Comment by _aavaa_
6 days ago
> 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.
That is a perfectly rational suggestion. It is repulsive that large companies such as my employer do this.
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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.