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.
Alternatively, make laws protecting digital ownership and the right to resell that ownership on any market.
Yeah, this feels like validating a toxic business model when they should be dismantling it
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 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.
Something like smart contracts on ethereum using NFTs is actually a perfect use for this and where the future is heading.
Where the future is heading is bullshit stupid technology some idiots think they can make money from driving a climate crisis that kills us all. And then we won’t have to put up with bullsht stupid technology pushed by idiots. Good riddance.
In that case, may as well just pirate everything!
Generative AI is already doing that. Tech is an extension of human activity, and as humans are observably machines for making their human world worse for each other, trust tech involves some level of harmful ignorance.
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”?
Fun Fact: If you as an individual bought a game, made a copy, and gave it away then you have done nothing wrong.
Also, downloading an “illegal copy” for yourself is also legal. You have not distributed another person’s IP for profit, there are no laws against what you did.
If you sold the copy it would be illegal. If you gave away 500 copies it would be illegal. But creating and sharing a backup is fine.
Yeah, this is definitely wrong. Giving away something you don’t own is still illegal.
Prove it.
Prove what? That you can’t cite a law?
You’re asking me to show you where something doesn’t exist.
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?
This feels like no progress tho
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.
