News

Alternatively, make laws protecting digital ownership and the right to resell that ownership on any market.

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.

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.

Weird how the end stage of capitalism is really just a strange two tiered form of the kind of communism everyone was told to fear. So much for actually owning anything.

Why isn't this a thing already? I mean, it's USA, companies love to sue against illegal copies. No one got an argument like "I bought it so i was in the assumtion it belongs to me"?

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 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.

How about making a law so we do?

This should have been done decades ago, and I think law was strong enough decades ago to make it happen, it's just that district attorneys didn't want to piss off large businesses.

If a company shows on their website that they are selling you something, you as a buyer have the reasonable expectation that you've actually purchased it, and through that purchase, you can do all the things that you would with anything you own. When that's not true, they haven't actually sold you something. They've rented you something, and they know it, and that's a deceptive business practice.

Which is to say, I'm happy to see some improvement on potential enforcement for false advertising, but the reality is I'm not too optimistic that people will seriously follow up on it because they already had a couple decades to do so.

“Spotify Music License Dispensary”

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.

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.

imagine buying something and not own it