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
Why would a high profile politician in the United states do something that is for the benefit of their people? Weak leaders do not generally make strong decisions.
This will start to protect some people, and bring awareness to the issue, allowing for further regulation in the future, once public demand for it has increased
We’re calling it Proposition #66 😉
My first thought was that it would be a nightmare verifying who owns what and how to transfer ownership.
Then it occurs to me, could this a legitimate use of blockchain?
There are a ton of legitimate uses for blockchain, but so many scammers loved it that it killed any momentum to use it where it works.
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with blockchain technology, but Surprise! the people most interested in unregulated financial systems are thieves and scammers. Who could have guessed.
Each new token needing more computing power is not an issue?
This is a constraint designed into bitcoin to produce artificial scarcity so that the volume of tokens doesn’t massively inflate and destroy their value. A blockchain doesn’t have to operate this way if the goal is to produce unique tokens as identifiers rather than as currency.
Any time you see the word “Blockchain” substitute “distributed public database” instead. And then consider if the distributed part contributes in any way.
For example, if you have the movie on apple movies, and you want to sell that movie to a friend, you take their money and initiate the transfer of ownership from writhing apple movies.
Of course, you’re responsible for the money transaction.
this is how college works too. textbooks are mostly digital e-books now. same price as the print versions, but of course impossible to buy used or sell back, and your license (and access) expire after a year. some of them disable copy and paste and limit printing to a couple pages. oh, you got a book you actually wanted to keep? fuck you.
I remember when this was first starting, the digital copies were like 30% cheaper. A lot of people, including myself, took them up on it because it made most things easier. (Especially when publishers would be coming out with new editions every year and many profs just made the new edition the required one regardless of any substantial differences)
and look how far we’ve come…
I remember that. We’d be told digital copies were cheaper, but those copies (and older versions of the textbook) wouldn’t include access keys to additional content that our professors required us to have. In other words, if we didn’t have the absolute latest textbook (and/or paid an additional fee for an individual access key), we couldn’t do our homework. It’s been years since I’ve been in school, but I find it hard to imagine textbook publishers have stopped that money-grab. Can any current students confirm/deny if that’s still the case?
Not a current student, but know some in tech programs. At least in colleges (as opposed to universities), a lot of professors have been moving away from textbooks. But maybe the students I know are just lucky, lol
There are still publishers who do exactly what you describe. Pearson was doing maybe 10% off for the digital copy. You could buy used textbooks, but then you’d need to buy the “digital pass” for the homework, which was more than half the cost of the book (and it wouldn’t give any digital access to the book itself).
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.
Sure. Digital “ownership” is like trying to put a round peg in a square hole, it’s applying rules and concepts to a fundamentally different thing. As long as it comes along with a tip culture for creators or some kind of guaranteed income.
We can own digital things as long as they let us properly download them. If you pay for a mp3 and have the actual mp3 file that you can do whatever you want with it, I’d say you own that.
They don’t let us download everything though because digital things can just be copied and freely distributed, so there’s often DRM.
Imagine if steam sold games and you got a full no drm copy of the game that didn’t require any hacks to make playable, no concern about viruses from shady distributions etc. People buy steam games because it’s easy, they have great sales making games cheaper, its safe, and they have all the other things like steam friends, chat etc.
But if steam just gave everyone a digital copy with no DRM that you could verify was safe and steam compatible, their sales would drop and more people would pirate.
So its a balance between DRM which steam is, and actual ownership.
By having something digital that represents digital ownership that cant be duplicated, you can solve the problem.
Steam could just publicly host the game for download but it only runs if you own the license. The license can’t be take away from you and is freely transferable.
For games, the problem is still online games. I’m not sure that’s ownable unless they also let you host your own servers and its bundled in the game. But for offline games it’s possible.
I’ll simplify: I don’t want that future. Steam is currently acceptable because they provide a low-impact market, I think their 30% cut is reasonable, and offline mode is adequate. If that changes I’m done. GOG also exists and is a preferable model, but the experience isn’t as polished.
I don’t care if sales drop a bit, the early success of stuff like netflix and spotify and steam proves that most people will happily pay a reasonable price for access rather than pirate. It’s only a “problem” for the capitalists and fuck em.
What future? NFT are still around?
Absolutely. Trump sells them lol
NFT are more than just digital art. It’s a token that represents a specific thing and have been around since the very early days if Bitcoin. I believe it was colored coins that were first implementation, but maybe something came before even that.
They could be a stock certificate for a company, a license to a game, a concert ticket, a house key.
Could you imagine those ledgers trying to process when everyone in existence tries to insert hundreds to thousands of unique licenses. Then having to continuously access records on every media use after that.
How many unique copies of media are there out there. Hundreds of billions, trillions. I don’t think we have anything adequately designed at this point that could handle that kind of load.
Thats not how it’d work. The blockchain will generate the NFT but the NFT can authorize itself. You can do offline signatures that will prove you own the token and thus own the media. It doesn’t need to check in with anything online to pass a validity check once it’s issued.
The token is unique, the media is just out there exactly like it this today. How many billions of copies of songs have been download from iTunes?
Edit: And layer 2s will be able to handle 100,000 TPS or more in the future for the initial issuance. I didn’t say today, I said where the future is heading. That’s 3,153,600,000,000 transactions a year, and it’s going to be more than that.
I wish this were true, but unless companies were forced to stop licensing then they’ll never do that. And even then, if the company decided to not sell smth anymore or stop supporting it or they went out of business you still wouldn’t be able to get things legally a lot of the time.
And even then, if the company decided to not sell smth anymore or stop supporting it or they went out of business you still wouldn’t be able to get things legally a lot of the time.
I don’t think that’s an issue unless it’s an online service that they host the servers on, but for something like a book, even if they decided to stop selling it (aka minting new NFT tokens to access it) all the existing tokens would still work and trading would work.
We can’t really do anything about online services though unless a law requires a company to allow self hosting if they close down, which would be a great law to have.
Edit: just to clarify further, the token is the ownership at this point. Having the protected content anywhere on the internet and downloading it without a token isn’t theft, it’s just there and legal, inaccessible without the token. It could just be on a public torrent for download from day 1 for anyone to download with or without a token. Also the content could even link to the smart contract to purchase a token to unlock it. So a movie player would see a unauthorized movie with a buy now button. It could even be a token that unlocks it for a 24h rental. Unless the media owner kills the contract intentionally, it’ll be purchasable as long as the blockchain it’s on exists.
I wish this were true, but unless companies were forced to stop licensing then they’ll never do that
I think we’ll see someone experiment with this eventually even without a law. There’s a lot of upset out there about not being able to resell digital content and it suddenly being taken away.
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 a steal, even at full price, particularly once you account for the various mods.
FYI, I’ve several friends who veto playing, or even talking about factorio. They can’t afford to lose 100s of hours of their lives again to cracktorio, and dont want to be sucked back in again. Take from this what you will.
I didn’t know I had an addictive personality until I played factorio. Crack for your brain, it’s crazy.
Most people have an addiction button. The version for geeks and engineers is VERY hard to exploit at scale, to make money. Factorio pushes that button perfectly. It’s a sustained dopamine stream that little can match.
On a completely unrelated note. Less than a month now! 😀
Can I recommend never downloading vampire survivors then?
I haven’t played it since getting married. If I open the game, the factory must grow.
You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode… :D
My kids started playing now so I “have to” “teach” them how to play.
If you look at it as dollars per time spent, it’ll probably be far better value than the majority of games you could get cheaper. Assuming you like it of course (but if you think you will, you probably will).
I’ve got over 1700 hours on Factorio, which makes it cost me 2¢ per hour of entertainment
Though it’s a bit like drugs in that you really enjoy it at first and eventually you’re just trying to get your fix.
But unlike drugs, it gets cheaper (technically) per hour of entertainment.
FR, afaik they’ve never done a sale ever. Also it used to cost 25.
They do it on purpose and it really does make sense. For everyone who supported the game they got the very best value of it. It sucks to pay full price only to have a sale pop up a few weeks or months later and you think “ah, I should have waited!” You buy the game, you support the devs, they keep working on the game, the game gets more, the price goes up for more game.
I wishlisted it when it was under $20. The price went up and up and didn’t go down. When I learned it was intentional and would never be cheaper, I bought it and eventually sunk 300 hours over loads of updates. Now the price tag is higher and I get to think “I’m glad I bought it when I did” and not “I should have waited”
The best time to buy Factorio was 8 years ago. The second best time is now.
It was officially announced the game is never ever getting a sale, and every price increase is communicated ahead of time. I bought it back in the day on Indiegogo fot 15$, but I’d gladly spend the price for an AAA game if I knew what I am getting into. Absolutely gem of a a game, and absolutely GOATed dev team.
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.
People love the boot as long as the boot is privately owned.
Communism? Try fraud.
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”?
The big company has more money to lawyer up. If a company can’t win, they can drain the plaintiff dry of money through legal fees.
Ah right, i forgot the pay to win judicial system of US.
I don’t understand why they don’t just charge both parties the average cost when one side has waaay more legal resources than the other. Seems like such an obvious issue with the legal system that even the founding fathers should have realized if they thought for a second.
Or they did and this is the intended system.
If anything, that would be worse. Imagine, you sue, and have a single lawyer, on a discount rate. They respond with a team of 100 highly paid lawyers. Your now paying 50-500x what your own lawyer is actually charging. This could also work in both directions.
Sorry what I meant is to pool both parties legal budget, divide it in half and give each the same amount.
Basically disarms all corporates from using their army of lawyers because their big army will never give them an advantage. So they would actually avoid legal battles cause it would cost them money with no unfair advantage.
Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.
Same as speeding tickets in Nordic countries, it’s a parentage of total revenue. Im sure these details can be ironed out but the idea is that a corp can’t use its unlimited resources, it has to share said resources with their opponent to ensure a fair trail, otherwise it’s not justice imo.
That would be very easy to weaponise, particularly against smaller companies. Once you’re dealing with lawyers, you need to assume that worst case scenarios will rapidly become the default. You also then end up with even more red tape, deciding who should pay what, prior to the trial even starting.
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.
You are for sure violating the copyright law by doing so. You have the right to make backups for personal archival but not to distribute. The second you share with someone else you are breaking copyright law.
In the USA, Copyright Infringement excludes nonprofit uses, but that becomes shaky very quickly when you run a network that distributes copyrighted work without permission because you are then harming the business that sells the items.
So, yes, you can distribute a copy to your friend and your friend can take said copy and no laws are broken.
Citation needed. Nonprofit educational uses, sure. But giving your friend a copy of a video game is certainly not fair use.
We’re 3 comments deep and nobody dare cites the law this supposedly breaks. How about you go first?
109 (b)(1)(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording or the owner of copyright in a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), and in the case of a sound recording in the musical works embodied therein, neither the owner of a particular phonorecord nor any person in possession of a particular copy of a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord or computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program) by rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending. Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library or nonprofit educational institution. The transfer of possession of a lawfully made copy of a computer program by a nonprofit educational institution to another nonprofit educational institution or to faculty, staff, and students does not constitute rental, lease, or lending for direct or indirect commercial purposes under this subsection.
1)Giving a copy to a friend is an indirect commercial advantage as they are not paying the license fee the copyright holder requires for distribution.
2)You aren’t a nonprofit library or educational institution so you don’t get a free pass to lend.
I think its an incredibly weak argument to say that its a “commercial advantage” for either person unless they’re using the product to create wealth or satisfaction.
Mere access to media is rarely if ever a commercial advantage of any sort.
At most the copyright holders could sue the people who redistributed it with a single loss of sale, but that would be hard to prove on its own and the court would allow a fraction of the claim to be used as damages.
No, wrong. Or else teachers would be able to make copies of textbooks, and they’re not.
They make money at work so they aren’t exempt, plus are they making copies for the children? Because that would be a lot of copies.
Still, I’ve never once heard of the law being enforced in that way. An entire School District has been succesfully sued by a copyright holder, but a lone teacher? Fat fucking chance, mate.
You’re saying absolute goddamned nonsense.
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.
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 may be careful wording to avoid it being struck down by the Supreme Court.
Individual states have limited power to limit contracts. And while this may be a flimsy leg to stand on, SCOTUS may as well be the great American flamingo when it comes to standing on a single shakey leg
True. But as long as that isn’t the case, may as well fix the wording and raise awareness.
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.
I think you got a you and a them mixed up here
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.
district attorneys didn’t want to piss off large businesses
Humans consistently choose to punish the many in order to enrich the few.
“Spotify Music License Dispensary”
Revokable for any reason at any time, temporary, non tangible, non transferable, forced arbitration, License Dispensary*
*conditions apply
If paying for it isn’t ownership, then pirating it isn’t theft.
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.
Good news is that if more and more places start passing laws making it harder and harder for companies to do that, valve will just start allowing you to own the games for real.
I say this because valve has always bent like a reed when legislation forces them to make their platform more consumer-friendly
A good test for that was whether they would allow the inheritance of Steam accounts, but their staff said they wouldn’t.
They just said that because thats what the liscence is non-transferable, it is piss easy to transfer ownership of an account.
Also dont forget family share
IIRC, some of the games are still playable without Steam, it’s just the ones with Steamworks integration can’t be played without Steam.
Though if you want full game ownership, obviously go with something like GOG.
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
imagine buying something and not own it
It’s actually true for most things if you think long term enough.
You don’t really own things, you have control over them for a portion of your life.
Would be pretty easy to argue that digital ownership is perpetual access for the rest of your life.
But then they can’t resell you the same thing on different platforms.
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That’s exactly my point which I think some downvotes missed.
Digital ownership can just be a guarantee for the company to let you access it until 100 years after purchase.
Well that sounds fuckin useless. Every place causes cancer too.
California is a large enough economy - especially in the entertainment industry - lead the country and pass a meaningful law!
this isn’t a win imo. instead of actually making it to where you own your games Companies get to play the “well we told them! they should know. Its the consumers fault” card
