Sony Went to Court to Argue You Never Owned It

A follow-up to Sony Says You Own Nothing, So I Closed My PlayStation Account. When I wrote that, I was reacting to an email. Since then Sony has put the argument in writing, in a federal court, under its own signature.

Last month I closed my PlayStation account and said I was done. The reaction I got most often was that I had overreacted to a routine terms of service notice.

Then Sony filed its answer in a California lawsuit and argued, in plain language, that no reasonable person ever believed they owned a digital game they paid full price for. That is not a leaked memo or a support rep going off script. It is the company’s legal position.

So here is the whole thing, with dates, filings and sources. Including the parts that do not help my case, because a post that only prints the convenient facts is worth nothing.

The reporting is not mine. Game File got Sony’s filing and read it first, and volunteers at the Consumer Rights Wiki built the archive of Sony’s own wording, so follow the links and read theirs. Everything else here is credited where it appears.

The lawsuit

On June 18, 2026, four California customers, Andrew Garcia, Edward Heycock, Jason Mendoza and John Salinas, filed a proposed class action against Sony Interactive Entertainment in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case is Garcia et al. v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC, No. 3:26-cv-06016-VC.

The claim is narrower than the headlines suggest, and the narrowness matters. They are not arguing that buying a game should transfer Sony’s copyright. They are arguing that the PlayStation Store sells with ownership words and discloses the truth too quietly.

The complaint says the store uses “Buy Now” and “Confirm Purchase” to close the sale, then relegates the license terms to “inconspicuous text or separate agreements that consumers are not required to affirmatively acknowledge.”

The law behind it is California AB 2426, now Business and Professions Code § 17500.6, in force since January 2025. It makes it unlawful to sell a digital good using “buy,” “purchase,” or any term a reasonable person would read as conferring unrestricted ownership, unless the seller either gets an affirmative acknowledgment listing the license restrictions and the possibility of revocation, or gives a clear and conspicuous plain language statement that buying is a license, with a link to the full terms.

That is the entire fight. Not philosophy. Disclosure.

What Sony actually filed

Sony responded on August 21, 2026. Stephen Totilo’s Game File obtained and reported the filing first, and every outlet that covered it, including this post, is working from that. Two things in it are worth separating, because the coverage ran hard at one and mostly skipped the other.

First, Sony asked the court not to hear the case at all. Its lead request was to compel individual arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act and stay the proceedings. Section 14 of the PlayStation Terms of Service contains an arbitration agreement and a class action waiver, with an opt out that reads, in capitals, that you have the right to opt out of binding arbitration and the class action waiver within 30 days. You have to write to Sony to use it. Sony told the court that none of the four plaintiffs did.

Only in the alternative did Sony ask for dismissal with prejudice.

Second, the argument everyone quoted. Under a heading that reads “Reasonable Consumers Would Not Be Misled,” Sony wrote the following, quoted here as reproduced by the Consumer Rights Wiki from page 12 of the motion:

In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining “ownership” of a digital game. Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then.

Sony extended the same logic to multiplayer: because players compete against other people who each need a copy, no reasonable person could think they were the exclusive owner of the game.

Read that twice, because the reasoning is the tell. It only works if you swap two different meanings of ownership. I own my copy of a Blu-ray. You can own a copy of the same movie. Neither of us owns the film, and nobody has ever been confused by that. Sony’s argument treats “I own this copy” as if it meant “I own this title and nobody else may have one,” then declares the resulting nonsense implausible. A used bookstore has been selling owned copies of identical books for a century without anyone filing a brief about it.

The hearing is set for October 1, 2026 before Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco.

Sony’s own words, archived

Here is where it gets hard for Sony, and it is the part that deserves the attention.

If nobody could reasonably believe they own a digital game, somebody should tell Sony’s writers.

This next part is not my research and I want that stated plainly. Volunteer contributors at the Consumer Rights Wiki, a repair and consumer advocacy project that grew out of Louis Rossmann’s work, have been cataloguing every place Sony tells customers they own things. The count stood at 44 documented statements as of mid September, with the page noting hundreds more, and every entry carries a live link plus an archived snapshot so it cannot be quietly edited away. That archiving is the entire reason this argument has teeth. Tom’s Hardware, Kotaku and GamesRadar+ all covered the effort, and the wiki page is where you should go rather than taking my summary for it.

A sample of what they found, in Sony’s words:

The PS4 to PS5 upgrade support page explains how to upgrade “an eligible digital PS4 game you already own,” and how to switch between versions “if you own the PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game.”
The PS VR2 upgrade page: “To upgrade an eligible digital game you already own to the PS VR2 version…”
Download troubleshooting: “If the game is owned by someone else who shares the console, make sure they have enabled Console Sharing and Offline Play.” The same page has a section headed “Check license ownership.”
Broadcast help: “View a broadcast for a game you own through the game’s hub.”
The Share Play page: “Both of you can enjoy the same game, regardless of who owns it.”
The Ghost of Yotei listing promotes a free update “for all Ghost of Yotei owners,” and describes Legends as a mode “free for all Ghost of Yotei owners.”
Sony’s own PlayStation Plus help says that if access ends you “lose access to the DLC and add-on content associated with that game” until you “resubscribe to the service or decide to purchase the title.”

There is a structural problem hiding in that last group. Add-on content requires the base game. Sony sells you DLC that only functions if you have a thing Sony now tells a judge you never obtained. The company’s own product design assumes durable ownership at the same moment its lawyers call that assumption implausible.

Let me be precise about one thing, because the sloppy version of this claim is going around and it is wrong. Sony’s license agreement has said “The Software is licensed to you, not sold” for years. That is not new and the archive does not show it flipping. The contradiction is not in the fine print. It is in everything wrapped around the fine print: the store buttons, the support pages, the promotional copy and platform emails going back at least to a 2021 notice about PS3, PS Vita and PSP that talks about content users own.

That is the honest version of the argument, and it is the stronger one. Sony reserves the cold language for the contract nobody reads and uses the warm language everywhere it is trying to sell you something.

The parts that cut against me

If I only wrote the above, I would be doing what I complain about when companies do it.

Sony may well be complying with the law. Techdirt walked through AB 2426 on September 2 and made a case I cannot dismiss: the statute offers sellers two routes, and the second one only asks for a clear and conspicuous plain language statement that buying is a license plus a link to the terms. The PlayStation checkout does put a license line above the Confirm Purchase button and does link the license agreement and the terms of service. If the court finds that line clear and conspicuous enough, Sony wins on the statute regardless of how cynical the rest of its conduct looks. The plaintiffs’ answer is that the disclosure is small, unhighlighted and easy to miss next to the rest of the interface. That is a real question and it could go either way.

The case may never reach the question at all. Sony led with arbitration for a reason. If the judge sends four individual claims to individual arbitration and enforces the class waiver, the ownership argument never gets tested in public. A 30 day window to opt out of arbitration, buried in Section 14 of a document attached to an account you made years ago, is how a company makes sure a class action is someone else’s problem.

The protest did nothing measurable. A campaign called the PlayStation Blackout, organized by the physical media group Does It Play, ran from August 23 to August 30 under the slogan “no disc, no buy” and asked players to stop playing, stop logging in and stop buying. On September 14, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella was asked on Bluesky whether the firm’s tracking picked up any change and answered: “No. There was no significant change at all in player count or engagement in our tracking.” That exchange was spotted and reported by Push Square, with Polygon covering it too.

That is US data, it measures engagement rather than spending, and it ran during a Call of Duty beta. But I ended my last post saying money is the only language these companies read. The first organized attempt to speak it did not register. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

One story I am not counting. An indie studio, Ternox Games, said on August 16 that Sony had terminated its developer agreement with no explanation and that 13 of its games would leave the store on August 23, reported by VGC and others. Within days Sony restored the account and the games stayed, as Delisted Games logged in its update. It got fixed, so it is not evidence of anything except that the appeals process works when a story goes wide enough.

The pattern is the actual argument

One filing is a legal tactic. What bothers me is that revocation keeps happening and the only reliable brake is public anger. The Consumer Rights Wiki Sony page lays the history out:

2010: System update 3.21 stripped the OtherOS feature from the PS3, a feature Sony advertised. The class action settled in 2018 for $3.75 million, paying affected owners up to $10.
2021: Sony planned to close the PS3, PS Vita and PSP stores, then walked the PS3 and Vita closures back after the response. It announced the closures again on July 1 of this year, and this time they are going ahead, rolling out by region from August 2026 through July 2027 per The Verge.
2023: Sony moved to remove access to purchased Discovery content when a licensing deal lapsed, then reversed after backlash.
2024: Merging Funimation into Crunchyroll, Sony revoked digital licenses that had been sold as “forever” licenses. Some users got free months of the new service, and only if they filed a ticket.
2024: A PSN account requirement was bolted onto Helldivers 2 after launch, including in countries where you cannot create a PSN account. It was withdrawn, and the game was pulled from sale in those countries.
2026: Sony erased purchased movie content from libraries, which is what started me down this road and which I wrote about in You Don’t Own It.

Every one of those was survivable for Sony because the customer had no standing to object. That is what a license is for. The reversals were public relations decisions, not obligations, and a favor that can be withdrawn is not a right.

Worth noting what is scheduled next: on November 17, 2026 Sony turns off network services on 71 audio and video products across seven categories, including Netflix, Spotify, Prime Video and Google Cast. Hardware sold specifically as streaming devices becomes hardware that does not stream. Nobody voted on that either.

Then there is the disc deadline

None of this would matter as much if there were still a fallback. On July 1, 2026, Sony announced on the PlayStation Blog that physical disc production for all new PlayStation games ends in January 2028. Anything released before then keeps its disc. After that, new releases are digital only, at the store or as a code in a box at retail. Sony’s own framing was that the change would “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

Two corrections to the chatter around that, because accuracy still counts when you are angry:

Ars Technica covered the earnings call where CFO Lin Tao, speaking through an interpreter, said Sony “cautiously considered” the decision and would move it forward cautiously. Per that same reporting, a corporate communications executive said Sony does not expect a negative business impact since content sales are largely digitized already, while allowing that players “have attachments.” The Consumer Rights Wiki’s summary of Sony’s quarterly results puts 85 percent of game sales in the quarter ending March 31, 2026 as digital.

And the widely repeated claim that Sony is cutting disc production to 10 percent is a misreading. A Sony DADC spokesperson told the Game newsletter that the original statement anticipated “an overall product volume decline by 10 percent, not a decline down to 10 percent,” a clarification I found via GamesRadar+. Still a reduction. Not the one people are sharing.

The clearest summary of the problem came from Shawn Layden, who ran PlayStation Worldwide Studios for years before leaving in 2019. Speaking to Brian Crecente’s Game newsletter, in reporting published September 4, he called a disc free future “depressing, but solvable,” and suggested Sony could license pressing to specialist manufacturers the way Xbox certifies authorized replicators. He also asked the question that ends the debate: if you cannot resell it, do you really own it?

Earlier, in a July interview with Eurogamer covered by Push Square, he said “I had no idea it was going to happen,” that he does not necessarily agree with it and that it is “a fairly dramatic decision.” The man who spent 32 years there and was asked about killing the disc drive every year for two decades found out with the rest of us.

The Dutch consumer group Stichting Massaschade & Consument is pursuing a claim over the PlayStation Store’s 30 percent commission on behalf of around 1.7 million Dutch players. Its chair, Lucia Melcherts, gave Wccftech a statement that puts the consequence better than I could:

No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it.

About Kojima, and what it is not

On September 10, Hideo Kojima revealed that PlayStation Studios had told Kojima Productions in mid June it was cancelling Physint, the action espionage game announced at a State of Play in 2024. Kojima said the team spent the following three months searching for a new partner and landed at Xbox. Sony’s statement said it had made “the difficult decision to step away” and that it continues to admire his vision. NME has both statements in full.

I am including this because it is part of why my trust is gone, and I want to be clear that it is not evidence about ownership. Bloomberg reported on September 11, summarized here by Polygon, that the cancellation came down to budget overruns, missed deadlines, Death Stranding revenue below expectations and reluctance to fund hundreds of millions for a game that would not stay exclusive. Those are ordinary business reasons. Publishers cancel games.

The connection is narrower and it is about credibility. Kojima called the end of discs sad and frightening. Sony’s response to the person who defined a chunk of its identity was to drop his project and keep the compliment. A company can do that. It just should not then expect to be taken at its word about respecting the people who buy its products.

What I did, and what I have kept doing

After I closed the account, I did not stop at logging out.

The PS5 has been off the network since. I pulled the ethernet cable and blocked the console’s MAC addresses at the firewall, so it cannot reach the internet even if something on it decides to try. I have not turned it on since the account closed.

That sounds extreme. It is the only configuration where the machine does what I bought it to do and nothing else. No patch I did not ask for, no terms update, no library change, no telemetry. The disc goes in and the game runs. The tradeoff is real: anything needing a day one patch is frozen where it is, and my digital purchases went with the account. I decided in advance that was the price and I am not revisiting it.

If you want the general version of that setup rather than the console specific one, it is in Locking Down Your Devices and Your Network.

What to actually do about it

Not a call to boycott. The boycott data is in this post and it says that did not work.

Buy physical while it exists, and verify it. Not every disc is a real disc. Some are a key with extra steps. I check every game against doesitplay.org and published my whole tested library in What’s Really on the Disc and the cartridge version in What’s Really on the Cartridge.

Opt out of arbitration when you still can. This is the practical one nobody talks about. Sony’s whole first line of defense is that four people did not send a letter within 30 days. Whatever platform you are on, find the arbitration clause, find the opt out window, and use it while it is open. It costs a letter and it is the difference between having a claim and having a complaint.

Archive the marketing, and support the people already doing it. The most effective thing anyone has done in this story was unglamorous. Volunteers saved screenshots and pushed pages into the Wayback Machine. That is why Sony’s own “you already own” language is now sitting next to its filing where a judge can see both. If you only click one link in this post, make it the Consumer Rights Wiki page. It is their work, it is better than my summary of it, and the wiki takes contributions if you find an example they have missed.

Keep the receipts on what a purchase button says. California already requires the disclosure. Laws like AB 2426 exist because people documented the gap between the button and the contract. More states will copy it, and the documentation is what makes that possible.

Where I land

I am not against digital. I am against digital being the only option, and I am against a company using the word “buy” in the checkout and the word “license” in the courtroom.

Sony can win this case. The arbitration clause might hold, or a judge might find that one line above the Confirm Purchase button is clear enough, and legally that would be the end of it. It would not change what the company said about the people who pay for its products, and it would not change that the disc is the only copy nobody can reach into my house and switch off.

That is why the shelf matters. Not nostalgia. It is the one version of the thing where the argument about who owns it never comes up.

And to say it once more, because it matters more than my opinion does: the filing, the archive, the data and the reporting in this post are other people’s work. I assembled and argued from it. Follow the links, read the originals and give them the traffic.

Sources

The filing and the law:

Sony PlayStation digital game ownership lawsuit, Consumer Rights Wiki, for the case number, docket history, quoted filing language and the inventory of Sony ownership statements with archived snapshots
Class action complaint (PDF), Garcia et al. v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC, N.D. Cal.
AB 2426 bill text, California Legislature
PlayStation Terms of Service, official

Coverage of Sony’s August 21 response. The filing was obtained and first reported by Stephen Totilo’s Game File, which every item below is working from, including this post:

Sony says ‘reasonable consumers’ know they don’t own the digital games they buy, VGC
Sony argues in court that digital games can’t be owned, Decrypt, for the arbitration request
Once a champion for physical media, Sony is now telling PlayStation customers they don’t actually own the digital video games they paid $70 for, Fortune
‘Reasonable’ consumers know they don’t own digital downloads, Sony says, Engadget
PlayStation wants to prove in court that you don’t own your digital games, Polygon

The counterargument, included on purpose:

Sony tells courts any ‘reasonable customer’ knows digital purchases are actually licenses, Techdirt, arguing the checkout likely satisfies AB 2426

The receipts:

Consumer Rights Wiki documents at least 44 instances in which Sony says you own your games, Tom’s Hardware
Fans put together a list of every time Sony said players owned their digital games, Kotaku
Fed up with Sony, PlayStation fans compile a list, GamesRadar+
Sony, Consumer Rights Wiki, for the OtherOS, Discovery, Funimation, Helldivers 2 and store closure history and the November 17 network service termination

Discs, protest and fallout:

Physical disc production ending in January 2028, PlayStation.Blog, official
Sony acknowledges backlash, “cautiously” moves ahead with end of PlayStation discs, Ars Technica
A future without PlayStation discs is “depressing, but solvable,” former Sony boss says, GamesRadar+, September 4, including the Sony DADC clarification on the 10 percent figure
‘It’s a fairly dramatic decision’: Shawn Layden reacts to PlayStation’s all-digital plan, Push Square
PS5 blackout protest made ‘no significant change at all’ to player counts, Push Square
The PlayStation blackout protest didn’t move the needle, Polygon
How Sony’s disc-free PS5 plan triggered a $457M lawsuit, Fortune
Sony’s disc-free 2028 plan hands it total price control, Dutch group warns, Wccftech
Sony is closing the PS3 and Vita digital stores, The Verge

Kojima, for context only:

Hideo Kojima’s ‘Physint’ cancelled by PlayStation, saved by Xbox, NME
PlayStation’s shock cancelation of Kojima’s new game now makes perfect sense, Polygon, on Bloomberg’s reporting

Verification tool:

doesitplay.org, check whether a physical game runs offline

Your Turn

Two questions I actually want answered. First, have you ever opted out of an arbitration clause inside the 30 day window, on any platform? I want to know if anyone does it, because Sony’s entire first defense rests on the assumption that nobody does.

Second, where is your line? The blackout data says most people do not have one, or have not found it yet. Mine was the account. If yours is further out than mine, I am not judging, but I would like to know what would move it.