Comment by theptip
6 days ago
It’s pretty easy to solve static content like ebooks and video games; just legislate that your license is transferrable between services and media. Then I can legally torrent a game that is unsupported.
Content subscriptions like Netflix are different because you are not paying face value for one title. The better analogy here would be the game streaming services like XBox online. It’s clear you are not doing anything like “buying a game”, it’s the whole point of the business model. As you say, it would be a lot harder to make these laws apply there (but I bet that wouldn’t stop the EU from trying).
I think any legislation on this subject would have to reckon with the second-order effects; on the margin you’d be adding pressure for publishers to move to pure subscription services, if these laws don’t apply in those cases.
> legislate the that your license
What we should be doing is applying the laws that already exist: when I purchase a physical book I own a copy of it and can sell it, lend it, modify it.
Amazon and the publishers have zero say in the matter.
Buying a digital copy should be no different. I more of this stupid “you bought a license to access a copy” crap.
Let's step through this example.
All Xbox games around 2004 were physical CDs. Many had online services attached to them. Eventually, those servers were turned off. You can still play LAN and singleplayer. You still have your access to the physical bytes on the disk (though there is copy protection).
What should companies be required to do regarding the servers?
Not sue people into oblivion if they want to reverse engineer and create their own servers.
2 replies →
Thing is, you are by default allowed to write mostly any contract / ToS you like (within the broad rules of contract law). So to implement this you need to explicitly ban “license for things that could be purchases”. And as I noted above the edge cases and market pressures make that non-trivial; do you also ban subscription services like Audible?
We already have subscriptions services for physical books and audiobooks.
They’re called libraries.
You don’t own the books when you check them out, and you wouldn’t own a digital copy when you check it out from audible.
As for market pressure, you don’t have to ban them. Require that if they want to rent digital copies out they must also allow for purchasing of them at a price that the average person would find resonable.