Sony's trio of announcements this past week are a death knell to the old world order that's governed media consumption for the past century. No more physical discs, shutting down digital storefronts for old game consoles, and the summary removal of purchased content from user libraries are all just the latest salvos in the everlasting war between personal ownership and corporate rent extraction, piling on top of this year's hottest game shoving download codes into boxes in lieu of physical media and the exiting of the last PC Blu-Ray drive maker, Pioneer from 2025.

Physical media, I am reluctant to say, is dead for gaming and video content. The remaining physical releases are for the most die-hard, devoted, loyal fans who simply refuse to accept the abysmal quality of streaming services but are also too poor to afford Kaleidescape systems and purchases for an even more niche device than their BD drives. These too will continue to taper off before disappearing entirely, save for the odd indie or collector's edition of specific films or shows.

We will never get them back, and I've made peace with that.

Okay, obviously I'm angry as fucking shit.

Physical media was the compromise we made with Hollywood and the games industry at the dawn of the internet, agreeing to purchase content or rent it from approved vendors, be they Blockbuster or Netflix. If you could afford the disc or tape and wanted to keep it, great, that'll be $20 for the DVD, $30 for the BD, and $40 for the UHD; if you couldn't afford to buy, you could always subscribe to Netflix for $10 a month, rent from iTunes for $5, or borrow it from a video store for a few bucks per night. We suffered through malware from the recording industry, HDCP handshake failures, and a labyrinth of HDMI specifications on the condition we could still own it if we bought it.

The games industry took it one step further with DRM that hinders performance, anti-cheat that inserts itself into protected areas of the operating system, and arbitrarily locking single-player content or games behind always-online server schemes. Sony's announcements are the culmination in a perverse sort of hostility towards their own paying customers, demanding a sort of monopoly over their business that would make Rockefeller jealous: dynamic pricing wielded against consumers for maximum extraction of what are tantamount to rental fees, and on a closed platform where nobody else can compete. No wonder gamers are throwing their weight behind campaigns like Stop Killing Games.

All of these measures - the DRM, the streaming services, the copy protections - are repeatedly touted as a means to protect content creators by stopping piracy and theft of intellectual property. This after the mid-00s brought about a piracy renaissance, where anyone with an internet connection and a P2P client could grab literally anything for free, albeit while running the risk of infecting your machine with viruses and malware in order to get some shitty handicam rip of a new release, or a VCD re-encode of your favorite niche anime. Again, we accepted the compromise of these tools because the tradeoff was that we got more content, at more reasonable rates. We got Crunchyroll for anime, we got Netflix for TV and movies, we got iTunes and Spotify for music, we got Gamefly for video game discs, and all for incredibly reasonable rates with a high quality of service to boot. Up until the mid-10's, it really felt like we'd finally struck a compromise that would stand the test of time: plentiful, affordable content on a variety of platforms to fit our needs as consumers, while still paying reasonable rates to content publishers and distributors that kept business afloat.

So it's no wonder that customers are seething mad at the abject hypocrisy of those same studios consolidating their footprints, firing workers, bringing in AI to replace human creators, and tacitly permitting the largest coordinated commercial piracy campaign in human history to train these models off the collective body of work of humanity itself without meaningful compensation paid back to actual creators when compared to the sums Hollywood got suing single mothers over MP3s. The social contract wasn't merely violated, it was thrown into a shredder we paid for, and then we were invoiced for the industry's labor throwing it into said shredder.

So, yeah. I am fucking pissed, and you should be too.

Thus we arrive in the summer of 2026, when consumer compute costs have skyrocketed due to speculative AI buildouts and where nary a month goes by where a service or company announces a new price increase, insertion of advertisements, or just yanking content off their platforms. We also find ourselves amidst a rising, if familiar, mantra:

If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft.

Piracy, it's worth noting, generally comes from one of two motives: the desire to get something for nothing, or the desire to get something you cannot get legally otherwise. This is an important distinction, because industries continue to treat all pirates as the former, rather than acknowledge that most piracy is likely the latter. The single best way to drive down piracy, as evidenced from it falling off a cliff with the advent of streaming services and digital storefronts, is making it both affordable and accessible. I am very much the exception in that I would pay the extra $30 to import a $20 CD from Japan circa 2008; 90% of non-JP customers would almost certainly pirate it, because it wasn't available for sale at a reasonable price in their market. Look no further than regional pricing on Steam titles to see the benefits of affordable access in creating revenue streams from your content.

Thus we can reasonably expect the media industry's methods to spectacularly backfire on them in predictably rapid fashion: VPN use has exploded among those tired of arbitrary geographical blackouts of media, cloud computing has enabled a swath of sites to offer torrent downloads with a degree of separation from the end user, and COVID taught an entirely new generation of youth how to utilize VPNs and video conferencing suites to share movies with one another, or even how to build media libraries themselves.

This resistant attitude extends beyond mere media piracy however, and into other tech-burdened aspects of life. Just look at the bevy of sites discussing how to disable manufacturer spyware in vehicles, or the increasing trend of feature phones among younger demographics (and expanding into nostalgia for older cohorts as well), or the pushback against AI Data Centers. The consensus is pretty clear: consumers know they're getting taken advantage of, and are more than willing to fight back.

That's where this blog post comes in, a sort of proposed treatise on how to respect copyright in a digital world where scarcity of digital goods is purely manufactured, rather than a necessity.

Copyright Reform #1: Enforcement for Duration of Sale

Let's start with the biggest, arguably most common-sense form of copyright reform out there, and one that is perfectly suited for the digital era: granting copyright protections to content so long as it's continuously available for sale. This accomplishes a few big objectives right off the bat: liberating abandoned or lost media from overzealous copyright enforcement by current rights holders, eliminates the "vault" system of distribution cycles that major studios take advantage of to drive prices higher, and place a firm counterweight on the scale for current terms of 95 to 120 years by granting such protection only to continuously saleable content.

Think of the immense vaults of Hollywood content, languishing on shelves solely because the publisher can't be bothered offering it for sale. Or the legions of abandonware video games or software products whose vendors disappeared or whose rights got lost in a web of M&As. Suddenly, boom, every single one of these pieces of content would be public domain for all, simply because their owners refused to sell them anymore.

Anymore being the operative word, here. That's the stick meant to whack existing bad actors who refuse to sell copies of their content anymore, but still demand copyright protections indefinitely for it while crying "lost revenue" or IP infringement.

"But Stego", I can already hear you winding up, "what's stopping a company from selling copies for $500 per episode or $5000 per film and keeping copyright protections?" I am so very glad you asked...

Copyright Reform #2: Limiting DRM Terms to One Year

DRM is a blight, but it also serves a functional purpose for these companies in protecting initial sales. My inner anarchist is vehemently opposed to DRM in its myriad of forms (especially HDCP, a constant and needless source of frustration; nobody is going to intercept a 48Gbps stream when the pre-compressed content is right there on the source device), but my pragmatic side understands that it serves a valuable function for new releases.

New releases being the operative word for this section. Capcom's decision to replace Resident Evil 4's existing shitty DRM with even shittier DRM years after launch is what prompted me to revise my own internal policy goals with regards to DRM, and that meant placing hard and fast limits on how long it could be utilized for to protect content from piracy. My proposal: limiting DRM enforcement on any piece of media to one year from initial release.

This serves two functions: it discourages piracy immediately after release by allowing vendors to lock content under DRM schemes for its first year of sales (which is when most media make most of its lifetime sales, if you listen to industry lobbying groups), but also acts as a stick to abusers of the first proposal (limiting copyright protections to content only continuously available for sale) that forces them to price their products appropriate to market demand if they want to avoid rampant piracy of their overpriced product.

Let's keep beating on Resident Evil 4 Remake for a moment, to illustrate how these policies work together:

• Under the second reform proposal, Capcom would have to remove DRM from RE4 Remake by March 24, 2024, one year after its initial release. Note that the reform doesn't mention it being released in that market, but merely released at all. This is an important distinction.
• Without the first reform proposal, Capcom is instead incentivized to yank the product from sale or re-issue it as an entirely new product to start the clock over again. Instead, Capcom must continue selling the game to be able to receive copyright protections for it, thus they may decide to bump its price to something astronomical instead - say, $100 for the DRM-free iteration, to recapture "lost revenue" from piracy.
• Except the two proposals work together to counter that increase in price with more piracy, forcing them to either spend more money hunting pirates than they'd ever make in revenue from the higher price point, or lowering prices to recapture consumer revenue despite the lack of DRM protections.

Thus the carrot and the stick approach becomes a choice between capturing as much revenue as possible through selling DRM-free goods at reasonable prices, or punishing consumers with higher costs after the first year of sales and chasing pirates instead. The key to both of these reforms is that it constrains what the copyright holder can do to constrict supply of digital goods (which can be recreated indefinitely, and thus lack scarcity), and instead forces them to participate in markets rather than try to control them outright (as we see today with Sony).

The Music Industry: A Case Study

To see how well this approach could work, it'd be really helpful to have some sort of example. Y'know, an industry that was initially hostile to consumers purchasing their goods once and using them however they liked, depended upon physical media for sales, fought against improvements in technology, and sought total control of their industry before its participants finally acquiesced, giving up anti-consumer tactics, and just finding contentment in making their goods widely available worldwide at reasonable costs while focusing more on physical merch or experiences for additional revenue.

Oh wait, that's the music industry.

Look at that chart. Really look at it. The industry has quite literally never done better than it is today, in an era where basically every song is on every streaming service, where purchases are unencumbered by DRM from every reputable storefront, and where the focus is on concerts and merch instead of extracting maximum profit from a CD by shoving rootkits on it to deter copying. To be clear, the industry definitely has its challenges in the form of AI audio saturating streaming service catalogs and thieves impersonating rightsholders to steal revenue from artists or fair use content creators; the industry is not some White Knight of reform. Still, it managed to turn its fortunes around by (generally) dropping anti-consumer hostility and embrace widespread availability making up for lower prices.

Take Madonna's latest album, CONFESSIONS II. I could stream it on release day from Qobuz or Apple Music with my subscription plans, or I could buy it outright. Music streaming services means I can "try before I buy" without resorting to piracy, while Qobuz and Apple both offer the album to purchase in a variety of formats. Apple wants $5 for the new album in their 256kbps AAC format, with lossless streaming available to Apple Music subscribers; Qobuz sells it in lossless-only formats for either $7.19 for the CD-quality version, or $8.29 if you want the high-resolution versions. For all the screaming from old-timers about how albums used to cost $20 and we're taking money from artists' mouths, the music industry as a whole seems to have acknowledged that the problem is distribution and accessibility, not piracy.

Indie artists arguably have it even better in this post-DRM digital era, as they can sign up with any number of distribution points for fixed-percentage fees and sell their music globally with ease. You don't see them banging on about DRM for music to stop pirates, because piracy is just a known quantity regardless of what they price their music at. The goal isn't maximizing per customer revenue, it's to maximize the potential audience at a price point that enough people pay for it. That's the trick the rest of the media industry still seemingly rejects.

The Wrinkles

So the above two policy changes make media more accessible and affordable in a post-physical age, eliminating artificial scarcity while balancing the rights of consumers with the copyright protections of content creators.

That's not to say this addresses every conceivable problem, however, nor does it address every conceivable product. In fact, there's a few wrinkles that proper policymakers need to iron out language for in order to protect certain edge cases.

Edge Case #1: The Exhibition Piece

I commission artwork, and I'm friends with a number of professional artists. This is a very important edge case for me to get right, so bear with me as I choose my wording very, very carefully here.

Artwork - be they digital illustrations, physical installations, or exhibition pieces - has been largely neglected by copyright reforms over the past century. After all, how do we properly protect artist intellectual property while also protecting those who commission said pieces in the first place, or allowing visitors to photograph or record said artworks for personal reference? In the above two proposals, artwork finds itself in a weird, potentially exploitable space: does a commissioned piece count as a "sale"? What about exhibitions in places that might collect fees, are those considered a sale? What about reproductions in the form of prints, souvenirs, shirts, or other memorabilia?

In this case, I think a fair line to toe would be to first restrict these new terms solely to digital transactions for digital media. Existing copyright laws would still function just fine on, say, someone making reproductions of physical film prints to sell, or artworks exhibited in gallery spaces, or physical art installations. This doesn't entirely eliminate the edge case of digital artworks however, and so we should consider amending the above to state that commissions are not a sale of goods so much as payment for services, rending copyright shared property of both parties unless a contract stipulates otherwise. If the commissioner uploads this artwork to a social media site, copyright still applies.

Now some might argue that an easier solution would be to narrow down the reforms to digital books/movies/shows/games, but that still leaves the modern trend of independent media via YouTube or streaming service within this weird edge case. If shows like The Amazing Digital Circus and Helluva Boss never actually go on sale, are they considered an exhibition piece and thus retain copyright privileges? I would say the answer is Yes, but with the caveat that an act of piracy cannot be committed against content that's never actually available for sale. Yes, yanking those YouTube episodes and stripping out the advertising only to re-upload elsewhere would absolutely violate copyright law (and generally be considered a dick move), but it wouldn't be piracy per se.

Thus we carve out a new boundary: content not available for sale is considered protected by copyright, and is fine to share provided it's properly attributed and left unaltered. So download those episodes, but don't forget to support creators by buying their merch.

Edge Case #2: Live Service Games & MMOs

I'm going to use World of Warcraft as an example here, just because I think it's one most folks will resonate with to some degree.

Given the above reforms, at what point do live service games or MMOs fall into the public domain or otherwise lose DRM protections? Is it when a new expansion pack debuts? Or when the servers shut down? Or is it when a game so fundamentally changes that its old iteration could be considered a wholly different game entirely?

There's no single path here that will make everyone happy, so I'll just share my subjective perspective on this given my own experiences with the industry over the past thirty-odd years.

With regards to DRM, I think we should consider always-online requirements to be equivalent to DRM. As for the one year requirement to remove said DRM, however, I believe that clock should start ticking after the launch of the subsequent expansion pack, season, or content patch, or expire eighteen months after the launch of the current expansion pack. This is confusing, so let me give you an example using WoW update histories:

• The latest expansion, Midnight, would still be protected by the above reforms as it's been less than a year since its launch and its last content patch.
• The prior expansion, The War Within, would still have copyright and DRM protections through March 2, 2027, one year after Midnight launched.
• Everything released prior to August 26, 2025, would be fair game. That's not to say it wouldn't have copyright protections still (it very much would), but that the server code, database schemas, game clients, and assets prior to that date cannot have an always-online requirement or any form of DRM in place.

That last point is where I can already hear Blizzard's lawyers preparing a sueball, so let me explain my reasoning here. First, this is already Blizzard's policy with WoW, in that said content is entirely free-to-play with an account, and accounts themselves aren't a form of DRM necessarily, at least for games that function exclusively online with other players. Second, removing DRM is not the same as open-sourcing the codebase (we'll get to that in a minute), thus this doesn't necessarily permit private servers leveraging IP that's still covered by copyright protections.

So even if the above reforms were implemented, Blizzard's case against private servers would still prevail because they're actively selling the game in the form of new expansion packs and thus retain copyright over their IP.

The Wrinkle: Subscriptions aren't Sales

With everything moving to subscription-based services, it's worth noting that the above reforms do not change the reality that a recurring subscription is not in itself a sale of goods. Blizzard (or anyone else for that matter) retain copyright protections because they still sell the game, not because they offer a subscription to its servers or services. This distinction is incredibly important, and to understand why, let's look at Fortnite.

Fortnite is a free-to-play video game built around Season Passes and Microtransactions, with a recurring subscription for premium currency and digital goodies. The game is free, the content within isn't.

...Except Fortnite was available for sale, briefly, under the moniker of "Save the World". That version of the game would lose DRM protections under these reforms on June 29, 2021, and would lose copyright protections in April of 2027 since they've made it free-to-play (and thus no longer available for sale).

What that looks like is a world where players could reverse engineer their own private game servers from that version of the game, provided they don't impinge upon Epic's IP in other ways (such as advertising with artwork or creative assets Epic still uses and sells on its Fortnite store). Do I think this is a good idea? Not really, because clearly Fortnite is still very much alive and well, but I also don't know how else to draw this line without giving companies an even bigger win than they already have.

As evidenced by the successes of WoW Classic and Everquest, there's a market demand for replaying "classic" versions of older MMOs and online games for a nominal monthly fee. I'm not quite sure how to balance the rights of consumers to play games the company explicitly no longer supports (like, say, someone who only wants to play Everquest as it was up to and including Planes of Power or WoW as it was in its initial release) versus the rightsholder's ability to secure new sources of revenue based on shifting market sentiments in the future.

So when do the above reforms kick in, exactly, and what do they look like for defunct online games? I'm inclined to extend protections provided the game remains available to play at or below its initial subscription pricing (adjusted for inflation) and is being actively updated at least once a year with new content, but that opens up a Pandora's Box of what construes "new content" (i.e., would a Destiny 2 Vault rotation be considered "new content"? What about a large bugfix patch? Or a new executable for a different platform, like a Linux client?).

I do not have the answers for those questions, but I do think we need to discuss them more at length. Regardless, I also think that games like Ultima Online, classic EQ/WoW, and other older titles shouldn't be allowed to attack private server operators willy-nilly, and I also believe that any game that turns off its servers also surrenders its copyright and DRM protections. Hell, the inner anarchist would go so far as to mandate any title that loses said protections immediately becomes open source, or that game developers have to share server code, system architecture, and database schemas upon closure of the game, but that's another post for another time.

Wrapping Up

I've spent several days on this post. I still don't like it, not entirely, but I think my core points are communicated clearly:

• DRM should only protect initial sales for a limited period of time, and must be removed at the end of that period
• Copyright protections for mass media should only exist provided that media remains available for sale and compliant with the DRM aspect of the reforms.
• Mass media not available for sale cannot also receive piracy protections.

In essence, we should be creating reforms that liberate mass media into public hands earlier when publishers or creators abandon it, and promote an economy that focuses on maximum distribution and accessibility over individual rent extraction and heavy-handed policing by rightsholders. More like the music industry or indie media scenes rather than Netflix or Amazon.

Physical media is dying, and I don't think we can really save it in the forms we enjoyed for so long. Digital distribution has finally killed it dead, and the best we can do now is ensure corporate monopolies and rightsholder abuses don't end up fleecing us for more money at the expense of our consumer rights.

Digital sales should absolutely fall under the First Sale doctrine, and purchases should be considered purchases, not rentals or licenses.

Until that time, consumers can and will find ways to enjoy media on their terms. The question is whether or not Hollywood et al will take our money for it, or suffer the consequences of piracy for acting in bad faith.