Watch and a haul of kids' movies — one user lost Where's Waldo and Carmen Sandiego.
A teacher with a web-dev past put the blame on Sony's own contract: there's no good-faith reason to sign a license that lets the other side reach into a paid library and delete it.
Sony's notice blames “content licensing agreements” for pulling Terminator 2, Total Recall and 549 other films from purchased libraries. It's not the first time — the company tried the same move years ago.
The recurring demand in the thread is legal, not technical: stop letting a checkout button say “purchase” when what you get is a revocable license with no end date disclosed.
