There’s a popular saying “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing”. This is even more apt for what Sony did to thousands of its customers. Sony posted a record $3.1 billion in operating profit from its Game and Network Services division for fiscal year 2025. Then it quietly sent thousands of customers an email telling them the movies they paid for no longer belong to them.
Starting September 1, 2026, Sony is ripping 551 titles from PlayStation libraries, including movies from the StudioCanal catalog. The studios affected include films from across StudioCanal’s 9,400-title empire: Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, the first three Rambo films, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cliffhanger, Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and hundreds more. No refund. No store credit. No alternative download. A short email, a list of affected titles, and a link to what PlayStation cheerfully calls their “support” page.
Sony hasn’t announced refunds, store credits, or any other form of compensation for customers who purchased these films and believed they owned them permanently.
This is not the first time. And the technical and legal machinery that makes it possible has been sitting in plain sight for decades.
What Just Happened
Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies distributed by StudioCanal, including Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, to say that access to those previously purchased titles will be cut off and removed from their video libraries. The notification surfaced publicly when a user named @somatyk posted Sony’s email on X, adding the pointed observation that Sony had just posted $7.535 billion in profit for 2025, yet saw no issue removing content customers had paid full purchase price for. List of affected titles are given near the end of this post.
In some countries, including Germany and Austria, users already lost their purchased StudioCanal content back in 2022. UK users are simply next in the rotation. The broader pattern is obvious: Sony sold content it did not own, on terms buried in a legal document almost no one reads, and is now exercising the right those buried terms reserved.
Sony officially discontinued the sale of movies through the PlayStation Store in August 2021. However, PS5 and PS4 players could still access and watch their previously purchased movies through the My Videos app on the console. That “previously purchased” access is now being revoked for over 550 titles.
The Legal Language That Makes This All Legal
Here is the clause that matters, taken directly from Sony’s own Terms of Service, Section 10.1:
Use of the terms “own,” “ownership,” “purchase,” “sale,” “sold,” “sell,” “rent,” or “buy” in this Agreement or in connection with PSN Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content, data or software or any intellectual property rights from SIE, its affiliates or its licensors to any user or third party.
That is a real sentence in a real legal agreement. And it goes further. When you order or purchase a product from PlayStation Store, you buy a personal license to use that product for private, non-commercial use. That license is not transferable unless your local applicable laws say it must be. This means you can use a product in the ways described in the license, but you do not own the product.
So the “Buy Now” button is not a lie, exactly. It is a careful legal construction designed to appear to be one thing while meaning another. You buy a license. The license is revocable. The terms making it revocable are on page 26 of a document presented to users before they were allowed to click through.
There is a word for this in other contexts. In consumer law, it might be called a bait-and-switch. In contract law, it raises questions about mutual assent. In plain English, it is a company using the emotional and commercial resonance of the word “purchase” to collect full purchase-price money while delivering something categorically different from what that word has meant for centuries of commerce.
Who is StudioCanal, and Why Does This Get Complicated
StudioCanal is not some minor distributor. It is Europe’s leading film and television studio, operating directly in all major European markets including France, the UK and Ireland, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, and Benelux, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and the United States. Its library holds nearly 9,400 titles spanning 100 years of film history from more than 60 countries.
StudioCanal now owns the third-largest film and television library in the world, behind only Warner Bros. and MGM. That library includes titles from Carolco Pictures, Avco Embassy Pictures, and Lumiere Pictures, among others.
StudioCanal is a subsidiary of Canal+ S.A., and Canal+ itself is majority-owned by Vivendi. StudioCanal financed some of the most commercially successful films in history, including Terminator 2, which grossed $519 million worldwide, Basic Instinct at $352 million, and The Tourist at $278 million.
The reason this matters is that when Sony sold you Terminator 2 on the PlayStation Store, it was not selling you a film it owned. Sony Interactive Entertainment never owned Terminator 2. StudioCanal owned it. Sony licensed the right to distribute it on PlayStation’s digital store and sublicensed that right to you, the consumer, on terms that passed on all the expiration risks. When the licensing agreement between Sony and StudioCanal lapsed or was renegotiated in Germany and Austria in 2022, those users lost access. Now UK users are getting the same treatment.
This is the structural problem at the center of digital storefronts that nobody is adequately disclosing to customers at the point of sale.
The Discovery Incident Was a Dress Rehearsal
This situation is not unprecedented even within PlayStation’s own history. In December 2023, Sony announced it would remove over 1,300 seasons of Discovery-owned television from users’ libraries, including shows like MythBusters, Man vs. Wild, American Chopper, Cake Boss, Deadliest Catch, and Naked and Afraid. No refunds were offered. The removal was attributed to licensing arrangements with content providers.
After massive public outcry, Sony reversed course. An updated message on PlayStation’s website read: “Due to updated licensing arrangements, the Discovery content removal planned for December 31, 2023 is no longer occurring. We appreciate your ongoing support and feedback.” Sony then quietly confirmed that it had worked with Warner Bros. Discovery to extend access for at least the next 30 months.
Notice the phrase “at least the next 30 months.” Not permanently. Not indefinitely. Thirty months from December 2023 puts the next potential removal date around June 2026. Whatever extension Sony negotiated with Warner Bros. Discovery is either expiring or was structured to cover only a defined period.
StudioCanal content did not get the same last-minute reprieve. The removal is proceeding as announced.
The DRM Architecture That Traps You From Both Sides
This is where things get technically absurd in a way that becomes genuinely important to understand.
When you stream or play a movie through PlayStation’s video library, you are interfacing with a server-side rights management system. The film file is not stored locally on your console in a form you control. The authentication check on every playback request goes through Sony’s servers. When Sony removes the title from your account, the authentication check fails. The film is gone.
Most digital purchases grant a license to access the content rather than permanent ownership. If licensing agreements expire, access can be removed. Physical discs provide the strongest form of long-term ownership because they are not dependent on digital storefront licensing agreements.
Now here is the contradiction: if you bought Terminator 2 on 4K Blu-ray and want to make a personal backup copy for travel, you face federal criminal liability for the circumvention tools required to do it.
4K UHD Blu-ray uses AACS 2.0, a layered encryption and authentication system developed and enforced by AACS LA, a consortium that includes IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. Unlike regular Blu-ray discs encrypted with AACS 1.0, 4K UHD Blu-ray uses a version of AACS 2.0 that does not allow shipping encryption keys with certified playback software. Instead, the keys must be downloaded from a remote server, making repeated updates and internet connections a requirement. Fetching encryption keys from a remote server also exposes the user’s viewing history.
Playing a 4K UHD Blu-ray on a PC requires an AACS-certified optical drive with firmware implementing AACS 2.0 bus encryption, which encrypts data traveling from the drive to the PC over the SATA or USB bus. It also requires an Intel CPU with Software Guard Extensions, or SGX, which creates a protected memory enclave for processing AACS 2.0 keys. SGX was introduced with Intel’s 6th-generation Skylake processors in 2015 and was deprecated in the 11th-generation Rocket Lake processors and removed entirely from 12th-generation Alder Lake chips.
And in April 2025, Intel shut down the SGX verification server entirely, revoking all older CPU models that still supported SGX. Meaning that as of April 2025, playing a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc through official software on a Windows PC became technically impossible without circumvention.
This is not a minor technical detail. It is a corporation turning off the authorized hardware required to use content you purchased, then calling the tools that would restore that access illegal.
Section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting a movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, the motion picture industry maintains that it is unlawful to make a digital copy of a DVD or Blu-ray disc you own for playback on your tablet or laptop.
Criminal penalties for willful DMCA violations can result in fines and imprisonment, with the maximum penalty being 10 years in prison for repeat offenders.
So to be explicit about the legal reality: Sony can sell you a license to a film it does not own, using the word “purchase,” and then revoke that license at zero cost to itself. You cannot make a personal backup copy of a Blu-ray you physically bought without technically violating federal law. The developer of the software tool that would let you make that backup can face prison time. Sony’s licensing failure costs Sony nothing. Your attempt to preserve your own content through circumvention tools would, in theory, cost you up to a decade of freedom.
The Over-the-Air Alternative Sony Hoped You’d Forgotten
There is hardware that sidesteps most of this mess on one side of the equation: the SiliconDust HDHomeRun, a network-attached device that receives over-the-air ATSC 1.0 broadcasts and streams them over your home network to any connected device.
HDHomeRun devices connect to a home router using Ethernet and stream broadcast TV over a home network with no additional configuration. Users can connect a USB hard drive for DVR recording with no subscription required. ATSC 1.0 over-the-air content is received and recorded DRM-free, meaning the recordings are usable on standard media players without authentication checks.
Over-the-air content in the ATSC 1.0 standard carries no enforceable DRM layer because federal law, specifically the FCC’s broadcast flag order from the 2000s, was struck down by courts before it could be implemented. This means over-the-air recordings made to a local hard drive via an HDHomeRun are yours in the most complete sense: no server authentication, no expiration date, no license agreement that can be renegotiated out from under you.
The situation is murkier with ATSC 3.0, the next-generation broadcast standard. Some ATSC 3.0 channels are DRM-encrypted. DRM encryption is used by select broadcasters to block out-of-home viewing, limit what player devices can be used to watch content, enforce that the original tuner hardware is always present to view recordings, and to block third-party apps. Some broadcasters can also force recordings to expire after a period of time or block recording completely.
The broadcast industry is actively trying to import the same revocable-license model from streaming into over-the-air television. When they succeed, the last practical method a consumer has for obtaining a locally-owned, expiration-proof copy of broadcast content will be gone.
The Part That Still Doesn’t Get Enough Attention
The music industry had a version of this fight in the late 1990s, and lost it catastrophically, partly because they spent a decade treating their own customers as criminals. The Clinton administration’s negotiators helped push through the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions via international treaty precisely to avoid letting Congress debate them too directly. As one former official later admitted openly on the record: it was partly an intentional end-run around the legislative process, and the music industry’s inability to adapt to digital distribution made the resulting legal framework largely irrelevant to actual consumer behavior.
The result is a set of laws written to protect a business model that the internet immediately began dissolving, retrofitted onto streaming and digital storefronts where consumers genuinely believed they were buying things, and now being used to ensure that when licensing arrangements collapse, the financial loss lands entirely on the customer.
For consumers who value long-term ownership, physical discs and DRM-free alternatives remain the most reliable options. Digital storefronts offer instant access across multiple devices, but as Sony’s decision illustrates, that access depends entirely on licensing contracts the consumer has no visibility into and no control over.
GOG.com remains the lone major storefront in gaming that offers genuinely DRM-free downloads with no server authentication requirement. Nothing comparable exists in mainstream film retail.
Until the law distinguishes between what “purchase” means in a shop and what “purchase” means on a digital storefront, this will keep happening. StudioCanal today. Someone else’s catalog tomorrow. The September 1 deadline is arbitrary. The next one is already being quietly negotiated somewhere.
StudioCanal Titles to be Removed
1 – Life on the Limit
10 jours sans maman
10 Minutes Gone
13 Minutes
30 jours max
388 Arletta Ave
68 Kill
’71
99 Homes
A Bigger Splash
A Dangerous Man
A Date For Mad Mary
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A Good Man
A Most Violent Year
A Prophet
A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
A Swedish Midsummer Sex Comedy
A Turtle’s Tale: Sammy’s Adventures
A War
A.C.A.B
About A Zombie
Across The Waters
Acts of Violence (2017)
African Safari
Aftershock
Age of Shadows
Ahmed Sylla – Avec un grand A | Season 1
AHMED SYLLA – DIFFERENT | Season 1
Alan Partridge
All in Good Time
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Alone
Amazing Grace
American Gods | Season 1
And Soon the Darkness
Angel Heart
Angel of Death
Animal Kingdom
Another Day/Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis”
Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut
April and the Extraordinary World
Asura – The City of Madness
At Any Price
Attack the Block
Awaydays
Axelle Laffont – Hypersensible | Season 1
Babies
Back to Burgundy
Backtrace
Bagdad Café
Bait
Bandidas
Bangkok Adrenaline
Barbacoa de amigos
Baron noir | Season 1
Baron noir | Season 2
Baron noir | Season 3
Baseline
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Beautiful Boy
Bedevilled
Before I Go to Sleep
Bel Ami
Below the Surface | Season 1
Bérengère Krief – Spectacle | Season 1
Beyond
Beyond The Border
Big Ass Spider!
Big Eyes
Big Game
Biutiful
Blood Alley
Blood Glacier
Blood Moon
Blue Valentine
Boule & Bill
Braquo | Season 4
Bridget Jones’ Diary
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Bridget Jones’s Baby
Brighton Rock
Brillantissime
Broken
Broken City
Bunny and the Bull
Byzantium
Café Society
Caged
Cannibal
Capital in the 21st Century
Captivity
Carlos The Jackal
Carnage
Carol
Casa De Mi Padre
Cave
Cell 211
Chanson Douce
Charlie & Boots
Charlie Casanova
Charlie’s Country
Che: Part 1
Che: Part 2
Chernobyl Diaries
Cherry Tree
Chevalier
Chic
Chinese Puzzle
Chloe
Cliffhanger
Clown
Cockneys Vs Zombies
Coco Before Chanel
Code Name: Geronimo – The Hunt for Osama Bin Laden
Cold Blood
Cold Pursuit
Colette (2018)
Color Out of Space
Comedown
Compliance
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Courted (L’hermine)
Crossing Lines | Season 1
Crossing Lines | Season 2
Crossing Lines | Season 3
Cruzando la oscuridad
Cuban Fury
Dark Vengeance
Darkland
Day Of The Dead
De Palma
De plus belle
Dead Drop
Dead Night
Dead of Night
Deadly Assassin
Deadly Crossing
Death Riders
Deathgasm
Delicacy
Demi-sœur
Dépression et des potes
Der Nebelmann
Detachment
Detroit
Deux Moi
Dheepan
Diary of the Dead
Diên Biên Phú
Django – Nur der Colt war sein Freund
Docteur Knock – Ein Arzt mit gewissen Nebenwirkungen
Dog Pound
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Doubt
Dragged Across Concrete
Dragon Blade
Driven to Kill
Drug War
Early Man
Eden
Eden Lake
El Niño
Elle l’adore
End of Watch
Engrenages | Season 6
Engrenages | Season 7
Éperdument
Épouse-moi mon pote
Ernest et Célestine
Evil Dead
Evil Dead 2
Exeter
Experimenter
F
False Flag | Season 1
Family for Rent
Fast Girls
Five (2016)
Five | Season 1
Florence Foresti Épilogue
Fog in August
Fonzy
Force of Execution
Four Lions
Free Fire
From Dusk Till Dawn
From the Land of the Moon
Game Of Death
Gangsterdam
Gauguin
Generation Um…
Genius
Girlhood
God Bless America
Gold
Gomorra | Season 2
Gomorra | Season 3
Gomorra | Season 4
Gomorrah
Goodbye Berlin
Grand départ
Guy
Halal Daddy
Hard Kill
Haunter
He Named Me Malala
He Who Dares
Heidi
Hell or High Water
Hellions
Highlander
High-Rise
Hollywoo
Hot Fuzz
Hôtel Normandy
How To Talk To Girls At Parties
Hush
I Give It a Year
I Saw the Devil
In Fear
In Harmony
In Safe Hands
In the Loop
In the Valley of Elah
In Their Sleep
Inside Llewyn Davis
Intruders (2016)
Is Anybody There?
Isao Takahata And His Tale Of The Princess Kaguya
Jacob’s Ladder
Jalouse
Johnny English Reborn
Johnny English Strikes Again
Journeyman
Julia’s Eyes
Kalinka
Kill List
Kill Your Friends
King of Thieves
Kings
Knight of Cups
Knockout
Krisha
La 317e Section
La Cité de la Peur
La folle histoire de Max et Léon
La grande vadrouille
La Guerre des Mondes | Season 1
La stratégie de la poussette
Labyrinth of Lies
L’aile ou la cuisse
L’Amie Prodigieuse | Season 1
Larry Crowne
L’Ascension
Last Night
Le Bureau des Légendes | Season 2
Le Bureau des Légendes | Season 3
Le corniaud
Le Correspondant
Le Crabe-Tambour
Le grand mechant renard (& autres contes)
Le Redoutable
Le talent de mes amis
Le Vieux qui ne voulait pas fêter son anniversaire
Leap Year
Legend (2015)
Leon – The Director’s Cut
Les affamés
Les bronzés
Les bronzés font du ski
Les Cowboys
Les hommes du feu
Les Paris du Globe Cooker | Season 1
Les Sauvages | Season 1
Livid
Logan Lucky
Lou!
Love, Marilyn
Ma bonne étoile
Ma maman est en Amérique, elle a rencontré Buffalo Bill
Macbeth
Madame
Man On A Ledge
Man Up
Manchester by the Sea
Manuscripts Don’t Burn
Mauvaises herbes
Maximum Conviction
Mia and The White Lion
Microbe & Gasoline
Midnight Sun
Midnight Sun | Season 1
MILF – Ferien mit Happy End
Milius
Mindhorn
Mindscape
Minutes Past Midnight
Mirror Mirror
Mon chien Stupide
Mon ket
Mon Roi
Mood Indigo (Theatrical Cut)
Moonlight
Moonrise Kingdom
Mr. Nobody
Muck
Murder on the Orient Express
My Week With Marilyn
Nach einer wahren Geschichte
Next Time I’ll Aim For The Heart
Nikita
Nina Forever
Non-stop
Nox | Season 1
On the Edge
Once Fallen
One Nation, One King
Open House
Orcs!
Orphan
Our Day Will Come
Our Kind of Traitor
Out of Nothing
Outrage: Way of the Yakuza
Outside the Law
Pachamama
Paddington
Paddington 2
Pan’s Labyrinth
Partners In Crime
Parts Per Billion
Paul & die Schule des Lebens
Pension complète
Perfect Sense
Perrier’s Bounty
PETIT VAMPIRE
Pilgrimage
Platane | Season 1
Platane | Season 2
Platane | Season 3
Playmobil: The Movie
Poker d’as pour Django
Police
Potiche
Premature
Prêt à tout
Primaire
Problemos
Radioactive
Ragnarok
Raisons d’état – Director’s Cut
Rambo 3
Rambo First Blood
Rambo First Blood Part 2
Rampart
Red Heat
Redeemer
Remember
Replace
Reprisal
Return of the Hero
Richard the Lionheart: Rebellion
Rise of the Footsoldier
Rise Of The Footsoldier: Extreme Extended Edition
Robocop (2014)
Room
Rosewood Lane
Rubber
Rush
Rust And Bone
S.M.A.R.T. Chase
Sahara
Saint Maud
Samba
Sammys Abenteuer 2
Samsam
Santa Claus – The Movie
Searching For Sugar Man
Section zéro | Season 1
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Seoul Station
Serena
Sharknado
Shaun the Sheep Movie
Sightseers
Silence
Silent House
Silver Linings Playbook
Sink or Swim
Situation amoureuse : c’est compliqué
Six Bullets
Six femmes pour l’assassin
Sleepy Hollow
Sol (2020)
Soldier of Vengeance
Song of the Sea
Song To Song
Source Code
Southbound
Special Forces
Splice
Spread
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Street Wars
Studio 54
Studio 54 – Director’s Cut
Submarine
Survival of the Dead
Sushi Girl
Swallows and Amazons (2016)
Taboo | Season 1
Tad: The Lost Explorer
Take This Waltz
Tekken
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Remastered)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The Accidental Spy
The Admiral: Roaring Currents
The Apparition
The Ardennes
The Army Of Crime
The Assassin
The Assault
The Awakening
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years
The Big Blue – The Director’s Cut
The Big Sick
The Bling Ring (2013)
The Boy and the Beast
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Breadwinner
The Burma Conspiracy
The Chamber
The Child In Time
The Commuter
The Company You Keep
The Congress
The Dark Valley
The Deer Hunter
The Devil’s in the Details
The Dino King
The Dinosaur Project
The Door
The Double
The Emperor’s New Clothes
The End
The Evil in Us
The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec (English Dubbed)
The Factory
The Founder
The Free State of Jones
The Ghost
The Giver
The Graduate
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The Gunman
The Hexecutioners
The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window and Disappeared
The Hunt
The Imitation Game
The Keeper
The Kings of Summer
The Land of the Enlightened
The Last Exorcism
The Last Exorcism Part II
The Lawyer | Season 1
The Look of Love
The Lookout
The Losers
The Lost City of Z
The Lost Prince
The Mercy
The Monster Project
The Night Clerk
The Orphanage
The Outlaw
The Place Beyond the Pines
The Program
The Red Turtle
The Sense of an Ending
The Shameless
The Silent House (La Casa Muda)
The Son of Bigfoot
The Speak
The Student and Mr. Henri
The Suspect
The Take
The Tourist
The Two Faces of January
The Wait (L’attesa)
The Wall
The Wave
The Wicker Man (1973)
The Wild Life
The World is Yours
The Young Pope | Season 1
The Young Pope | Season 2
Them / Ils
This Is Spinal Tap
Thunder and the House of Magic
Tickled
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
To the Wonder
Total Recall
Tour de France
Traders
Traffic
Train to Busan
Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
Transpecos
Trauma Center
Trust Me | Season 1
Tunnel | Season 2
Tyrannosaur
Under the Skin
Universal Soldier
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
Universal Soldier: Regeneration
Unknown
Urban Warfare
Vehicle 19
Venise n’est pas en Italie
Vernon Subutex | Season 1
Versailles | Season 2
Versailles | Season 3
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Violence of Action
Viva
Vox Lux
W.E.
We Are Still Here
We Are Your Friends
Welcome Aboard
Whiteout
Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
Without Name
Wo ist Albert?
Wolf
Wolf Creek
Wolfcop
Wonderstruck
Worry Dolls
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
Yardie
Years and Years | Season 1
Yellowbird
You Were Never Really Here
Your Sister’s Sister
Youth
ZeroZeroZero | Season 1
This post first appeared at - The CyberSec Guru