Sorry, you no longer have the licence to listen to the podcast.
What is the point if they can just take it back?
This month, we are plugging the American Red Cross! Even if you can’t give blood, there are many other ways to help out. Visit https://www.redcross.org/ to find out how!
SOURCES
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/movies/sony-is-deleting-over-500-movies-that-people-bought-from-their-digital-libraries/ar-AA26PnQO
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/sony-lawyers-argue-that-nobody-is-stupid-enough-to-believe-they-actually-own-digital-games/ar-AA2biH19
Unlocking the Black Box: How the DMCA Became a Barrier to Repair
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
I know I bring up the video games industry a lot, but there’s actually something really fascinating going on there right now that deserves a closer look.
You see, Sony, the owner of the PlayStation brand, has been trying to phase out the idea of physical media and announced recently that their next console, the PlayStation 6, will not have physical game discs or cartridges. What’s more, their current console, the PlayStation 5, will be getting rid of them for major releases in 2027.
What Sony would prefer you do is go onto their digital marketplace, the PlayStation Network, and purchase games and other media digitally from now on.
And it’s really strange that Sony has been the one to advance this policy because today marks the day that Sony is removing 551 movies that were available for purchase from its digital platform from availability, and they’re not just taking down the pages to buy them – they’re removing them from the libraries of people who actually purchased them.
No compensation, no apology, no attempt to make things right. They’re just gone.
This has, understandably, upset the people who purchased movies to watch on their PlayStations, and Sony’s made a very strange argument to justify it.
If you buy something online, they’re saying, you as a consumer understand you’re just buying a license to that product that can be terminated at any time.
After all, you have to read a license agreement and agree to it to be able to make that purchase, right? And the license agreement says you don’t own the product.
This is obviously upsetting to people who make purchases from Sony because it means that they can buy things with the intention of using them later and then never get to actually use them.
With entertainment media, this is a pretty normal phenomenon – people buy things to have them when they want them, not necessarily to use them right away. But now the very way in which digital media operate may train consumers to think differently.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this goes a lot deeper than video games. Your car, your home appliances, your electronics and your computer software are probably all more or less covered under the same sorts of license agreements.
It creates an interesting conundrum for marketers, because as we try to persuade people to make a purchase for a durable good, what we’re actually selling may be something that’s more consumable than customers realize.
So let’s take a look at whether or not the very notion of ownership is changing.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
My refrigerator broke a few years ago and I had to have a technician come in and take a look at it because I couldn’t figure out why it was making raspy, breathing noises like Darth Vader. And when the technician came in to look at it, after we made a few jokes about how my appliance had turned to the dark side, he plugged in a portable computer and diagnosed what was actually wrong with my fridge.
Wait… what? He didn’t unplug it or open it up and look at the machinery itself? He used a computer?
That would have been a crazy notion 20 years ago. But in the modern world, he had a good reason for doing so – a faulty circuit board was making the fan oscillate weirdly, and that meant replacing it with a new one.
The appliance itself was fine. It was the proprietary circuit board that was the issue. And I pressed him with questions, wondering if I could fix it myself if I wanted to.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “That extended warranties you bought was a good idea because these things have to be fixed by a trained tech and you can’t use other parts. Even if you replaced the part, you have to have this special computer to activate them. They design these things to last about as long as the manufacturer’s warranty because they want you to just buy a new one when it breaks. This would have cost you about $500 today without that extended warranty.”
I was curious, and I researched just how deep this problem goes. And it’s indeed quite troubling. Product manufacturers often design appliances, cars and other expensive durable goods to be intentionally difficult to repair, and they utilize license agreements for the software running in these devices to make it difficult or even illegal for people or third-party repair shops to fully fix things.
Even if you replace the hardware itself, you need proprietary diagnostic software to activate it, and many of these electronics also have proprietary security chips or codes they pass to each other to ensure you’re not trying to integrate cheaper third-party solutions in a repair.
The manufacturers claim this is for safety and quality control, but the reality it that it’s often beneficial to them since they can control the market for repairs and get consumers to purchase replacement products more quickly, especially when the consumers find out the cost of repair. The result is that these repairs serve a different segment – those who need repairs under warranty – and not the general consumer.
Likewise, car manufacturers have started building out electronics that offer additional features for a subscription add-on. In the past, this might have been the SiriusXm radio in your car or the OnStar safety system, which was included but required you to pay a subscription to use permanently. Now it might be features like driver assist modes or diagnostic software or comfort control systems. Eventually, it will probably be entertainment systems.
Appliance makers may eventually integrate these features the same way. Your washing machine may have premium smart cycles that require a connection to the internet to verify you paid for the compute power. Your smart fridge may have services for easy re-ordering on Instacart that you have to subscribe to in order to use. Your oven or microwave may have pre-programmed AI-managed cooking patterns that you have to pay a monthly fee to utilize.
You can buy the hardware, but you can’t own the software that runs it. Your acceptance of one or more end-user-license agreements specifies this. And this is all legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which the United States enforces around the world through reciprocal trade agreements to limit piracy and workarounds.
As a consumer, I find this outrageous, of course. But as a marketer, I also find it troubling because consumers generally expect to be able to own what they purchase.
And in the pursuit of making money, we may be training them to look for alternatives or demand regulation rather than to view these practices as valuable.
Let me return to the video game industry for a moment, because it’s an interesting testing ground for how we got to where we are today.
The very idea of owning a video game has always been a little bit nebulous, because the original video games existed on coin-operated arcade machines where games were owned by businesses, not consumers, or on mainframe computers owned by institutions.
The code itself wasn’t even really fully owned by its creators because computer code is easily copied. And also, arcade machine operators were limited in what they could offer in the machines they purchased because the games weren’t initially interchangeable.
And so software creators had to find ways to protect their code and arcade machine operators evolved ways to utilize conversion kits to, for example, change Pac-Man cabinets into Ms. Pac-Man cabinets without having to buy a whole new cabinet for the newer game.
Home video games started out as games that were built into the video game system, but an engineer named Jerry Lawson invented the idea of interchangeable cartridges. And this is where the concept of games ownership really began to take shape in the late 1970s.
You could buy games independently of the video game systems used to play them.
If you wanted to buy a bunch of games for your Atari 2600 or Intellivision or Nintendo Entertainment System and then lend them to friends or rent them out, you didn’t need a video game system to get that utility out of them.
Likewise, you could resell those games secondhand at your own discretion – you didn’t need anyone’s permission to do so.
The same thing was already true of recorded music, which had been sold on various formats for decades by this point, and home video, which was evolving alongside video games.
And let me point out that all of this is a very 20th century innovation that evolved alongside product marketing itself, because in the 19th century and before, there were very few types of media that anyone could own.
So, let’s fast-forward to the 1990s where digital media started showing up more commonly thanks to the spread of the internet. The mystery of digital media was that you’d purchase software or music without ever owning a physical format for it.
People who made digital software programs would create fake boxes for them and put them on their websites to convince you that you were getting something valuable. And digital music was usually offered significantly cheaper than purchasing a physical CD or cassette tape because of the fact that it was limited to being played on your computer.
As the 2000s rolled around, consumers still weren’t really sold on digital media. They wanted to own things physically because that’s what they were accustomed to, and they didn’t want their software or music or, eventually, videos to be locked to one device. They also wanted the right to resell or re-use the things they purchased.
But a few innovations changed that. For games, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and the computer games platform Steam all began offering digital download services that got people accustomed to the convenience of buying a perpetual license for games and then being able to download and play them on-demand.
And for music and movies and even books, a variety of different innovations like iPods and other digital music players as well as smartphones, tablets, eReaders, internet-connected movie players, cable TV boxes, TiVos and smart TVs all got people comfortable with the idea of downloading or even streaming their music and movies and software.
By the time Netflix rolled around with its video on demand subscription model, there were already plenty of ways to consume digital media -Netflix really just added in the buffet-style approach.
And by the time smartphones trained people to buy apps for little to nothing instead of expensive computer software, people were already used to the internet providing a lot of useful applications that way.
The internet was also foundational in training consumers to think of software as a service – SaaS – running on a cloud application rather than locally on their computers. That’s how we got to the current environment of most software being subscription-based rather than perpetually licensed.
So the idea of digital media being the predominant format of entertainment media is, really, still in its awkward teenage years.
But video games are always pushing the frontiers of digital media because they’re in this nebulous space of not quite being static recordings like music or movies but also not being as useful as productivity software.
Some games are released and then the creators move on to new things without continuing to support the software, but others are released and then upgraded and maintained for years with patches and updates.
And video game publishers and platform owners perceive, often wrongly according to research, that software piracy and resales are cutting into their revenue potential and making it more expensive to maintain those games.
Digital sales are also more lucrative for the platform owners because they get a cut up front – as much as 30%! – and don’t have to share it with traditional retailers or pay manufacturing and distribution costs like they do with traditional media.
So every platform owner – Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple, Google, Steam, Epic, and so on – wants people to buy online exclusively. They don’t want brick and mortar retailers involved, they don’t want consumers to have the ability to resell, rent or lend out their software, and they don’t want anyone to be able to easily copy the software they’re selling.
That’s how they make their money.
The problem is that consumers have to also agree to this, and when a platform owner like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft or Steam decides to delist products people have purchased and nuke them from existence, consumers are right to be wary.
There are few legal protections in place right now to prevent bad behavior and it’s recently only because Europe has been challenging them that there are any positive consumer policies in place at all.
But the funny thing about consumers is that they’ll only take being abused for so long.
The idea of owning something you purchased isn’t novel. It’s foundational to commerce and civilization.
And if regulators get involved to break up monopolistic practices or if consumers ultimately decide they’re only going to support Netflix-style subscription models or they determine they’re only going to buy physical formats going forward, things could change again, and hopefully for the better.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
SEPT PLUG
This month’s plug is for the American Red Cross.
Now, listen – I do not like needles. I do not like giving blood. And I hate mosquitoes with a fiery passion, because they absolutely love me.
But I’ve made an appointment to give blood this month. Why?
It’s not just because the Red Cross is giving out an exclusive Hello Kitty item this month if you give blood – yes, they are, through September 20th!
It’s because right now, there’s a need for blood donors like there hasn’t been in awhile, and everyone – even people with common blood types like me – needs to step up and give.
That blood doesn’t just go to disasters. It helps people who need transfusions to stay alive. It helps babies who were born with sickle cell to get their chance at a normal life. It helps people who are suffering from cancer and need chemotherapy.
Blood can’t be made artificially. It only comes from donors. But only 3% of age-eligible people donate yearly, and, I’ll admit, I’ve been really bad about doing it myself.
So I’m making a change this month, and I hope you will too!
If you can’t give blood, you can always donate funds or host a blood drive yourself. Go to https://www.redcrossblood.org/ for more details.
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