[WorldMaker]

I think Digital Asset rights fights are going to be big in the next couple of decades. Especially as account owners start to mature and realize their investments and start asking hard questions such as estate planning. (Can you pass on your digital assets/libraries to your children? The answers there [which currently are most "no"] are going to surprise an increasing number of people over the next few years.)

[slayback]

When my wife and I did our estate planning we had the lawyer put specific terms in to help ensure that our future (and now current) kids would assume ownership of all digital accounts. At the time there was only one example from another state we were able to use that had been proven successful in court, so that’s what we adopted.

Now that we’ve moved to California I need to update the documents to fit our laws as well the current understanding of the law is. Point being I’m seeing a lawyer soon for this specific case alone and the wording MUST be tested in court for us to even know where to start. For anyone studying law, IP law will make some money for now and quite a while still.

P.S. if anyone can recommend a Bay Area estate attorney with this experience please let me and others know!

[WorldMaker]

Yes, it's going to be an interesting up hill legal battle that will either need a lot of expensive court cases or some really smart people in legislatures, and in this climate it feels like we can count on the former a lot more than the latter.

Many terms of service agreements terminate with the "owner" and are very explicit that accounts are "nontransferable", and both are problems that are going to be big fights.

[stubish]

Uptake of subscription services might make this a non-issue, if it is sizable enough to make a minority of people who want to own media. If the providers of subscription services can solve the disappearing and exclusive content problems. Maybe fights over rights will be there instead, with 'exclusive' distribution rights to media being limited and a right to buy. I tend to think that a change such as requiring copyright holders to sell to everyone or no-one under the same terms would mean us consumers would no longer be stuck needing to hoard, and most of us would be happy to pay our monthly fees to have access to everything delivered to our TVs.

[WorldMaker]

I'm more afraid that uptake of subscription services will hit that worst case scenario problem of prolonging the fight just long enough that people give up on the fight in a war of attrition before subscription services simply prove again why (digital) landlords cannot be trusted and (digital) renters have no rights.

A big part of my concern here is that copyright terms are so long today that any subscription/rental-focused world is a multi-generational digital feudalism. With a larger and "closer" to the current generation public domain it might be much easier to trust competition among subscription companies. You allude to this indirectly in trying to open the market, but there will always be "exclusive" distribution rights so long as copyright casts such a long shadow from the big castles on all the lowly consumer sharecroppers.

While I doubt we'd see much legislative interest in shortening copyright terms and enlarging the public domain, fighting for digital asset rights from digital retailers that use words like "own" and "purchase", given long histories of consumer protection laws and consumer protection court cases, seems a lot more plausible, and a lot more worth fighting. I worry that a lot of people won't care to fight so long as the castles make subscription services seem like good sharecropping just long enough for most people to give up, and then it will be too late and there won't be a big enough public domain to protect us.

[slayback]

I think it reduces the risk to consumers, but it won’t eliminate the need. It’ll be a long while before my entire Steam library will be available via subscription.

[stubish]

If you can rent out a purchased copy (one for the courts, jurisdiction specific), then Steam/Microsoft/GOG/Humble could offer things as a subscription quite easily. If publishers are required to sell to them and not allowed to create roadblocks. Given the concurrent player counts for most games the subscription service wouldn't need to purchase many copies to allow almost-always access. The interesting games to consider are the 'always online' ones, where the software could be given away for free, because it is useless without access to the game servers. Which pretty much operates like a subscription ('lifetime' or monthly), and is expected to stop working one day.