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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago

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

[-] [email protected] 30 points 11 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

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

[-] [email protected] 10 points 7 hours ago

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).

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 7 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

I didn’t know I had an addictive personality until I played factorio. Crack for your brain, it’s crazy.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

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! 😀

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Can I recommend never downloading vampire survivors then?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I haven't played it since getting married. If I open the game, the factory must grow.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

You can always introduce your other half to multiplayer mode... :D

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

FR, afaik they've never done a sale ever. Also it used to cost 25.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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"?

[-] [email protected] 17 points 11 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago

Ah right, i forgot the pay to win judicial system of US.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

How could it be weaponized?

It costs money (relative to your company size) to do any legal action, a big company suing means they lose waaay more $ than the small opponent.

Same thing with the small guy, it’s not a lot of $ to sue but it’s still a big chunk of your business so you would want to avoid unless your pretty sure the law is on your side.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

E.g. a competitor "encourages" multiple individuals to open cases. Perhaps with some "financial assistance". Suddenly, the company is dealing with the costs of 10 cases. Even worse, they can no longer use economies of scale to cope (e.g. have an in-house lawyer). They are on the line for the complainant's cost. The cases don't have to go far, the company pays the opposing lawyers either way.

Also, if you can't see how ambulance chasing lawyers couldn't exploit a guaranteed payout system (to the lawyers at least), I would question your imagination.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

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

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

Law’s good and all. But it needs to be enforced.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

How about making a law so we do?

[-] [email protected] 139 points 1 day ago

Alternatively, make laws protecting digital ownership and the right to resell that ownership on any market.

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[-] [email protected] 31 points 20 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

Communism? Try fraud.

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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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