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The story
With Sony signaling plans to end PlayStation disc manufacturing in January 2028, a class-action lawsuit is underway arguing that what buyers of download games actually receive is not ownership but merely a “license to use.” According to reports, Sony’s lawyers are arguing that no “reasonable consumer” would be misled into believing they own a digital copy. On 5ch (Japan’s largest anonymous message board), the thread covering this story splits between those who say “they keep it vague because calling it a rental would kill sales” and those who counter that “other companies don’t disclose it either, so it’s unfair to single out Sony” — with the discussion eventually spilling into Japanese copyright law concepts like the distribution right and exhaustion.
As Sony signals plans to end physical PlayStation disc manufacturing in January 2028, some are calling for clearer disclosure that what buyers of digital (download) games actually hold is “merely a license to use the software, not ownership.”
Unlike a disc, digital copies can’t be lent out or resold secondhand — and if a service shuts down or something goes wrong with your account, you could lose the ability to redownload or play the game altogether. Advocates say that risk needs to be made clear to buyers.
Amid all this, reports say Sony’s lawyers argued in a class-action lawsuit over PlayStation digital game purchases that no “reasonable consumer” would mistakenly believe they “own” a digital game. Put more bluntly: if you’ve got a functioning brain, you should already know you don’t actually own it.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, exactly.
Pretty reasonable take, for Tane-chan (a nickname for the person behind this thread's original post).
Because you can't charge full price for a rental.
Subscriptions don't need to say it, though.
Ownership of the key card itself belongs to the buyer,
and it can be resold secondhand, you know.
No matter how much you hate Nintendo, at least do your homework.
That's just a 'rental right' that lets you re-lend it, lol.
Didn't it just stop getting fed?
Though for some reason even the EU seems to be Team PlayStation on this —
and the EU is normally supposed to be the consumer's friend, if anything.
Come on, Mr. Distributor — someone as big a name as you shouldn't be posting anonymously.
All it'd take is one extra line, but instead they make excuse after excuse to keep people in the dark.
Typical Sony — masters of the art of deception (a pun in the original: swapping 技術/gijutsu "technology" for the homophone-ish 欺術 "deception-craft").
Nobody else labels it 'rental' either.
If that's your argument, people are telling you to change the label from the start — but going 'what about Nintendo, what about Microsoft' isn't actually responding to that.
If you want to say Nintendo and MS should fix it too since they do the same thing, fine — but fix your own house first.
They're doing the same thing, so of course they should get called out too.
'Tangible property'?
It's defined as 'a copyrighted work or a reproduction thereof,' isn't it?
Case law has limited the scope of the 'distribution right' (hanpu-ken) to tangible objects.
I think that ruling exists precisely to stop courts from over-broadening the definition of 'reproduction.'
Given the era it was decided in, that's a pretty reasonable call, don't you think?
By the same token, it's only because of case law that the distribution right applies to games at all —
despite games not being films, which is what the right was originally written for.
(“Fūrinkazan” — a famous four-character motto, “wind, forest, fire, mountain,” associated with the warlord Takeda Shingen — is this poster’s chosen handle.)
If they labeled it 'rental,' that would create an obligation to return it.
Then why not just label it 'purchase a usage right'?
And add a note saying 'access may become unavailable.' Problem solved, right?
That's already how it's worded, dude.
'Already worded that way' — you mean in the terms of service, right?
I'm talking about the purchase screen.
Though I bet you know that and you're just dodging.
Yeah, nobody does that on the purchase screen.
No, you ARE purchasing something — a right.
Whether anyone else does it isn't the point.
This is a counter to Sony's own legal argument specifically —
so people are saying, fine, then Sony should be the one to fix it.
This isn't a Sony-only problem though.
iTunes has done that kind of thing too.
Actually, Nintendo closed a store first.
Eh, whatever, I've just left it alone.
https://gzo.ai/i/avE1yTv.png
https://gzo.ai/i/SfvVAiO.jpg
What's the right answer, I wonder.
Isn't that literally what the monthly subscription fee is for…? Or am I wrong?
Monthly services shut down eventually too, that's just how it goes.
If paying monthly guaranteed a service would keep running, games with a monthly pass would never get shut down.
(“Shiozuke-kun,” roughly “Salted-kun,” is this poster’s chosen handle.)
Background and key issues
Behind this debate lie two concepts from Japanese copyright law: the “distribution right” (hanpu-ken) and “exhaustion” (shōjin). In a past ruling on used-game sales, Japan’s Supreme Court held that, for packaged software, the distribution right is exhausted at the moment of first sale — which is what makes reselling secondhand discs legal. The legal sticking point in the thread is that this doctrine assumes a tangible object (a disc), and arguably doesn’t extend to data delivered as a download. Sony’s plan to end PlayStation disc production in January 2028 is the backdrop against which this lawsuit is playing out. Where the thread split was over one specific question — whether there’s an obligation to disclose the license-not-ownership distinction. One side credited Steam for spelling out the licensing terms in its terms of service; the other argued that since Microsoft and Nintendo don’t clearly disclose it either, singling out Sony is unfair. What’s easy for readers to miss is that this isn’t a Sony-specific issue — it’s a structural problem across all digitally distributed games: what you think you bought isn’t actually something you own.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and summaries of the 5ch “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” board thread “Tane: ‘Why doesn’t Sony label download games as rentals?’”
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