It shouldn’t be narrowly focused on just video games. Should simply be anything digital.
Babysteps? Maybe if it is about video games, the old people won’t know enough about it and pass it, which would make it easier to expand to any digital software.
Unlikely. We ended up here because of corporations lobbying the government to prevent bills like this from becoming laws and to allow them to set up the system the way they wanted it because it benefits them.
The old people are in their pockets and the most susceptible to their schemes to prevent changes in the status quo because it makes them money.
This is an attempt to sway people to vote for him in an election year.
Scoped in a way to get press and hopefully positive attention before voting starts in a week or so.
Agreed, but if passed it would set a significant precedent that would surely have to flow onto all/other digital media.
Ritchie Torres is an AIPAC funded piece of shit. Fuck this guy.
I’d like to see this effort include the responsible sunsetting of games.
If publishers no longer wish to host the game, and noinfer wish to collect money for it, they should relinquish the server code and let communities prop up games when the games services are decommissioned.
Server code should come with the game from day 1, like it used to back in the '90s.
Protect this man!
The tech industry lobbyists will crush this idea before it ever sees a sincere vote, but at least someone out there is trying. Though the cynic in me still can’t help but feel that this is just an empty gesture in a bid for reelection.
The timing and the rest of the guy’s record seem to confirm your cynicism.
Also, once again, this is a whack-a-mole approach, trying to legislate every individual symptom caused by the lack of consumer protections against rent-seeking, rather than regulating industries to forbid their cause. In a world where bad-faith action is a standard business procedure, we have to explicitly legally define words like “own” and “purchase”, because they’ll say they mean something else if we don’t.
sad that it has to be legislated, but thats the world we live in now
I never understood why games could not work as books. I mean, when you buy a book, you own that single group of pages containing the words that make the story of said work. But you don’t own the work itself. Meaning that you own the unit containing it but, as you are not the owner of the work, you can’t profit from selling copies of it.
With a game, it should be the same, when you buy a game, you own either the disc containing it, or (if digital) the unique keycode identifying your copy. You can sell your own copy because you own it, but it doesn’t mean you own the work itself so you can’t copy it nor claim it as yours.
We really solved it long time ago, yet, for some reason (greed) we can’t use this method on games.
Consider ebooks. Amazon has revoked and deleted ebooks that people paid for. They’ve ironically done it to 1984. And I think even to people living in countries where 1984 is public domain.
It’s not that they can’t treat games like books, it’s that they don’t want to. And they don’t want to treat books like books either; they just don’t have any control over the physical object once it leaves their hands. And before everything became downloads, games used to come on a CD, cartridge or cassette, and you could sell that just like you could sell a book, and they were powerless to prevent it. But with everything being downloads and always online, they have that power, so they use it.
It’s not that games can’t work as books, it’s that books can’t work like games.
Trust me, if book publishers could keep you from actually owning a physical book, from reselling it, from photocopying it, from lending it to a friend, they would. And with ebooks they do.
The fact that games are software gives publishers additional capabilities and control over the product, and they take advantage of that control to limit user control whenever possible. You just can’t do that with a pile of paper bound together, otherwise they would.
This is where legislation can come in though. We need to make it legally clear that when you buy something you really own it. Renting, leasing, licensing, these ideas aren’t bad on their own, but you can’t call that “buying” and the venue offering these services shouldn’t be called a “store”. If it’s called a store, it needs to be actually selling things, otherwise the entire business is disingenuous and deceptive.
You do own the game, for most games sold on GoG. (Not the copyright assignment. The “game”, or “copy of the game”, however you want to refer to it.) If you buy a game as a disc, in a store, you own it until you take it home and find an EULA contract that takes away that ownership. I don’t believe a clickwrap contract has any legitimate effect, but I don’t think the courts would be on my side.
If only he wasn’t one of the biggest AIPAC stooges in Washington.
If a bad person supports a good cause, that doesn’t make the cause bad.
I agree, it’s more about pointing out that it doesn’t make the bad person good, especially when they’re pushing the bill at a time where it has no chance of passing.
I think all three statements in this chain are accurate and true. But it does leave me not really knowing how to feel about this.
I guess mostly disappointed, because the most salient point to me is the last one, that this is really unlikely to pass. So that’s a genuine shame.
I have no idea what this actually means, but…
Based?
While it is a good idea, but it will result into a hell of a fight with the software industry in general. Their extortion schemes base on the very idea that you can’t own software at all.
You are right, but also fuck them. They didn’t invent the code or the concepts. They paid for other’s works and pretend it is theirs. Software is an amalgamation of so much before it. Pretending you own it when it really is the work of tens of thousands of people is silly in a way.
dunno. the only people i’ve met who like Anything-as-a-Service don’t exist. i’ve never met anyone who likes that shit.
Nobody in his right likes it. The software companies do, though, for a number of reasons. First, they can squeeze more money out of people on the long run. Second, if we actually owned the software we paid for, we had much better legal standing with regards to reverse engineering or altering it to fit a purpose - something the normal licensing terms strictly forbid.
Good idea. Bad execution.
How would you fix it?
Why this bill makes no sense
The game, which retailed for $69.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the All-Star Edition, will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30 and will have its online servers shut down on December 31, only two years after its initial release.
Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.
NBA games have an offline mode, so they are protected by this bill. Even if it was just a quick play “pick team vs team” that would be considered compliance.
Our legislatures have more important things to do. There is a very simple solution. Don’t buy those games that don’t give a download/ physical disc. Otherwise the software companies will just figure away around the rules.
