Sony Just Deleted Movies You Paid For. Let's Talk About Who Actually Owns Your Data.

Every so often Sony (or Amazon, or whoever’s turn it is that quarter) reminds everyone that the movies, shows, or games you “bought” digitally were never actually yours. A license gets pulled, a licensing deal expires, a service shuts down, and the row of purchases in your account just… isn’t playable anymore. No refund lands in your account. No apology that means anything. Just gone, like it was never there, because legally, you never really owned it to begin with.

And every time this happens, somebody in the group chat says the same thing: “this is why physical media matters.” And you know what? They’re right. I still buy discs. Not because I’m nostalgic for scratched DVDs — I’m not that guy — but because a disc on my shelf doesn’t care if a company’s licensing deal changed. It doesn’t get “removed from your library.” Nobody can push an update that deletes it.

This isn’t really a movie post

I bring this up because it’s the exact same lesson I try to get business owners to internalize about their own data, and almost nobody wants to hear it the first time. “The cloud” is not a place your files live safely forever. It’s someone else’s server, running someone else’s terms of service, that can change without asking you first. Your files being “in the cloud” is not a backup. It’s one copy, sitting in one place, subject to one company’s decisions about pricing, policy, or whether they even stay in business.

Sony taking your movies away is annoying and it costs you forty bucks. A business losing its only copy of its client records, financials, or years of project history because it lived in exactly one place is a different category of problem entirely — the kind that puts people out of work.

What “owning” your data actually looks like

The rule I actually use, and the one I’d tell you even if you weren’t a client: your important data needs to exist in at least three places, on at least two different types of storage, with at least one copy somewhere physically separate from your office. That’s not paranoia. That’s just acknowledging that servers fail, ransomware happens, and yes, sometimes a company just decides your access is over.

You don’t need to understand the technical side of that to get the point: don’t let “it’s in the cloud” be the whole plan. If you want someone to actually look at where your business’s data lives and whether it would survive a bad week, that’s a conversation worth having before you need it, not after.

And yes, I’m still buying the disc.