[nullsmack]

We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.

I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

[hodgehog11]

Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.

You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

[Buttons840]

The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.

Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.

[throwaway287391]

> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).

[roganartu]

The most relevant example of this for the games industry is probably Steam’s refund policy. They allow you to refund a game if you bought it less than 2 weeks ago and have less than 2 hours playtime recorded.

This is their policy for all users, but was a direct result of an Australian consumer watchdog lawsuit [0].

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...

[simjnd]

Counter-example to this would be 3rd-party app stores on iOS, which are only enabled in the EU, Japan and more recently in Brazil (maybe I'm missing some).

Legislation in one market didn't impact the state of things in the others, and some countries get screwed over.

[pipes]

I think this is going to have unintended consequences if it goes through: funding game development is a very very high risk investment. Adding this type of regulation adds further cost and complication, which makes it an even less attractive investment. Which will result in less monetary and creative risk taken.

Even just open sourcing part of project is expensive. Legal and technical.

[ryandrake]

This argument is always pretty weak. All regulation adds cost and complication for companies. If that alone was a good reason to not add regulation, then taken to the logical conclusion, there should be no regulation on companies.

Regulation needs to be seen as a trade-off, for example: We get better behaving companies, and the cost is less risk taken. Then the question becomes "is the benefit worth the cost?"

[Ferret7446]

The argument should be stronger since the vast majority of regulation is as you say, the cost is not worth the benefit.

All regulation by default is anticompetitive and also comes with the risk of intended consequences, and thus must prove that they provide sufficient benefit. They are "guilty until proven innocent".

e.g., rather than trying to "just do something" about games, maybe we should revisit copyright law as a whole, instead of slapping a bandaid on a festering wound caused by the first bandaid

[benj111]

How is all regulation anti competitive?

Is it anti competitive that your product does what you say it does and is safe? Isn't that just levelling the playing field by allowing consumers to make rational choices?

What about regulation designed to make sure there is competition? Is that anticompetitive???

[Schiendelman]

I thought this was more "let people run the code themselves if they can figure it out" not "open sourcing". There's no appetite to force a company that reuses and improves their game engine on every new title to open source it, even an older version.

[Volundr]

That alone would be an improvement from the status quo, but the SKG movement does go one stop further in wanting publishers to be required to leave the game in a working (local) state of they design it to be dependent on central services they then shut down.

This could be as easy as releasing the tools they used for development when developing the game.

[Schiendelman]

That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

Most game studios are similar, in reusing and improving a whole development architecture and systems across many titles. I would not agree with making them release that, even an older version. That's a big competitive moat for some studios.

I think if a community group wants to PAY to operate a server, that's quite reasonable. And then you still end up with a fight about how much to charge. But I don't think handing over server code is the right move.

[ytoawwhra92]

Fortunately, Stop Killing Games isn't looking to mandate any one solution to this problem.

There are many possible ways to enable game preservation and SKG is pushing for game studios to pick one and implement it, instead of not doing anything and letting games die when they become unprofitable.

[Volundr]

> That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

I don't get why you think that makes it harder? Right up until the final version of the game their developers were somehow making changes and testing their changes. It's not like the game grew on its own. What were they using to test those changes? Release that. Job done.

[hodgehog11]

I don't think that's what working state means here. It's not a full snapshot or even necessarily multiplayer support. It means minimum functional, which to me is just barely enough to see the assets used in the game. Not necessarily networking, matchmaking, online services, or the relevant tooling. Developers have already proposed making helpers that would introduce an effective switch to do this.

Also what you said about releasing the code and letting the community figure it out was explicitly an example SKG said was okay, from memory.

[acdha]

I’d go with a simple proposal: if you use the word “buy” the seller is required to refund buyers if the seller’s action removes access (unlike, say, losing access to a CD or DVD after the disc is scratched).

The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.

[TheGRS]

I agree, the "buy" on a streamable product implies that as long as the company is solvent and they have the same overall streamable products available, then your "purchase" should always be upheld.

In a an ideal world, if you bought the title then you'd have the ability to download it locally. I understand the licensing is a main driver of taking titles down, but these agreements are completely opaque to the customer at the time of purchase.

[qingcharles]

The law is changing (very, very slowly):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48754782

[bsimpson]

Include "add" and other potential weasel words

[qingcharles]

California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.

[wat10000]

I’d take it farther. If you knew, or a reasonable person should have known, that this sort of thing might happen (for example, because you signed a time-limited licensing agreement), then you’ve lied for financial gain. The legal term for that is “fraud” and it’s a criminal act. Prosecute it.

[jMyles]

Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.

Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.

All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.

I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Release:QmUWtV7fG1K9pM5TQSf5c38v...

[himata4113]

We already have a pretty resilient solution called piracy.

[yreg]

> and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price.

Wouldn't this incentivize people to buy the game, play it and once they are done with it get banned to get a full refund?

Maybe not a major problem since almost no centralised multiplayer games are one-time purchases.

[rustcleaner]

Never buy, never subscribe, obtain by other means, until things change.

Starve 'em!

[supertroop]

There’s only one party fighting for things like this and they are in the minority. Funny how people that cry about politics on hacker news don’t understand how it directly affects them until their digital media is no longer their property. Sad that’s what it takes.

[HiPhish]

> I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.

[ksec]

I quite like the idea of what Nintendo Switch 2 is doing and hopefully could take on with some guarantee. The new Switch 2 cartridge, I am buying the Key to access the media. Storing and transferring media cost is going down every single year. You can pass the physical media to anyone. And they will still be able to access it. And the copy of that data should be legally yours and be protected by law they can't remove it.

[standardUser]

The list of legislation we need is getting very big very fast, but our Congress is dysfunctional and the president only cares about the SAVE act. Even when we've had a functional Congress, most protections like these are written in favor of corporations and/or weakened by the next administration.

[EA-3167]

They’ll be begging for it when they recreate the very piracy problem they were fleeing, but far worse.

[dopidopHN2]

Yeah. This time I'm not living the high seas.

We seen what licensing ala Netflix and Spotify means artists.

[wongarsu]

*leaving

[Guvante]

> These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this.

I don't think it is reasonable to bundle those ideas together.

Companies renegading on their promise of perpetual access is not the same thing as a right to resell at all

Right to resell is just going to warp game prices in a way that is bad for everyone

After all how do new games compete with used games in that setup? Given the way engagement with games works there will basically always be spare copies

Key sales already happen at below new game value at nearly all times and that is unused games

> they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought

Also not the same thing at all, bad behavior removing access and no refund is normal

> that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price

Ah yes cheating in an MMO results in a full refund of all money paid that wouldn't be abused by anyone

[nradov]

We need consumer boycotts, not legislation. I find it hilarious that people would continue to buy (or license) content from a trash company like Sony after they were caught literally installing rootkits on customer computers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

[cogman10]

Yes, let's boycott sony and go to... sega?

There's only 3 major companies at this point in the home entertainment system market. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Microsoft has indicated they want to get out.

When so few companies have so much control over a market boycott becomes pointless as you are basically saying "You need to give up a product you like and there is no real alternative".

That means we need regulation, legislation, and enforcement.

We need better antitrust enforcement and tweaks to to give it more teeth. We should be seeing more corporate breakups.

Memory is in the same boat. There's only 3 major companies producing most of the RAM and they've repeatedly colluded to raise prices.

[ryandrake]

> We need consumer boycotts, not legislation.

We need both. 'Buyer Beware' and 'The invisible hand' are necessary but insufficient to correct corporate bad behavior.