Piracy has never been tried successfully as theft, because it does not deprive the original owner of their lawful copy. It has always been tried as Copyright Infringement.

Its not theft because nothing is being stolen, only a copy being made. Their take on this is all the more reason to pirate. I'll be damned if Im paying $80-$100 to "rent" a game so they can take it from me when they lose the license. Which they've been doing alot of recently.

Modern Piracy is never theft.

Sonys been evil as fuck for decades dude, remember when 20 years ago they hid rootkits in their cds for drm protection.

The article is sensationalized a bit. They're not arguing you shouldn't have rights. They already state that clearly in their terms of service. They're arguing they disclose this fact adequately under California's disclosure laws.

California law forbids companies selling a licence to access content from using the words "buy" or "purchase" unless they make it clear to "a reasonable consumer" that what they're buying is a licence to access and not "unrestricted ownership".

Sony is facing a lawsuit claiming they're not following this law. Their sales pages use "buy" and "purchase" but don't make it clear they're selling licences.

Sony is countering by saying it's clearly stated in the first paragraph of their terms of service. If that isn't enough, they also argue a "reasonable consumer" would inherently know they're not buying "unrestricted ownership" of Sony's multiplayer games since multiplayer implies they're selling to multiple people and multiple people can't all have "unrestricted ownership" of the same product.

In law, "reasonable person" is usually a much higher standard than the average person. Even if the average person doesn't understand licences and ownership, a "reasonable person" does. Its why Fox won its defamation case where they argued that no "reasonable person" would assume Tucker Carleson's statements were factual.

The same reason your fruit punch is "made with 100% real fruit juice"

Just a little gamer jargon. Everyone knows what's up

“Add to cart” “Purchase”

No, you didn’t purchase it.

If not owned, shouldda said "rent".

Sleazy lawyers expect the judge to have rocks for brains and buy this argument. They're relying on the ignorance of digital goods and how they work. I hope they didn't forget that neat word from the last corpo scam before AI, non-fungible. Every copy is indistinguishable from all the other copies. If you can sell infinite copies at no cost, then people should be able to buy a copy and keep it in a working state forever. Fuck DRM.

It really should work that way then, instead of letting them have their cake and eat it too. They and others have fought hard to make that logic work to their own ends. When publishers can enforce artificial scarcity of digital goods upon public libraries, like limiting the number of active e-book loans at any time, those same publishers should find themselves bleeding on the other edge of that sword. But since corporations are "persons," the large ones belonging to that class of untouchables, it's "rules for thee, but not for me" as always.

Please tell me this is an actual song somebody made

"we only manufactured one! When you bought it, we no longer owned it!"

Well according to Sony, you don't own any even if you paid for them on their storefront.