California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it
(www.theverge.com)
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 26 Sep 21:32
https://lemmy.world/post/20222404
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 26 Sep 21:32
https://lemmy.world/post/20222404
If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not really.
EDIT: On re-reading it, there may be huge holes in it. Like if they just “clearly tell you” how little you’re getting when you buy it, they can still say “buy” and “purchase”.
threaded - newest
Much like California’s other good-sounding laws, the fine print is what gets you on both ends, both in the law and in the EULA you agree to when signing up that’s going to say that all transactions are explicitly a terminable and revocable license.
A revocable license for a virtual “product” whereupon they absolutely do not give you back your real world dollars if they terminate said license.
There’s no power imbalance in this transaction at all, no siree.
Anyway, I’m all for making backups of things. So you de-licensed me. Big whoop. I still have the file and I can still play it, and nobody can physically stop me.
I suppose that’s the difference between laws in the US vs the EU. In the US the wording of the law is everything. If you find some absurd loophole due to weird grammar, good for you. In the EU, at least from an outsiders perspective, the law is enforced as it was intended to be, and if you try to fuck around with wording you get fined.
That’s the thing, though, it’s not a loophole. It’s intentional. It makes a good headline, but it doesn’t really do much.
That’s probably a better way of putting it. “Pretending to help”
DRM violates this principle. Atreides forever
How do you figure? If the DRM depends on them, doesn’t that give them the power to destroy it?
DRM infected files mean that you as a consumer don’t own anything. As someome else can destroy it.
If you’re not receiving physical media, and you’re not saving a copy to local storage, then you’re not buying anything. You’re renting it.
That’s not even the best metric. You save Destiny 2 to local storage, but you still don’t own that either.
You can buy a perpetual license and then you own it (the license) regardless of storage or possession.
You can’t just go out and buy a perpetual license for any random thing you purchase.
That’s great until they decide to stop providing whatever content you licensed.
Just because you bought something and never picked it up it isn’t the stores fault. If you buy a perpetual license to digital code then never download it then cry when the store stops providing the source or updating it sounds like a you problem. Now a SaaS thing is weird. Like what do i do when I own a license for Helldivers 2 and the service turns off. That is like paying a person a lump sum for a service like trash but it is one person and you expect it to last at least 50 years since that person is young and they die next week. Now you are out the money and the service expecting the service would never end
Do they need “buy” or “purchase”? All they need is “pay”, and nobody would notice.
I would still imagine that has a very different psychological effect. Nobody wants to click a “pay”-button…
Shopping cart icon, and “checkout”
People will click whatever’s stopping them from the dopamine hit of adding a game they’re probably not going to play to their library.
It’d be even harder to stop someone who actually WANTS to play the game they’re paying for! Lol
“get” or “acquire” or “add to collection” or “snag”… or any other vomit inducing roundabout corporate speak
They will get around it. Instead I suggest that buy buttons should say what you’re buying.
For example: Just “buy” should not be allowed.
“Buy License” or “Rent Game” for games with DRM. “Buy game” where you own your digital copy and can do whatever you want with it.
We ain’t ever seein’ that one.
Probably not. Still “buy licence” at least gives us more transparency.
Even better, “buy non-transferable license”, because that’s technically what it is.
How would it work, anyway?
GOG
Is still only licensing you the game regardless of whether or not you can download it and play it offline without a problem.
If they can’t take it away from you after you bought it, I think I can still call it ownership.
There is a bigger barrier to them being able to take it away from you. But they absolutely can. Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.
This is about the medium by which the license is provided, there is no doubt whatsoever that the license is the same. This has been proven repeatedly. The difference here is that the distributor can be legally forced to remove the content by the owner of the media. So, if for instance you order a physical disc and pay for it ahead of time and then the place you order from loses the right to distribute that disc, you absolutely won’t get it in the mail because they’re required to send it back to the owner.
You’d likely get a refund in that case but that’s because you didn’t get to actually enjoy that media at all. But buying a license to a show on Amazon or something is different only because it’s likely that they have pull the show after you paid for it and outside the return window. Meaning in theory you have enjoyed or consumed the media you paid for. So the license is legal.
What really needs to change imo isn’t the transparency. This discussion keeps being had repeatedly and people keep being outraged by it as if they have never heard that this can happen. Its been 20 some odd years of this and I would think it would be common knowledge by now.
What really needs to change is the terms by which the owner who licenses the content in the first place should either be required to provide a refund or equivalent on a different platform, or they should be the ones held liable for their terminology in the licensing agreement that would require that license to be null and void for people who have already purchased it.
But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.
Yeah, that’s because you own the property, not the intellectual property. This is copyright law, not an affront to your ownership. When you “buy” a movie digitally on Amazon, you’re only buying access to their copy of the movie. Amazon bought the right to distribute it to you. When that contract expires, they can’t distribute it to you anymore. That’s why it’s not ownership. When you buy a game on GOG, you download the installer, and they cannot take it away from you, no matter how hard they try; that’s their whole shtick.
Someone has probably explained the above to you before.
On the basis of technicality, it will depend very wildly on the ToC of said intellectual property. As you said, GOG just distributes the installer and that is it, the IP holder can technically revoke your/GOG license if that is in the ToC somewhere.
So what if they did? Are they going to give me a court summons to destroy my copy and all of my backups of the game? I don’t think so.
Yeah, hence why I said that technically the license can be revoked. Enforcing that is another matter. Without going into the weeds, we need to rethink how to handle it. At minimum, we need to make sure that if the license is revoked not from breaking ToS, the Copyright/IP holder must refund the purchase too. The copyright/ip holder still has the right to their creation but the consumer is also protected via those refund. It is indeed not bulletproof but whether you like it or not, copyright/ip protection is needed to some extent.
Not trying to argue, but I don’t believe I can re-sell my copy of a game I “bought” on GOG, so in my view that’s not full ownership as most people understand it. If you’re a full, legal owner of some property, you can sell that property anywhere you like.
I can think of some other exceptions, but they’re usually large, dangerous, or otherwise regulated as such, yet you’re still an owner of it.
I’m ok with distribution restriction of digital good because the nature of it. Unless you want to nft-ize your copy.
You just repeated the proposal.
“Ubisoft take note”
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve… You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam and it’s the biggest store by a huge margin, don’t know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically…
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
So they’re not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical. The closest you’ll get to that with digital games is through GOG or Itch.io or anything similar where you can download the actual install files and you don’t need any launcher at all.
You can purchase the game in a web browser and use steamcmd, which (one could argue is still requiring an app) to download and install. In cases where the publisher is not invoking DRM (Larian games like BG3, DoS2, etc. for instance) once the game is downloaded you can certainly archive it and transfer it to another machine and run it there without Steam. In the end you are likely purchasing proprietary software (though again it’s not always the case on Steam) and we could say you don’t really own that either, so maybe take your complaints to the publishers or just use the power of your wallet and not buy those games and support libre games, of which there are many, another way. That said, Valve is actively making things better for users by developing and contributing to useful libre software like Proton (WINE, DXVK, etc) that can work outside of Steam.
once you downloaded the game you can copy it into a pendrive, upload it into mega or whatever storage and use it. I don’t get why y’all get so held up at the fact that steam might stop offering infinite downloads. Once you have downloaded the game you are free to burn it or store it wherever! This is different from streaming music for example, since with music you never have a local copy you can work with.
You can. I have several games where I can literally copy the game folder into another computer, press the executable and be able to play it offline. Terraria, vampire survivors, stardew valley, pathfinder: WOTR, Grim Dawn, AoE2… And more. I literally have “backup” zips of several path versions of grim dawn to play different mods because I’m too lazy to patch the game each time I want to replay different versions.
Once the game it’s in your system it’s as physical as it can get. There’s no difference of storage in your disk, a pendrive, an external drive or an optical CD. You give the example of GoG, there’s plenty games in steam that once “installed” have all the files in the game folder and you can easily move them.
They don’t make it clear which games have steam DRM and which games have nothing at all, they only list it if it’s a third party solution like denuvo.
In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
They can still delete your account and cut you off from your games.
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
Boo hoo, someone say too many slurs on the forums?
Eh… I was just showing that you don’t actually own your games as access to them can be taken from you, that’s all.
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it’s something the publishers of games would allow.
And yet, they always refused to put it in writing in the EULA. Wonder why.
But we know that is only guaranteed for single player Valve games
And until it happens that’s meaningless
Blame devs for not creating a system for custom servers, not valve who’s games do have those systems.
How do you host an Artifact server?
How do we update it to work on unsupported (read future) systems?
You got me on the first one. Artifact is definitely an exception to what I said.
As for the 2nd question, you emulate old systems.
Just people trying to ride the wave for internet points without really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s just the popular “current thing” to hate on.
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).
Just let me buy a license then download it wherever I want
Let’s just face it. There isn’t ever going to be a publishing company that doesn’t fuck us however they can for an extra dime. Companies are machines full of people deciding whatever they have to for money.
There also will never be a way they can keep us from just copying files.
They’ve already invented ways to keep us from just copying files: in that they don’t provide us with all of the files in a lot of cases anymore.
If it can display on your screen or play through your speakers, you can copy it.
If it’s software as a service, just don’t buy. We can live without whatever it is they make.
I don’t buy it in that case, but it takes me a lot of leg work a lot of times just to figure out what I’m buying, because no one is interested in making it clear besides GOG; even then, there are things I wish they did better on that front.
Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.
For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.
And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.
I figure the content that’s not popular enough to already be pirated is coming from smaller artists who should probably have my money.
Not really. You can just use a $10 splitter from Amazon
Next: make it so games can’t suddenly lose their music license. This is so incredible annoying. I know it’s depending on what the publishers negotiated, but it shouldn’t be possible to suddenly patch out soundtracks because of a license expire.
Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that’s acceptable).
require games to buy perpetual licenses for the music?
Other way around. Require sales of licenses to games to be perpetual. The way you phrased it means that the license holders can charge way more.
it’s a distinction without a difference.
I’d never even heard of this before. Wtf
Try downloading any GTA before 5, there will be a community guide about the missing songs and how to restore the radios.
Some games, like Allen Wake, have been full out removed from sale because of expired music license. There has been other cases some come back later with the music stripped.
I’m not sore how downloading cars works but when I do it it feels like I own it…
Or force them to admit they are selling it for real without all the license mumbo jumbo. They have always known what “buy now” buttons were meant to lead you to believe. And — in my humble opinion — you aren’t wrong for believing that; they are.