In case you missed it, Sony recently decided to delete a bunch of Studio Canal movies from customers’ libraries (and not for the first time). Well, Google would like to remind us all that it’s no better.

Via Reddit and Dexerto:

Man refused refund after digital Lord of the Rings movies disappear from his library

…yes, those Lord of the Rings movies. The ones that megafans and obsessives keep rewatching, over and over again. It would have been hard for Google to delete a movie that’d be more likely to be missed.

Google’s explanation for not giving a refund or store credit? The complainant bought the movies in 2022, which is well outside their 120-day refund policy. And yes, the Google “support assistant” did use the word “bought.”

Google’s explanation for removing the movies from customers’ libraries in the first place? None. We can only speculate…

…but Google acts as a front end for a bunch of other streaming services, and LOTR gets passed between different streaming services a lot. Netflix, for example, had LOTR from February 1 to March 31, 2023,. The most likely-looking culprit is Amazon, which also uses the word “buy” to describe parts of its streaming service and which “lost” the “rights” about a year ago. Some LOTR fans rewatch it as an annual tradition…

(…and Amazon is the company known for removing George Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ libraries, repeatedly…)

If the complainant “bought” LOTR through Amazon or one of Google’s other partners in crime, though, wouldn’t Google’s “support assistant” have referred him to their customer service mechanism? And Google does still pretend to sell movies on its own… but it’s hard to find any Net record of Google offering or losing LOTR, because the search results are overwhelmed by endless retellings of this week’s outrage…

Unless the complainant reveals more details about that 2022 “purchase,” we don’t know whether Google screwed him over by itself or whether it was helping some other corp screw him over. Not that it matters all that much from other customers’ perspective, because all these corps suck ass.

 

P.S. External SSDs are reportedly not the absolute best long-term storage solution, but they’re good enough for my purposes. The hardware can last for a decade or more, and I’d have to not access anything on that SSD for months before I had to worry about bitrot.