Google books itself a trip to Mordor, as it removes a legally-bought digital copy of Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition, and refuses a refund. It’s not the most difficult rule of thumb here: that if you buy a digital download of a movie from an online store, that you should always have access to ... Google removes access to legally bought Lord Of The Rings movies
Google books itself a trip to Mordor, as it removes a legally-bought digital copy of Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition, and refuses a refund.
It’s not the most difficult rule of thumb here: that if you buy a digital download of a movie from an online store, that you should always have access to it.
That, after all, is the model, isn’t it? Given that over time, we’ve seen a couple of online movie stores disappear and take digital purchases with them, it’s unsurprising that more and more gravitate towards the big names. After all, the thinking is that the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Sony are going nowhere. At the very least, we’ll always have access to paid-for digital libraries.
You know exactly where this is going.
Over the weekend, it came to light that a user who’d purchased the extended cuts of Lord Of The Rings via the Google movie store noticed they’d been removed from their libraries.
Upon querying this with a Google rep, and you can see the conversation here, they were told that the films are “no longer available in our catalog.”
See also: upcoming Blu-ray releases in the UK
They were also denied a refund, as the films were outside the usual refund window that Google offers.
This eerily echoes what happened earlier in the year, when patrons of Sony PlayStation’s movie store had access to legally-bought Studiocanal movies removed without warning. The corporate reasoning presumably being that Sony didn’t renew its Studiocanal deal, and thus not only did it stop selling the firm’s films, but also withdrew access to those that had already been bought.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is unacceptable.
Accepting that even if we buy a disc we don’t actually own the movie on it – no matter how much marketing campaigns may occasionally suggest otherwise – we do always have access to it. That the accepted norm is that if you pay to have permanent access to a film, that you get permanent access to a film.
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When a company such as Google, with its infinite money, doesn’t play by those rules, then what chance for everybody else.
We regularly bang the drum here for physical media and this is a key reason why. It takes away the whims of big corporates, and their ability to take away what you’ve legitimately paid for.
Google hasn’t responded to this story yet, and it may all be a nice misunderstanding that can easily be resolved. If not, it’s actually outrageous. Not surprising, but outrageous.
With a firm tap on the physical media sign, we wait to see how this develops…
