[Pxtl]

Honestly, I hate blockchains, but I feel like they're the ultimate solution for digital goods. I don't want to own NFTs for their own sake as "speculative assets" or "stores of value" or nonsense like that, but an NFT that is my certificate of ownership of a copy of like a videogame or a streamable movie, etc. would just make sense. Combine that with a requirement that (a) binaries be freely redistributable, and (b) binaries must authenticate against a blockchain and not against private servers.

I mean that still doesn't solve the problem of games that require servers to operate for online play, but at lest that would return digital goods to near-parity with physical media in terms of copy-protection and transferability and ownership.

If you go the extra mile and require that companies publish free dedicated-server-binaries for end-of-life products and allow clients to point to custom servers, you could still run the game while still protecting the seller from piracy. I mean, you'd have no security patches so if you're running eg your own Star Wars Galaxies server you'd want it to be invitational-only and secured with a VPN, since playing with strangers would get the server and clients hacked.

That seems like it would be a reasonable compromise for video-game preservation - old games are therefore available indefinitely to anyone who purchased access to them (and this is transferable), but without companies having to abandon their copyright protections.

I mean this approach would probably have to be mandated by a government or a near-monopoly e-store like Valve, so I'm sure it would get screwed up and fail, but a boy can dream.

[Cerium]

Why should society protect copyright for goods that are discontinued? Discontinuation of a product is generally a financial decision; in essecne you are making a public declaration that the product is unprofitable and throwing up your hands.

Your right to protection against piracy should end when you discontinue a product.

[Pxtl]

That argument extends far beyond digital goods. There are a myriad of great physical books, albums, games, boardgames, etc. that are out-of-print, and so the only legal way to experience them is to find somebody with a copy and borrow/rent/buy it from them. The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more. So the problem you describe is exactly the same for physical media.

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong but that this is scope-creep.

[autoexec]

> The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more.

That's rarely the case. Most of the time rightsholders want to keep old works out of circulation because they would compete with the new works they are promoting and want people spending their money on instead.

There are some physical works that are expensive enough to produce that profit can be an issue, but things that are extremely inexpensive to produce such as paperbacks or disk media (CD/DVD/bluray) still go out of print all the time. It's not that those artistic works couldn't make the corporation a profit. It's just that the company is betting that they can make higher profits by keeping those works out of the hands of the public, which is deplorable.

I can't blame a company for not producing something that actually won't make them money, but corporations locking away our culture for more than a century just so that they can maximize their profits is a sickening example of pure avarice that copyright law wasn't originally intended to allow for.

The real issue with physical products is that they're harder for the public to duplicate. If I could copy a complicated out of print board games as easily as I could an out of print album on MP3, I'd argue that we should have the right to do that too. 3D printers haven't caught on to the point where there's one in every home, or it might even be possible.

[Pxtl]

That's a distinction without a difference, imho. Either IP that the owner has decided to stop selling should be free to reproduce, or it shouldn't, regardless of their justification and the medium.

[blincoln]

> a requirement that (a) binaries be freely redistributable, and (b) binaries must authenticate against a blockchain and not against private servers

If the software runs on general-purpose hardware, it would be trivial to modify it to bypass the blockchain authentication step. If the software is only compatible with some sort of locked-down platform that won't run modified code, then it already has an enforcement mechanism (whatever is used to prevent running modified code), and a blockchain is redundant.

[Pxtl]

Blockchain is not redundant because blockchain provides non-first-party ownership authorization and would enforce the transferability of the product.

Like, right now, if I buy a digital good on a game console, my "ownership" of that good is controlled by the vendor. They can take it away on a whim, or simply because they no longer want to maintain the server that says "yes, Pxtl owns this".

If that ownership is stored on a record outside of the first-party infrastructure and the software must authenticate my ownership against that 3rd-party, then that 3rd party is the one that controls whether or not I own the software, and is responsible for keeping that service live.

And a blockchain, flawed as it is, is a decent solution for managing ownership of goods without having the infrastructure owned by a single entity who has to maintain it and can take it down on a whim.

I mean, an ICANN-style neutral 3rd party with specific policies about lifetime and transferability of ownership that just runs this on a regular-ass SQL server would be fine too.

[jncfhnb]

Nobody is doubting ownership. The problem is your (a).

[Pxtl]

If the binaries are freely redistributable but worthless without the blockchain auth, then it's harmless to let any torrent site host them, right?

[bentley]

> If the binaries are freely redistributable but worthless without the blockchain auth

How can that happen in our right‐click‐save world?

[Pxtl]

Other way around. The idea is that anybody can right-click-save whatever game they like. But when you run the game, the first thing it would do is check your blockchain wallets for authorization to execute this game.

Basically, accept that your game media will be copied willy-nilly and do a "does the user actually have ownership rights to this" check that is already common today, except that do this check against the blockchain so that there isn't a single-point-of-failure by putting all reliance on the vendor's auth servers.

[jncfhnb]

So if one person posts a private key that owns the wallet then anyone can verify that they own the game with a local copy of the blockchain.

[jncfhnb]

Binaries are not freely redistributable