from ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to games@lemmy.world on 26 Jun 23:16
https://slrpnk.net/post/23909395
(Text below written by @treasure@feddit.org. Hope you don’t mind me yoinking it for here!)
The European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Stop Destroying Videogames’ is nearing its deadline on July 31st and is still missing quite a lot of signatures. To be precise, at the time of writing this post, only 560.000 of the required 1.000.000 signatures have been reached.
Another requirement has already been fulfilled: The minimum signature threshold has been reached in 10 countries, 7 were required.
If this is the first time of you hearing about this initiative, here’s a short TL;DR for you (more detailed information can be found here):
- Publishers that sell or license videogames should have to leave their videogames in a functional (playable) state.
- This means: Remote disabling of video games (such as live service titles) without providing means of keeping the game functional without the involvement of the publisher should be illegal.
- This does NOT mean that publishers should support their games forever, but rather that they provide tools (such as server binaries) to enable others to keep the game playable.
The initiative is slowly picking up speed again recently after its creator published a video explaining some of the background and why he doesn’t want to continue after the initiative is over. The video has been well-received by the community and some big influencers have reported on the topic.
If you are an EU citizen and have not signed yet, THIS IS THE TIME! The month until the deadline is met will pass quickly. Use two minutes of your time to influence something that may improve your life forever!
CLICK HERE TO SIGN. (or click here for a guide on how to sign in your language)
Also, if you are a UK citizen, you can sign a UK specific legal petition that also carries legal weight (forces parliament to investigate the issue). You can sign that here: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/
threaded - newest
Don’t Give Up. You Can Cuss The Whole Time Just Don’t Give Up.
Hell yeah! We can do this!
Wow, so that won’t do anything.
Very insightful. Thank you for your wisdom.
You are welcome good sir 😊
.
Go back to reddit
It does infinitely more than sitting around being a doomer.
What’s a doomer?
Like a boomer, but even less respectable.
Oh. No I’m a millennial
Someone believes a cause is doomed from the start, so doesn’t even try.
Because gaming companies are all greedy fucks. They aren’t going to give a fuck about people’s signatures lmao. You have to not buy the game in the millions. Not sign a website, and still buy the games anyways
This isn't a petition like change.org.
It's to get this brought in front of politicians that HAVE to make a ruling based on it.
eu citizens initiatives are official tools of the public to help draft new laws.
You speak on matters which you do not understand
Ah, like PirateSoftware! :D
I do find it kind of funny that uh, seemingly this is the situation:
If gamers want to actually, truly, literally RISE UP… and do something useful and good, for once…
They will have to defeat Thor, in online combat.
(The PirateSoftware guy goes by Thor, not sure if thats his real name, a nickname, who knows)
There’s a dumb as shit Marvel knock off fanfic plot line in here somewhere.
I assume by “gaming companies” you mean game publishers. No they won’t care, in fact this initiative is not meant for them. It is meant for EU lawmakers, which after a certain signature number threshold are required to look at the issue. Once a protection is written into law, these same companies have to, of course, comply with it, or face whatever consequences were prepared for this case (fines, probably).
Oh come on you can’t actually be that dense. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there are these things called laws and companies have to follow them.
This is not a change.org petition. This is a European initiative. Meaning if this gets the necessary number of signatures this could get brought forth to the European Parliament, where laws on the subject can get negotiated over.
Its not a meaningless web petition.
It’s a formal, direct democracy style legal process in the EU, to get the relevant legal authorities to review and revise the laws that currently allow gaming companies to be greedy fucks.
A similar concept exists in many US states amd cities:
If enough signatures can be gathered in a defined amount of time, then the proposed legal concept that has been directly endorsed by enough citizens then is automatically either pushed to the legislators and courts to review, or to be included for broader democratic voting up or down on by the next local election.
…
You apparently have no idea that initiatives and petitons can be more than just a legally non binding, essentially useless virtue signals on some random website.
In many, many parts of the world, something like an initiative serves as a way for the citizens of an area to bypass their own representatives and force them to directly engage with an issue.
If this initiative crosses the threshold, it stands s good chance at reforming the laws around games as a consumer product, from a consumer rights point of view.
Governments do actually have the ability to restrain and modify the actions and practices of corporations, by altering the laws that define what they are and are not allowed to do.
Further, because the EU has so many people, is such a large market for games… there is a good chance that if the EU reforms what game companies are allowed to do within the EU… well, developing an entirely different game for the EU and the US, totally different in the underlying internal design, more than just translstion/localization… from a business POV, it may end up making more financial sense to not essentially develop two games at once, and instead just develop a single, global game, that is compliant with with EU laws.
Go look into how digital privacy laws being different between the EU and US and other parts of the world are currently, right now, forcing many US based tech firms to alter their practices within the EU, and sometimes even in the US and elsewhere, due to the propagation effect of a huge market altering its laws.
…
Another example of something like this is firearms in the US: California, and now several other US states, have passed laws stating that for certain kinds of guns, a magazine can hold no more than 10 rounds.
Prior to this, when such laws did not exist… not many firearm companies made and sold guns with only 10 round mags. Now, many of them actually do.
This has also occured at a Federal level with barrel length restrictions: Basically, you cannot sell a civillian a short barelled rifle, something that has a barrel less than 16 inches in length, or a total butt stock to tip of barrel length less than 26 inchds.
Before those laws were passed… you could buy those, companies could sell those.
But because a compact, higher powered rifle is the easiest thing to use in a confined space, for something like a school shooting… well, now all the guns have to be at least a bit bigger, so that they’re more difficult to use in a ‘moving from room to hallway to room’ kind of scenario.
…
Laws passed by governments can alter industry practices, thats the entire concept of regulation.
Laws and legal review processes can be formally initiated within a government by formal, legal, citizens initiatives, that’s the entire point of them.
Someone born within the years 1992-1995. You can spot 'em easy.
I feel attacked, I’m doing my best 😭
It is better to try and fail than to not try at all.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett
you do realize this isnt some dumb online petition but rather a official citizens initiative to create new laws, right?
actually you clearly dont realize that.
This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.
Well, that pirate guy didn’t do anything. (Unless he actually caused this, then… messy causality…)
He actively misrepresented the campaign and spread misinformation about its goals. I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake but he did a lot of damage to the momentum and perception of the whole thing.
It sucks these big creators only now pick up the mantle but it’s better than nothing. There’s still some time left.
I haven’t really been following it or him (I don’t really even know much, other than the gist of not wanting games to disappear when devs decide it’s too expensive to keep the servers). What did he do? Because normally he gives pretty good takes.
He wildly misunderstood/misrepresented the initiative two videos in a row (and continues to ten months later), and he continually discredits the entire initiative because of contrived edge cases.
I think this paragraph from this twitter reply really sums it up:
The idea that creativity would be hampered because games would have to remain playable when the company shuts down servers one day is ridiculous. Can you imagine if we talked like this about anything else? “We can’t force every phone to use the same USB-C charging port because it would be too technically infeasible to do so and hamper creativity.” “We can’t outlaw CFCs because they’re useful chemicals and it would be technically infeasible for some products to be made without chlorofluorocarbons (the things that fucked up the ozone layer).” “My dislike of the initiative stems entirely from the wording to ‘make cars limit their emissions’ which is not possible for all cars and could limit what kinds of cars companies make in the future.” Ridiculous.
It’s absurd that I’m not exaggerating when I say his opposition to Stop Killing Games entirely boils down to “I think companies should be allowed to take games away because it would be really hard for them to leave some games playable when they’re done supporting them 🥺”
I used to passively like Thor, but when I watched those two videos he made last year about SKG I lost all of my respect for him.
Worse, he actively lied. In his edited video about the petition he actively misrepresents the initiative, then goes on to edit out the the part of Ross’ video that would have contradicted his misrepresentation.
This is not an innocent or negligent mistake on Thor’s part, it’s an active attempt at burial.
Even worse, he is a narcissistic lying piece of shit with high ego. He would never admit a slight mistake, and thinks of himself as all-knowing. Think ChatGPT - confidently lying all the time, but always doubling down.
He’s like if ChatGPT hallucinations were kept in for the express purpose of profit.
I initially read this as a petition to stop games that have killing in them facepalm
Still better reading comprehension than PirateSoftware.
Drama drives these things. I totally understand Ross not wanting to engage in it 10 months ago but look at what it can do.
Yeah. It has rapidly turned an initiative that was already unnecessarily combative toward devs (fuck the publishers though) and associated it with harassment and review bombing games that are actually Doing It Right just because they worked with the wrong third party studio. Not to mention all the “Well, we don’t agree with everything asmongold says, but let’s call a truce so long as he is gonna let us play our video games”
And… honestly? I have disliked thor since LONG before all y’all realized he isn’t the world’s best WoW player or he has an opinion you don’t like because he was considering things from the perspective of the people who would be doing the work to enact these “simple requirements”.
But it feels REAL fucking everyday normal to watch people immediately go from “the harassment campaign that led to the death of Mikayla Raines was horrible” to “Let’s fucking ruin Pirate Software’s life and attack him and everything he has ever associated with because we are morally righteous”
Let’s be real here; arrogant twats don’t off themselves. Too much ego.
Not only do I not mind you yoinking the text, I want to thank you for your contribution to the cause. If everyone who has signed could get one more person to sign, the initiative would succeed!
Glad to help out, and thank you for letting me use your well written words! :D
I hope the wording of the petition is very clear. The last time this was brought up in the UK the government of the time basically just brushed it off by intentionally misunderstanding the petition. You can’t give them any leeway to do that this time.
I suspect they would’ve brushed it off regardless, they didn’t want to deal with it. There’s another 100k UK petition (The one linked to at the bottom of the OP text) that would force them to re-look at it with more depth which is also ending quite soon.
Can you link to that other UK petition too pls? :)
Already included at the bottom of the text body of the post (though it’s to the StopKillingGames page on it, I’ll swap it to the direct link)
Ah sorry I misunderstood your comment then, I thought there was another one besides that.
No worries, I’ll edit it to try to make it more clear.
Yes I’ve already signed it, and I signed the original. Although even back then I suspected that the petition was simultaneously too vague and too specific.
It was vague in that it didn’t really explain what it was asking to happen, and didn’t really make the distinction between a product being technically still functional and a product not working because the servers have shut down. While at the same time being too specifically focused on games rather than server run software in general. What happens if Adobe goes down, does everyone lose access to photoshop?
I just feel that this has a better chance of succeeding if they were to de-emphasize the games aspect, and allow politicians the wiggle run to focus on the corporate business side of things.
I’ve been hearing about this for so long I honestly can’t remember whether I’ve already signed it.
Not an issue! Just try signing in again and it won’t add it if you already signed
Just tried, turns out I had already signed it.
As an American who can’t bear to play most online games because they might go down or disallow Linux users, please please please please check. EU laws are our only hope of having usable fucking technology.
The thought of being able to mod and host my own GTA 5 online server when it goes down, without some weird custom server mod that also uses Windows-exclusive anti-cheat on most servers, sounds like a damn dream. I miss that game… but fuck Windows, nothing is worth installing Windows. I just realized I’ve been ranting about the lack of Linux compatibility of GTA 5 Online in reply to someone’s comment about how this petition has gone on for a while. I swear I wasn’t hijacking your comment, I just have strong feelings about Linux gaming and got carried away.
Makes me wish I was European so I could sign it too.
In that case, help spread the word.
Reposted it to Mastodon! Hope it makes a change, cause America can usually catch the waves.
Am European, but not in the EU.
Wish I could do my part too
Did my part and signed, I hope it reaches the required threshold
Thank you so much for contributing! :D
I hope this petition succeeds. There are games and other digital media I want to experience, but corporations are dead set on just trotting out new things on their terms.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2bb16d3e-345e-417a-98cf-7036f77d0515.jpeg">
Absolute legend.
Damm I wish I could sigh these things but some dumb fucks decided I can’t
Ah. You must be from The Divided Kingdom.
Yeah
Signed the UK parliament one, sadly drowning in those Brexit benefits when it comes to the other.
Thank you for your help! :D
I’m an EU citizen living in the UK, but only signed the UK one because I’m not putting my passport ID into petitions O.o
Just to clarify, this isn’t a normal toothless petition, this is an official EU mechanism that allows citizens to bring problems to the attention of the European Commission, and force them to pass judgement on it legally. You can read more about it here.
It’s good to be skeptical of anything asking for that personal info, but I’d suggest researching into it to confirm that it is indeed legit.
Thank you for signing the UK one :)
Done!
Thank you for contributing!! :D
<img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/bc3d09be-54e8-4f24-a865-8d0aba17bf69.jpeg">
Signed.
Signing it now just to spite piratesoftware.
I watched critical’s update on him and my fucking god is piratesoftware such an arrogant twat
I’ve been served PirateSoftware’s shorts long before all this controversy and it always bugged me how confidently wrong he was about systems and network things. He seems to be under the impression that he understands these things on an advanced level due to his experience as a checks notes QA tester for Blizzard, and a… indie software developer lol.
All this backlash against him is so vindicating.
ELI5 this controversy? I’m out of the loop.
youtu.be/GuTp4Am51i0
There’s a group with a petition to “Stop Killing Games” which seeks to legally remedy the issue of game developers making games that are later turned off and left unplayable even in the case of them being single player.
Thor of PirateSoftware owns a development outfit that makes indie games and he also does a lot of streams. He’s against Stop Killing Games, but doesn’t seem to even understand it, and has publicly spoke out against it, going so far as to spread misinformation about it.
Have also been out of the loop too but went through the know your meme page.
Pirate Software made a video a year ago criticizing the initiative on a very surface level and has continued to do so in streams. Guy who created/sponsored/however-that-works the initiative posted a counter-argument video talking about what the initiative would actually do. Pirate Software did the ol’ Internet Doubledown and in general was kind of an ass and kind of revealed some ignorance. Cue Youtube Drama.
Everyone was calling it “stop killing games” instead of “stop destroying games” and I literally thought it was a petition to stop games with murder and violence lol never even got farther than seeing the title.
Definitely a good idea to switch over to stop destroying games if that wasn’t the official title already…
Damn great example of why it’s stupid to only read headlines.
I’m not going to read something if the title doesn’t interest me. It’s also a great example of write headlines that are accurate and informative.
I would love to know where the people who downvoted you are getting the time and energy to read every single article they see a headline for.
And every book they don’t like the title/cover for
By that logic I might assume your new title for the movement is to stop any games with destruction! Make only wholesome games!
Edit: Also “destroying” a game is very subjective. Your suggestion is definitely a downgrade.
Ya me too.
But everybody loves mass murder.
It saddens me that my country (Italy) has such a low percentage of signatures. Most of us are either ignorant of anything happening outside of our borders, or straight up doomers who don’t believe anything can ever change for the better.
Big congrats to my fellow northern cousins. I was expecting Poland, who has a healthy videogame industry, to gather a good enough number of signatures, but 160% is wild! It’s refreshing seeing so many people joining the petition - It’s not even about videogames: this initiative will have huge repercussions on the lifespan of other, unrelated products and, in general terms, planned obsolescence.
I think it’s been very hard for us to spread awareness into countries where a majority don’t also speak English, as the organizer and much of the coverage is only in English.
If you know of any big Italian gaming YouTubers or streamers that might be receptive to helping or talking about the campaign, could you reach out to them about it with a comment?
Unfortunately, that’s not my area of expertise. I don’t follow streamers or YouTubers (Italian or international), nor do I have a close enough relationship with any of them that I’d be able to talk to them and convince them to mention this petition to their fans.
The one and only time some friends and I attempted to interact with a few local content creators (to publicize our free fan games we poured hundreds of hours into and NEVER attempted to monetize in any way), we either got ignored, insulted, or received vague answers that went nowhere. It soured me towards Italian content creators and vowed to never interact with them again.
Sorry to hear that they were so nasty. :(
One thing you can do: In person organising. It’s something the campaign has been really bad at. Have some flyers printed up and start handing them out. I don’t know the Italian school schedule, but if universities are still in session they might be good targets.
I did it last year, first at Gamescom and then at a local uni and I think it helped spread the word.
Raiden and Midna at PLAYERINSIDE did it (again) this week and are going to do it again in their video today.
I bet that if they point out that we are losing to the French, we may achieve incredible results in record time.
Except in Pisa.
Where do you see signatures by country?
citizens-initiative.europa.eu/…/000007_en
Here are the up-to-date numbers, the threshold percentages are now better than shown the image in the post but there’s still a long way to reach the total of 1 million
I filled in all the fields and it keeps telling me “Field required”. I’ll try it later when I’m at my desktop PC.
Fuck that. I’m sending this to everyone I know. Gamer or not. Common sense alone demands a signature.
Edit: This far 2 gamers finally put their signatures on it and 4 non gamers went with it too. So with me we’re at 7 signatures.
I did my part. But I think it won’t be enough. Yes, after Ross spoke up every content creator and their grandparents started shitting in Pirates mouth and is advertising the petition like crazy. But sadly these kind of things are a bit circle jerky and will be watched by the same people.
Exactly. Some of my best friends are gamers.
Fuck Thor.
I mean, big YouTubers like Charlie and others covering Thor’s bullshit is what drove this huge spike in signatures so maybe we should be thanking Thor lol
“Fuck you, Thor, but also thanks. But definitely fuck you, Thor.”
“And by thanks I actually means fuck you”
Nah, fuck Thor — he could have been the YouTuber pushing for coverage of Stop Killing Games, instead he decided to double down on his stupid bullshit.
Reminder — he was a Blizzard employee for 7 years. I think that, plus his ‘my shit doesn’t stink and if you think it does, you’re wrong and banned’ attitude should give you all you need to know.
Thor reminds me a lot of chatgpt. Subjects that I am not an expert in, he sounds intelligent and like he is providing good advice. The second he provides advice in an area where I am a subject matter expect, it makes me realize how full of shit he is.
Unless someone corrects me, I think his argument boils down to, “we shouldn’t allow the release of server binaries for online-enabled games because it’s too hard for the developers”.
Well, if that’s the case, then Thor, that’s a “you” (the company) problem. Not a “me” (the consumer) problem. And if you’re not going to release a server binary but we’re “buying” the game, purchasers have legitimate moral and legal grounds to demand that they be informed that they are buying a license, or renting, the game; they are not owning a functional copy of the game outright.
I’m turning 42 this. I’ve been a software developer for 15 years now. I’d like to even say that a few of those years I even came across like I knew what I was talking about. But this basic issue is not about software development. This is about consumer advocacy, And it was a super huge turn off to watch him perform the mental gymnastics on why people should be screwed over.
Its not allowing the release, its requiring it.
Let’s keep going eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
Still think this is pure selfishness from players, but hey if you get a law passed then more power to you.
How is it selfishness to want to keep the product you bought? To preserve things that contribute to art and culture?
Of course things are so simple. I like the “everyone’s art” argument as well.
You wouldn’t mind elaborating on “of course things are so simple”? It feels like an awfully vague answer…
I think this movement is based on feelings. It feels bad that a game died, so we should fix it. Unfortunately the real world is more complicated than that, and overly broad rules are goint to cause unintended consequences for small developers.
The art argument is nonsense, although the other extreme is too. Artists need protections so they can earn a living, but the protections currently last far too long.
Either way, nothing is stopping a company creating a game similar to any number of often referenced “dead” games, and there is nothing wrong with letting something run its course and die off, to allow room for new creativity.
I’m not aware of really any small developers pulling stunts like Ubisoft is doing. And there’s always the option to limit new laws to bigger publishers, like the EU is doing with the DMA.
The art argument is not nonsense, not sure where you get the idea. Games like Assassin’s Creed 2 have influenced many people in their design choices for their own games.
And of course there’s something wrong when a company takes away access to singleplayer games you bought, just because they use always-online DRM and don’t want to pay for the servers. These games don’t take away space from new games, it’s a ridiculous idea that them dying off is improving the situation for new games. It’s also ridiculous to think “hey, someone can just develop a game like the old one!”.
You can call it ridiculous but it doesnt make it less true.
Of course it’s ridiculous and untrue. You can’t “just” develop a game like Assassins Creed 2.
Why not?
Because it’s a massive time and money investment, because the market and gaming landscape has changed, because mechanics and approaches can be patented, …
It’s a game with a story. You can’t just create a literal copy of that story since it connects to the story of the games before and after it. Come on, this isn’t hard to understand.
Are you saying noone would play a better version of assassins creed?
First, how the hell did you get that from what I wrote?
Second, do you really think art is this replaceable? “Oh, we don’t need old movies and music, we have better ones now, so let’s just take away the copies people have already bought”? What a sad way to look at art.
I never said to take it from people. If a company makes their end of life shitty and thats impoetant to you don’t buy their shit.
But that’s what’s happening, games like AC2 are being taken from people.
How the hell were people supposed to know that the game would be taken from them when they bought it? You are aware that clear communication on that issue is literally one of the objectives of Stop Killing Games?
Have you done any thinking & reflection on why people support the campaign? It feels like you’re desperately throwing arguments against the wall to see what sticks, even though nothing actually makes sense.
Absolutely not, we paid for something, and they can take it away. This is the fight for digital ownership.
We do love our pointless fights don’t we?
How do those boots taste like?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want a game that I paid for to remain functional long term. In my case I have a copy of the Hitman trilogy in my Steam library, and as it stands when the servers for that game go offline it will become nearly unplayable just because the unlock system is reliant on the publisher’s servers. It would be easy for them to just release a patch as they decommission those servers to allow the unlock system to function offline, but right now there is no guarantee of that happening, nor any real reason to do so besides some consumer goodwill.
Thats an interesting example, what do you mean by the unlock system requiring servers?
I mean that you straight up cannot unlock new equipment, costumes, starting points, and the like while offline and/or disconnected from the game servers. IIRC the game just doesn’t track stage mastery without a connection.
You never win if you don’t fight.
I think you’re allowed to be selfish when it’s your game. I paid £80 for that game, I should have the right to play it for as long as I have the hardware to run it, even if I have to do some fiddling and modding to get it to work.
This is about maintaining the compromise that is intellectual property law.
IP law has been so perverted that I see a lot of the takietarians around here wanting to abolish it completely. That’s not a good idea. The US constitution empowers Congress to make laws that for a limited time give creators exclusive rights to their creations. FOR A LIMITED TIME. That’s the key feature. I know this is an EU petition, I imagine they have a similar concept of IP. That it belongs to the creator for awhile, and then enters the public domain as the heritage of all mankind.
Do away with copyright protection entirely, and you kill a lot of people’s jobs. The rate at which things will be created will drastically decrease. Throughout the 1980s, how many decade defining or genre defining video games came out of the United States? The nation known for a video game industry crash that decade? How many came out of the UK? How many out of Japan? How many out of the Soviet Union?
Okay so let’s make copyright permanent! Well no, because then you get Disney, a collection of stuffed suits who have MBAs instead of souls holding as much western culture hostage as they can in perpetuity.
So, we compromise. You create something, you get an amount of time of exclusive right of way, then it becomes public domain.
That length of time has gotten longer and longer to the point now that it’s more than 2 human lifetimes long. To an individual human, that’s as good as forever, so it has the problems of permanent copyright.
Especially in the realm of computer software and video games, where the life of a platform averages 10 years. There’s a whole body of software and games written for OLD systems that are still protected under copyright, but finding the copyright holder is damn near impossible. I’ll make up a game: Turtle Adventure for the Commodore 64, copyright 1985 by Bedsoft Inc. Bedsoft Inc was a sole proprietorship operated by Bartholomew Teethwick in Bristol, England. Mr. Teethwick published Turtle Adventure, a typing tutor game that didn’t really work right, and an advertisement for a Pacman clone to release in 1987 was circulated but that game was never made. The “company” was shut down in 1988 and Mr. Teethwick died of AIDS in 1991, unmarried, no children. Who’s going to sue me for posting Turtle Adventure on Github? Whose rights is copyright law protecting here?
Then you get into this model where video games don’t work at all without a central server somewhere. That’s just an end around of the deal. This software is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually. By copyrighting it, that’s the deal you made.
To patent something, you’re required to submit a technical description of your invention in sufficient detail for it to be replicated, because patent law is a similar compromise. You invent something, it’s yours for awhile then it belongs to humanity. You cannot have a patented trade secret. Why do we allow closed source software to be copyrighted?
The rules for software weren’t created for software, they were created for human readable works of literature, and they’ve been misused in ways that benefit large greed-based organizations like Microsoft.
Requiring game developers to publish their server side code when the game goes defunct is holding them to the deal they made when they installed that copyright notice. It is what they owe humanity.
Thats all a great argument for far shorter copyright lengths, sort of a pity this bill isn’t asking for that but maybe thats how it will shake out anyways.
Fuck, I would sign but I’m a piece of shit American.
Helping spread the word is still an option, and would be greatly appreciated! :D
Done!
looks like GamersNexus is covering it on their consumer advocacy channel
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ahH6HrtTc&pp=0gcJCc4JAY…
Yes! They’ll also be plugging it on their main channel soon.
I’m an American citizen living in the Netherlands; I have a renewed 5-year residency permit. Am I allowed to sign? I’m guessing no, but maybe there’s an allowance for EU residents, not just citizens?
Pretty sure it’s just EU citizens. If you can’t vote in elections there, you probably can’t sign this.
The Dutch allow me to vote for the Water Management Board of my town. Other than that, no, I can’t vote in the other elections. 😢
Don’t have many bluesky followers, but i made an awareness post - everyone i know and who cares has already signed :-)