California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that won’t stop companies from taking away your digitally purchased video games, movies, and TV shows, but it’ll at least force them to be a little more transparent about it.
As spotted by The Verge, the law, AB 2426, will prohibit storefronts from using the words “buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good or alongside an option for a time-limited rental.” The law won’t apply to storefronts which state in “plain language” that you’re actually just licensing the digital content and that license could expire at any time, or to products that can be permanently downloaded.
The law will go into effect next year, and companies who violate the terms could be hit with a false advertising fine. It also applies to e-books, music, and other forms of digital media.
It’s way past time for a crackdown in regard to digital ownership. We’re living in a digital age now, where digital entertainment products have clearly outpaced physical products. We need to force companies away from the “rental store” mentality they’re insisting on. If we’re paying the same price for a digital copy of a product as it would be for a physical copy, then we deserve the same protections across the board.
If I buy a movie, music, a book, or a game, I should have the right to save a local copy of it to use, in perpetuity, in any manner I please, not just for as long as the company decides I should be able to or for as long as the company exists.
Not only that, but the ability to transfer or even sell your license. If I can gift or sell a book or DVD, I should be able to do the same with a game or digital movie.
Something like smart contracts on ethereum using NFTs is actually a perfect use for this and where the future is heading.
You get a fraud proof authorization token that cant be duplicated that let’s you access the content. It can be sold or transferred without needing the company to still exist and can still unlock the content even years after they’re bankrupt.
The only thing left is how do you host the content so it survives beyond the company going out of business. The company themselves could host it initially, but eventually it’d need to end up on a public torrent site or some other distributed sharing network otherwise it could vanish. But that’s also a digital media problem in general.
Edit: also like any DRM people that want to break it can go as far as altering source code to remove the checks, they do that today, this wouldn’t change it. But this is a path for people trying to do the right thing on all sides. They haven’t stopped selling digital content because people can bypass things.
Could you imagine those ledgers trying to process when everyone in existence tries to insert hundreds to thousands of unique licenses. Then having to continuously access records on every media use after that.
How many unique copies of media are there out there. Hundreds of billions, trillions. I don’t think we have anything adequately designed at this point that could handle that kind of load.
Thats not how it’d work. The blockchain will generate the NFT but the NFT can authorize itself. You can do offline signatures that will prove you own the token and thus own the media. It doesn’t need to check in with anything online to pass a validity check once it’s issued.
The token is unique, the media is just out there exactly like it this today. How many billions of copies of songs have been download from iTunes?
Edit: And layer 2s will be able to handle 100,000 TPS or more in the future for the initial issuance. I didn’t say today, I said where the future is heading. That’s 3,153,600,000,000 transactions a year, and it’s going to be more than that.
I like how Factorio packages their game. You pay them $35 and then you can download and install on steam, get an installer through the website, or even just get a portable folder containing all of the game files.
Great game by good people.
I really wish they would do sales occasionally, I played the demo and really liked it but $35 is just a bit more than I want to spend on a single game
It’s a steal, even at full price, particularly once you account for the various mods.
FYI, I’ve several friends who veto playing, or even talking about factorio. They can’t afford to lose 100s of hours of their lives again to cracktorio, and dont want to be sucked back in again. Take from this what you will.
I didn’t know I had an addictive personality until I played factorio. Crack for your brain, it’s crazy.
Most people have an addiction button. The version for geeks and engineers is VERY hard to exploit at scale, to make money. Factorio pushes that button perfectly. It’s a sustained dopamine stream that little can match.
On a completely unrelated note. Less than a month now! 😀
Can I recommend never downloading vampire survivors then?
I haven’t played it since getting married. If I open the game, the factory must grow.
You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode… :D
If you look at it as dollars per time spent, it’ll probably be far better value than the majority of games you could get cheaper. Assuming you like it of course (but if you think you will, you probably will).
I’ve got over 1700 hours on Factorio, which makes it cost me 2¢ per hour of entertainment
Though it’s a bit like drugs in that you really enjoy it at first and eventually you’re just trying to get your fix.
FR, afaik they’ve never done a sale ever. Also it used to cost 25.
no, dumbasses, the law should say “fuck you, if you sell it they own it”. not that you’re allowed to do whatever the fuck you want after they pay for your product as long as you say so first.
This may be careful wording to avoid it being struck down by the Supreme Court.
Individual states have limited power to limit contracts. And while this may be a flimsy leg to stand on, SCOTUS may as well be the great American flamingo when it comes to standing on a single shakey leg
True. But as long as that isn’t the case, may as well fix the wording and raise awareness.
this is great! now we can argue in court, “if it cannot be owned, how can it be stolen?”
I feel like the Magic The Gathering Online rule should be in play: if somebody sells a digital product you should be able to have them ship you a physical copy of the product at the cost of shipping it.
I think you got a you and a them mixed up here
I wonder how many Steam users are going to get a startling wake up call. For all the praise it gets, Steam was a frontrunner in labeling buy and purchase what is essentially an unlimited time rental that can expire when your free subscription service does.
They can ban and suspend your account for, say, adding the “wrong” CD key into your account (they reserve the right to ban false CD keys) or accepting gifts (if fraud ends up being associated with it), along with all your other purchases if they wanted to, and that would be potentially thousands and thousands of dollars down the drown. Steam could collapse, or it could be passed on to a new CEO that say, sold it to EA, and they could decide to put conditions on that subscriptions or even to empty inactive accounts as they did to their own service. They could even just simply start enforcing their guidelines for bans to their fullest extent. Oh, and each game developer can issue a game ban based on their own code of conduct.
It’s funny how little interest there has been to treat your purchases as actual digital goods, except by the NFT crowd who are just in it for the money. Actually, ignore that, if anything, most NFT implementations as of now are treated more as subscription options with a buzzword than a digital good, too. So as an aside, it’s also funny how the blockchain crowd avoids using the blockchain as a digital good and uses it as confidence game cash grabs instead.
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“Spotify Music License Dispensary”
And the companies that pull this kind of shit have already amended their terms of service that nobody ever reads. More public grandstanding without actually doing anything. More failure theater.
“I refuse to accept progress if it’s not perfect progress”
Is what you’re effectively stating here.
Cmon, really? I have this argument with my toddler when he asks for something like a rip off a loaf of bread. He wants the whole loaf, he can’t have the whole load, so he gets a choice: The piece you can have, or nothing.
So. Would you rather have this progress, or nothing? That’s your choice, and right now it sounds a whole lot like you would rather have no progress?
