It’s about time to change the laws on “owning” digital media

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Discs? DISCS? Where we’re going, we don’t need no discs

Sony has had quite the fortnight. First it announced that 551 Studio Canal films and TV shows will be removed from PlayStation video libraries — including from the libraries of people who paid for them — on 1 September 2026. Then, on 1 July, it announced that from January 2028 it will stop producing physical discs entirely for new PlayStation games. It’s probably about time we reviewed our consumer laws protecting users against the deletion of games, books and movies — any digital media — from our respective online accounts by the digital store owners, the distributors, or even the copyright owners.

A couple of points worth being precise about, because they make the situation worse, not better. Sony actually stopped selling and renting films on the PlayStation Store back in 2021 — so these aren’t titles being withdrawn from sale; they’re being clawed back out of libraries people already bought into. The removal affects the UK and Europe (US users apparently get to keep theirs), covers the likes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Total Recall, Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, Hot Fuzz, Paddington 2 and Pan’s Labyrinth, and comes with precisely zero refunds or compensation. Sony’s notice blames “content licensing agreements” and leaves it at that. And this isn’t even the first time: Sony pulled the same Studio Canal trick in Germany and Austria in 2022, and in December 2023 announced the removal of purchased Discovery TV content (later walked back after a monumental backlash).

The “You will own nothing and like it” era

In this modern age of digital content, consumed immediately on demand across different platforms, we’ve reached the point where convenience outweighs ownership and the (in)ability to keep a non-tangible product even if it’s no longer being sold. Violate the terms and conditions of your Amazon, Sony, Microsoft or Google account? Anything you’ve “bought” will be wiped forever. Distributor or publisher goes bust? Your movie or book vanishes from your online library. Licensing terms change and titles get pulled? Same result. The PlayStation End User Agreement — like most digital storefronts’ terms — says outright that you’re buying a licence to view content, revocable when the underlying licensing deal expires. The word “purchase” on the button is doing an enormous amount of dishonest work.

This happened to me with the film Attila Marcel by Sylvain Chomet, an excellent French film from the director of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. I had bought a copy on Apple TV and it vanished without warning a year or two after purchase. I approached Apple for a refund; they refused. Apparently the distributor went bust. If the movie had been downloaded to my Mac, I’d have been able to keep watching — but when you have over 500 movies in your collection, storing all of them locally is a bit of a pain in the arse. Apple doesn’t exactly go out of its way to let you archive your digital content, especially movies: anything with “iTunes Extras” can’t be downloaded at all. It’s all streamed.

Ironically, Attila Marcel was still available to buy on Amazon Prime for about four months after Apple removed their copy. I went and bought the DVD instead. If I were a more sensible person, I’d buy a Blu-ray drive for the Mac and rip my collection into a format I can play on any of my devices. But that remains technically illegal under UK copyright law: the private-copying exception introduced in 2014 was quashed by the High Court in 2015, so format-shifting your own legally purchased discs is once again unlawful. Woefully behind the times.

By making all content digital, we’re heading for a world where shops like CeX — anywhere you can buy second-hand DVDs, Blu-rays and games — eventually disappear as everything transitions to strict rights control. You won’t be able to share, sell or give away your copy of a film, game or book unless the digital rights management system deigns to let you. And piracy, I’m sure, will only increase as a result. Judging by the reaction to the Studio Canal news online, plenty of people have already reached the same conclusion.

Better digital rights for consumers

I want to see the law — especially UK law — enshrine consumer protections into digital purchases so that none of the digital store owners, their partners or third-party sellers can remove content that has been “purchased”.

If your account is closed for whatever reason, any purchased content must be transferred to a similar service elsewhere — and a statutory right to port purchased digital goods between services should be available to all consumers.

If a distributor removes content from a store (again, for whatever reason), it must remain available to download from that store — or another — without charge to the consumer. If that’s not possible, reasonable compensation must be paid. “Due to our content licensing agreements” should not be a magic incantation that makes your money disappear.

Obviously there need to be reasonable provisions for the stores and rights owners in all this. Video game platforms come and go: we’re on the PS5 (and PS5 Pro) now, and analysts reckon Sony’s January 2028 disc cut-off all but confirms the PS6 won’t arrive before 2028. How long Sony and developers will support previous generations has to be considered. On the other hand, there are still developers out there writing new 8-bit games for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, so “the platform is old” isn’t much of an excuse either.

The empire strikes back

What I fear for the future is that the terminology quietly changes to protect the tech companies and rights owners — “purchase” and “buy” rebranded as “long-term rental” or “indefinite licence”, which means exactly what it means now: content can be removed for whatever reason, with no compensation. And I suspect they’d backdate it, so anything you’ve already bought remains liable for removal regardless of any new laws introduced. Sony has, in a sense, already done the rebranding retroactively — the EULA said “licence” all along; it’s just the shop front that said “buy”.

Monopoly money

Which brings me to pricing, because digital-only doesn’t just mean you can lose the game — it means you can’t shop around for it in the first place. If a game exists only as a download on PlayStation, there is exactly one shop in the entire world that sells it: the PlayStation Store. Sony sets the price, and Sony’s contracts require publishers to sell exclusively through its store and hand over a 30% commission on every sale. Compare that with discs, where Amazon, the supermarkets and the specialist shops all compete and undercut each other. Sony understood this perfectly well, which is presumably why in 2019 it banned third-party retailers from selling full-game digital download codes — eliminating the last channel through which any competitive price pressure could reach a PlayStation digital purchase. (A US class action over precisely that move was settled for $7.85 million, with no admission of wrongdoing, naturally.)

And this isn’t just me grumbling: it’s currently before the courts. The Alex Neill v Sony claim at the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal — brought on behalf of around 11 million UK consumers over purchases made between August 2016 and February 2026 — alleges that Sony abused its dominant position by blocking all competition on the PlayStation Store, allowing it to overcharge for digital games and add-ons by around 20%. The claimants’ benchmark is telling: physical copies of the same games, sold in a competitive retail market, averaged about 20% cheaper than their digital equivalents. Estimated damages come to roughly £182 per class member — about £2 billion all in. The ten-week trial (the longest of its kind) concluded in May 2026 and the Tribunal is now deliberating. Sony’s defence is that it competes with Xbox and Nintendo at the console level, and that its commission subsidises cheap hardware; the claimants’ rather compelling response is that nobody standing in Argos can calculate a console’s lifetime digital game costs before buying it.

Nor is the UK alone: a parallel Dutch case on behalf of 1.7 million gamers reckons the digital premium there runs to 47% over physical, with further actions under way in Portugal and Australia. And there’s precedent for this sort of thing going badly for the platform holder: the Tribunal ruled against Apple over its 30% App Store commission, to the tune of £1.5 billion.

All this sits alongside Rockstar confirming that the “physical” edition of Grand Theft Auto VI contains no disc at all — the box holds only a download code, at full price ($79.99 standard, $99.99 Ultimate). Boxed copies go on sale on 12 November so buyers can pre-load ahead of the 19 November launch. Take-Two’s CEO denied “no physical version” reports back in February, and technically he wasn’t lying: there is a box. There’s just a piece of paper in it. Reports differ on whether a proper disc edition ever follows — Rockstar support has vaguely promised a “physical copy” in “the following months”, while a source told The Hollywood Reporter that no discs are planned at launch or after. A couple of specialist retailers have refused to stock it on principle.

To be fair, digital distribution has genuine benefits. There’s not much need to pre-order beyond letting your internet connection breathe while the content downloads ahead of launch day, rather than fighting a clogged-up ISP whose traffic on 19 November will consist mainly of GTA VI downloads. Developers can patch installed games readily. You’re not limited by physical media sizes — and indeed Rockstar has cited the sheer size of GTA VI as one justification for skipping the disc. Sony and its associates haven’t pushed optical disc capacities since UHD Blu-ray, as ecosystem after ecosystem goes fully digital. Leak prevention is the other obvious motive: no discs in warehouses means no street-date breaks. None of which explains why the code-in-a-box costs the same as the download.

Is physical media use actually increasing?

Here I have to be more careful than some of the headlines. A widely shared TechRadar piece quoted a manufacturing agency, Key Production Group, reporting a 10,000% increase in their own Blu-ray orders — over the past eight to ten years, and particularly in Blu-ray Audio. That’s one company’s order book, not the market. The broader picture from the ERA’s December 2025 figures is that physical video overall is still declining, but Blu-ray itself grew by around 3% — a genuine reversal after years of grim numbers, driven substantially by 4K/UHD steelbooks and special editions, which accounted for roughly £2 of every £10 spent on 4K Blu-ray in 2025. Vinyl, of course, continues its long resurgence. And nobody has told the Criterion Collection that Blu-ray is dead: they continue to release beautifully restored films on disc with all manner of cool features.

So no, physical media isn’t booming across the board — but the premium, collector-driven end of it is demonstrably alive, and every “purchased content will be removed from your library” email Sony sends out is free advertising for it.

In any event, I still say we need better consumer protection laws for digital media, because I will not allow the likes of Sony and their chums to take away content I paid for because licensing agreements or rights have expired. That’s not a me problem, that’s a YOU problem, Sony. And you will damn well fix it if you want to keep my custom — though I’m reminded of Mr. Prosser in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, asking Arthur Dent how much damage the bulldozer would suffer if he just let it roll straight over him: “None at all.”

I expect nothing less..

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Next goal is to obtain the PQC key exchange, but this is sadly not entirely possible with the Linux distribution I’m using due to various important supporting libraries.

Also pleased with this with regards to performance. Again, could do with tweaking a tiny bit, but I’m overall happy with this. For now.

And likewise for the mail side of things, I can’t achieve any higher because BIMI is very much a business function that requires access to a registered trademark with an image/logo. It also costs over £1,000+ per year for the certificate that’s needed to prove the organisation’s identity. Google Workspace does not support TLS (DANE), so I can’t use that, either.

But my edition of Google Workspace does support S/MIME for encrypted email and sender/ID verification – so if you get an email from me using Gmail, you’ll likely see that the sender has been verified. If you use Outlook, not so much, because Microsoft makes it a pain in the arse to deploy and use S/MIME.

Three: Possibly dumber than a certain orange president, even worse than O2

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During the time that I was off work and beginning to run out of money, I had looked at the possibility of setting up a cheap 30-day rolling Three pay-monthly SIM account so that if things went sideways with EE and they blocked my main number, I still had a phone number that I could use to make and receive calls. The downside was that I’d have to give out my new number on all future job applications as well as relatives and friends.

I decided to do this. And added an Apple Watch data plan too (in case I was far away from the phone that I wasn’t able to take a call). Three months later (ironically), I had my offer with UAL and I didn’t need to do anything with my EE account, so I began cancelling the Three line. In some ways, having used another number for a few months has probably saved me from many random phone calls from recruiters asking me if I am still looking.

But, ALAS!

Firstly, cancelling (or porting) a Three number – especially the the main number – will cause you to immediately lose access to the web site and phone app. It requires the phone number for both the logging in and two factor authentication (which I still say is a major security risk – let us passkeys or third-party OTP authenticators). If the phone line is cancelled, you can’t log in at all.

While the main line was cancelled (along with it the direct debit), I couldn’t cancel the Apple Watch data plan because it wasn’t eligible at the time for cancellation. Yet, I couldn’t access my account online to see any of the details. In order to cancel and pay the remaining bills, I had to call Three which is the worst experience of any of the phone operators out there. It has a typical horror maze of options which aren’t helpful at all, you usually have to keep stabbing a number key or hash before it’ll even put you through to a human. Sometimes that doesn’t work and you just have to keep waiting until the menu system times out. Takes an absolute age. It took two months to cancel down (you need to give 30 days notice within 30 days – you can’t do it ahead of time) and pay off Apple Watch data bills. Apparently there is still a final bill to pay, so I’ll await the notification. I raised a complaint with them when I last spoke to them earlier this month about all this.

Today I received this email:

What particularly amuses me is that they also sent me a text to my EE phone number…

So clearly Three can contact me – email and phone seem to be fine. Now, I’ve had to put my phone into call screening mode as I’ve been getting a lot of spam and scam calls of late (those in my contacts should be able to bypass this – unless its an upcoming iOS 27 feature – I can’t remember right now).

If Three operates an auto-dial system, call screening could potentially cause it problems, but tough shit – this is 2026 and the state of spam and scam calls through phones is at all time high. I’ve had so many phone calls from a wide range of unrecognisable numbers that haven’t left voicemails over the past few weeks that I’ve simply blocked them. If it’s important – you should have left a message.

Companies need to work harder to improve communications around stuff like this. For example, the email could have said: “We tried to call you from this number: XXX XXXX XXXX”, as I could have checked my blocklist and even whitelisted the number through my contacts – but, alas, no). But. don’t tell me that you tried to contact me when you can clearly send texts and emails without a problem.

Meanwhile O2 still haven’t fixed the “too many redirects” loop bug that prevents me from doing anything useful in my account on the web. It eventually leads to a system error. I have raised a complaint/ticket with O2 and tried to email their webmaster, but to no avail. It’s an issue that cropped up after Telefonica and Virgin Media joined forces and united their authentication systems into one. It’s a complete bloody shambles.

Why are telecoms companies unable to design a web site that serves its customers well through a web site that offers performance, stability and security? What we get with the major operators is a massive pile of shit that is unfit for purpose and probably combines 20 years of inherited code that hasn’t changed very much in that time leading to all manner of problems. Three, Vodafone and O2 should all be ashamed. EE is the only company that has improved not just its web site, but its contact options so that you don’t go through a maze to get to the right people. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than the others.

Apple’s Reality Distortion Field v2

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I watched the latest Apple WWDC keynote presentation today and found it to be as exciting as mud. It’s effectively fixing and optimising everything from last year, and providing the kind of features they were promoting last year and failed to deliver.

What I found particularly grating was the revamped Image Playground which allows you to take a person from your photo library and use generative AI to put them into something or have them do something. This is somewhat worrying. Regardless of privacy of the AI model – e.g. whether it runs locally on device or in the “private” compute space, the problem is that this could potentially be abused. That said, it’s not as if people can’t already do this with the likes of Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro or Nano Banana 2. Apple just makes it easier.

Speaking of which, Siri with Apple Intelligence will let users reframe photos and allow generative AI to fill in stuff that doesn’t exist because of the framing. Talk about Orwellian nightmares! Everybody will soon be part of the ministry of misinformation! It’s all fun and games until it isn’t.

Another thing I’ve noticed at work – there appears to be increased presence from something called “Applebot” which, I assume, is linked to Apple Intelligence/Siri. This bot (which legitimately comes from Apple IP addresses) was hitting a site I was working on pretty hard (but not as hard as some others) which is somewhat worrying. Can we all expect these AI bots to start consuming web site bandwidth and CPU/memory as it crawls, digs and extracts information from websites?

Also, with all this Apple Intelligence baked into the phone and macOS, I find it strange that they haven’t mentioned about any possible improvements to call features such as call screening or scam detection. Are there any improvements? Even just having call screening as a toggle switch in the Control Centre for iOS would be a big improvement for me.

Everybody sing: Old McDonald had a server farm, A.I., A.I., OH NO?

Gmail: Google, please give us better font options!

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Google, while I appreciate the efforts you’re going to make A.I. genuinely useful in Google Workspace, I’d really like you to revisit a few basic options that have gone untouched for decades. I’m talking about font selection and font sizes. At the moment, this is all you get:

In this case, I’ve chosen the larger size rather than normal. Normal, to me, is far too small when composing and sending messages. And what’s worse, you can’t specifically set a size for reading emails that have been sent in plain text. What are small, normal, large and larger sizes? Who knows – they are not allocated a number size – unlike the majority of font size options in.. oh, let me see, pretty much every other bloody product. Including Google Docs.

Whereas this is what I see in Outlook and Outlook for Web, I get a much better range of options:

Aptos 14 in Outlook is a good size. Larger Sans Serif in Gmail is larger than Aptos 14, though it is close. But it’s not close enough and annoys the heck out of me. As somebody who started their email journey on quite literally text terminals where there no such things as fonts or font sizes (as such). Everything was consistent.

Gmail has unfortunately been one of the few services that hasn’t really kept up with the basics – instead choosing AI over all else, and appears to be slipping behind even good old Pine which was a very capable email client back in the day. I just don’t get as much joy as writing emails with Gmail as I do with Outlook or any other client.

Reading email when the sender uses Gmail’s default small font or plain text is also a terrible experience. Take this email from my server to let me know local backups have completed. The font is too small. Gmail offers me no official method of setting a default size for reading email.

I’ve tried to create a Chrome extension using Claude that will override Google’s default fonts and font sizes, but while it works in principal, it’s an uphill struggle with potential compatibility issues and future updates from Google.

There is also a third-party Chrome extension that I’ve used in the past called V7 Gmail Zoom – and it works wonderfully well. You can set default text sizes for both reading and composing. But because Gmail ends out such tiny text by default, and having now gone “large” to make thing easier – email I send myself looks too big.

Sigh. This shouldn’t be a thing in 2026. Come on, Google, fix this stuff.

My third and final video game credit..

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Thanks, YouTubers, for releasing entire gameplay walkthroughs before the official release date. Though I should really be saying: bad YouTubers, bad. To your beds. Naughty YouTubers.

But at least this confirms that myself and others that have now left the company have been given credits for this game which as been in development for as long as I was at SMG. One day I shall look forward to playing it myself.

I am somewhat amused with my own IMDb entry in that the “Known For” section shows three video games and one video game film adaptation.

Back to the future.. the white ZX Spectrum

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Having grown up mainly around the ZX Spectrum (the ZX81, the 48K, 48K+ and the +2A), it makes me happy to see companies releasing authorised modern equivalents of these 8-bit masterpieces (we have the Commodore 64 Ultimate and 64C Ultimate, the Amgia A1200, and the ZX Spectrum Next).

I must admit I like the idea of this white ZX Spectrum based on the rubber key variety. It’s been fully updated with HDMI and modern inputs including USB-A ports. £129. I’d also like to own the Amiga A1200 (£169) as there was no possible way of owning one back when I was a kid – it was far too expensive (as was the BBC Micro which had the best keyboard of any of the 8-bit computers).

However, even if I had the budget for them, I don’t have the space as it is. I’ve also feel that I’ve moved on quite a bit from the 8-bit retro gaming scene (though I occasionally yearn for a quick go at Chuckie Egg). Things got really interesting when I moved up to an Amstrad PC3086. It didn’t have a hard drive, but it did have two types of floppy drive and you could easily play decent games thanks to its VGA graphics (which was fancy at the time – especially at that price point) even if you had to keep swapping disks out every so often.

Ah, the memories.. but it was a right bugger to type on

But it’s great that there are companies out there that cater to those who are nostalgic for the good old days of gaming and programming. It makes us appreciate what we had before all the nonsense that we have now (Windows 11, I’m looking at you).

The Atari ST or the Amiga A1200 was THE ultimate gaming machine back in my day

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Tim Cook

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I must admit that I am rather sad that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple. During his tenure, he’s seen the launch of what I would consider to be three of Apple’s greatest achievements in the past 20 years: the Apple Watch, and Apple Silicon Macs (e.g. the M series).

The Apple Watch has played a vital role in my health (its sleep apnea detection forced me to go and see a doctor, and I now have a CPAP machine) and continues to do so by monitoring my steps and other vital signs to improve my overall fitness and health.

The Apple Silicon Mac, when it first launched, proved that moving away from Intel was a very smart move despite launching in the middle of the COVID pandemic. I personally thought it was strange timing, but thankfully, I was proven wrong. The M1 series proved to be an absolute powerhouse of a computer, which is still going strong 5 years later – many people are still perfectly happy with the performance of their machine despite the M5 series potentially being three times (or more) as fast. I will always try to get a Mac for work – to give you an example, my current work M4 Pro MacBook Pro allows me to work completely untethered all day and still have enough juice for the evening. It’s extremely power-efficient and fits in well with the university’s energy policies – probably more so than the standard Windows laptops.

And I’ve always seen Apple gear as a good investment; it’s excellent value for money in both the hardware, software and services. I’ve got fair and decent pricing whenever I’ve sold Apple kit (unlike my Windows laptops). In terms of services, under Cook’s management, we’ve seen the launch of Apple TV, which has given us some of the best science fiction (For All Mankind, Severance, Silo, Pluribus) and drama (Slow Horses) and factual content (Long Way Up, and Long Way Home) I’ve seen anywhere. News+ is a great aggregation of newspapers and magazines, and Apple Music provides me with a quality music service where I can upload my own music library across all my Apple devices easily and without fuss – all in excellent quality.

Apple hasn’t always gotten it right, and they can be quite stubborn at times, but ultimately, the whole experience has been far more positive than with other technology providers. The most recent annoyance was having to prove to Apple that my 83-year-old dad, who only has an iPad, is old enough to browse the web. For me, my Apple account was old enough to immediately pass, but there was a lot of kerfuffle with credit cards, which I wanted to ensure did not end up on the account (which, thankfully, it didn’t). However, I blame the UK government for this more than I do Apple, which I suspect was ordered to implement it sooner rather than later.

You’ve got mail!

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Bit of a strange week for postal mail. As we head towards the local council elections in May, I’ve been bombarded with letters from candidates. I’m sure the independent candidate tried to call the other day, but I was in the middle of a Teams work call. He left a leaflet. Then there were handwritten letters addressed to either me personally or “the resident” from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and a leaflet from Reform, which was torn up and thrown away immediately.

What amused me was a handwritten letter from a religious group – possibly THAT group that usually calls around when you least expect it (no, not the Spanish Inquisition – they’d be 192 years too late). I only knew it was some religious thing from an enclosed pamphlet about Jesus and God and things of that nature. The letter itself was indecipherable. The handwriting was so illegible I suspect it might have been written in ancient Aramaic (as opposed to aromatic, which conjures the images of delicious duck in hoi sin sauce).

On the electronic mail front, I had to sigh when the latest news of Directive 8020 from Supermassive Games, for whom I worked up until September of last year, had ended up in my Google Workspace spam folder. Given that I had set up the infrastructure for the marketing department to ensure maximum delivery (ensuring DKIM, SPF, and DMARC were all correct, etc.) for this sort of thing, it was hugely frustrating to find that Gmail decided to throw it in the junk because other people had been reporting those kinds of emails as spam. You can do everything in your power, technically, to get mail delivered, but you’re still at the mercy of a mail provider’s anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-malware heuristics as to whether it will get seen by anybody. I signed up for the mailing list. It’s double opt-in (e.g. you get an email to confirm that you want to subscribe), but Google knows best. Anyhow, I’ve had to mess up my contacts list by whitelisting a no-reply email address because of Gmail’s design….

Anyway, Directive 8020 is due for release on the 12th May. I’m still undecided whether I’m going for the PC version (RTX 5070 Ti with 12Gb VRAM with Ultra 9 275Hx CPU) or the PS5 Pro (which apparently the game is optimised for).

Happy 11th birthday, Sven the Cat

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Sven is my father’s cat, and is perhaps the chillest, most relaxed feline I have ever met. He likes pets, sleeping, pootling around the garden, and sleeping. He follows Dad around like a shadow – even to the toilet – and likes to “help” out with computer problems by sitting on the printer (which was the case when I was dealing with family IT over the Easter weekend).

Happy birthday, Sven.