California's New Law Will Force Storefronts to Disclose That Buyers Don't Actually Own Their Digitally Purchased Media - IGN
California's New Law Will Force Storefronts to Disclose That Buyers Don't Actually Own Their Digitally Purchased Media - IGN
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that will force storefronts to admit that you don't actually own your digitally purchased games, films, and TV shows - you're just licensing them.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Law’s good and all. But it needs to be enforced.
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