In early 2025, customers who had purchased movies through Sony's PlayStation Store discovered that 551 films had vanished from their libraries. The cause: StudioCanal, the film's production company, had ended its licensing agreement with Sony. Customers who had already paid for those films received no advance notice. No refund process was announced, and Sony stayed silent at first. Only after users banded together and raised a public outcry did the company respond at all — and even then, the fix amounted to little more than a credit toward an alternative streaming service.
The anger of customers who lost 551 movies was settled with a single credit.
What the "Buy" Button Doesn't Tell You
When we purchase digital content, we habitually say we "bought" it. The PlayStation Store itself uses a "Buy" button. You add the item to your cart, enter your credit card, and receive a receipt by email. Nothing in that experience signals that what you're acquiring is a license to the content, not ownership of it.
Yet somewhere in the terms of service, it says: "You are purchasing a license to this content; ownership does not transfer to you." When the contract between StudioCanal and Sony ended, that license simply expired. The movies disappeared, and legally speaking, Sony had acted exactly according to its own terms.
Legislative responses have already begun in the US. Starting in January 2024, California enacted a law requiring that consumers be explicitly informed when a digital good is a license rather than a purchase. That after-the-fact legislation is itself evidence that industry practice had been misleading consumers for a long time.
The Case That This Isn't Simply Sony's Fault
Some in the industry took a different view of the incident. StudioCanal's decision to terminate its contract with Sony was a decision Sony had no control over. Content distribution in the streaming era is entangled in multilayered contracts among producers, distributors, and platforms — when one link in that chain breaks, the platform ends up a victim too.
Others argued that consumers bear some responsibility for not reading the terms of service. Parts of the Hacker News community pointed out that Sony's terms had explicitly disclosed this very possibility. The logic: adult consumers should understand the true nature of a digital purchase.
That critique has a logical footing. But designing an interface that foregrounds a "Buy" button while burying the possibility of license termination deep inside the terms of service is itself a choice — one that separates the consumer experience from legal liability. If the button had read "License" instead, the industry surely already knows how conversion rates would have shifted. A design that captures both convenience and deniability at once sits at the root of this incident.
What Anyone Doing Business on a Platform Needs to Check
For solo entrepreneurs who create content, distribute it, and connect with customers through a platform, this incident is hard to read as merely a consumer-harm story. Structurally, they stand in the exact same position as PlayStation users.
Businesses that park their content and customer data on platforms like YouTube, Substack, Notion, or Imweb have no way to control those assets the moment the platform changes its policy, tweaks its algorithm, or shuts down a service. Media companies that watched their traffic drop 60 to 70 percent after a single Google or Facebook algorithm change learned this lesson the expensive way.
In management strategy, this has long been treated as a "supplier dependency" problem. The more your core assets depend on an external platform, the less bargaining power you have and the more vulnerable you become. Regardless of scale, keeping core capabilities and core data on your own infrastructure strengthens long-term survival. Files made in Adobe Creative Cloud can become unopenable the moment you cancel your subscription. A newsletter subscriber list stored only inside one platform becomes just as precarious the day that platform changes its policy.
There are operational questions worth asking. Among the tools you currently subscribe to, is there anything you've mistaken for something you "bought"? Can the platforms you use export your customer data or original content, and under what conditions? Where, in that platform's terms of service, does it state that the platform "may remove content without prior notice"? The cost difference between asking these questions in advance versus after the fact is substantial.
I don't read this as a matter of distrusting platforms. It's simply reasonable to treat as an operating assumption the fact that no platform guarantees permanence. Distinguishing what you've entrusted to a platform as owned versus merely rented — and keeping a copy if it's the latter — is the line that separates manageable risk from unmanageable risk.
Paying a platform is not the same as owning an asset. The 551 movies that Sony's customers lost were access rights valid only for as long as the contract between the platform and the production company remained in force. For anyone running a business, periodically pulling out the list of your core assets and checking whether they're truly yours — or contingent on someone else's contract — is a basic operational checkup.
