In early 2025, customers who had purchased movies through Sony's PlayStation Store discovered that 551 films had disappeared from their libraries. The cause: StudioCanal, the film studio, had ended its licensing agreement with Sony. Customers who had already paid received no advance notice. There was no refund process, and Sony stayed silent at first. Only after users banded together and raised a public outcry did Sony offer a limited response — and even that amounted to little more than store credit toward an alternative streaming service.

The anger of losing 551 movies was settled with a single credit voucher.

What the "Buy" Button Doesn't Tell You

When we purchase digital content, we habitually say we "bought" it. The PlayStation Store uses a "Buy" button. You add it to your cart, enter your credit card, and get a receipt by email. Nothing in that experience signals that what you're acquiring is a license, not ownership of the content itself.

Yet buried somewhere in the terms of service is language like: "You are purchasing a license to the content; no ownership is transferred." When the contract between StudioCanal and Sony ended, that license simply expired. The movies vanished, and legally, Sony had acted exactly within the bounds of its own terms.

Legislative responses have already begun in the United States. Since January 2024, California has required that digital storefronts clearly disclose to consumers that what they're buying is a license, not a purchase. That a law had to be passed after the fact shows just how long industry practice had been misleading consumers.

The Case That This Isn't Entirely Sony's Fault

Some voices in the industry have pushed back on placing all the blame on Sony. StudioCanal's decision to terminate its contract with Sony was outside Sony's control. In the streaming era, content distribution runs through a tangle of multi-layered contracts between studios, distributors, and platforms — when one link in that chain breaks, the platform becomes a victim too.

Others have argued that consumers bear some responsibility for not reading the terms of service. Some commenters on Hacker News pointed out that Sony's terms explicitly disclosed this very possibility. The logic: adult consumers should understand the nature of what they're buying digitally.

That criticism has a certain logical validity. But designing an interface that foregrounds a "Buy" button while burying the possibility of license revocation deep inside the terms of service is, in effect, a deliberate separation of consumer experience from legal liability. The industry almost certainly already knows, from its own data, how conversion rates would shift if that button read "License" instead. A design that captures the convenience of "buying" while offloading the responsibility onto fine print is at the root of this incident.

What Anyone Building a Business on a Platform Needs to Ask

If you create content, distribute it, and reach customers through a platform as a solo operator, this story is hard to read as merely a consumer-harm article. Structurally, you're standing in the exact same position as those PlayStation users.

Any business owner who stores content and customer data on platforms like YouTube, Substack, Notion, or Imweb has no way to control that asset the moment the platform changes its policy, tweaks its algorithm, or shuts down a service. Media companies that watched traffic drop 60-70% after a single algorithm change from Google or Facebook learned this the hard way.

In management strategy, this has long been studied as a "supplier dependency" problem. The more your core assets depend on an external platform, the less negotiating leverage you have and the more vulnerable you become. Regardless of scale, keeping core capabilities and core data on your own infrastructure is a strategy that improves long-term survivability. Files created in Adobe Creative Cloud may become inaccessible the moment you cancel your subscription. A newsletter subscriber list stored only inside a single 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're mistaking for something you "own"? Can you export your customer data or original content from the platforms you use, and under what conditions? Where, in that platform's terms of service, is the clause that says it can 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 case for platform distrust. Rather, it's reasonable to treat as an operating assumption the fact that no platform guarantees permanence. Distinguishing whether what you've entrusted to a platform is something you own or something you're merely borrowing — and keeping a copy if it's the latter — is the line between a manageable risk and an unmanageable one.

Paying a platform is not the same as owning an asset. The 551 movies that Sony's customers lost were access rights that were only ever valid for as long as the contract between the platform and the studio remained in force. For anyone running a business, pulling out the list of your core assets from time to time and checking whether they're truly yours — or whether they hinge on someone else's contract — is a basic operational check.