Comment by Mindwipe
6 days ago
> If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).
Yes it can.
Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.
> Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.
They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.
> Yes it can. Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.
Issue is with A->B->C due to business B being unable to legally fulfill the terms that'd require them to go around consumer C's homes destroying the chair they have bought (even if such destruction is hidden in some fine-print, given decent consumer protection laws). Some business B can still agree to terms impacting themselves (and as a business, typically have greater capacity to review/negotiate contracts), like destroying their unsold stock.
> They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.
I think generally it's a large enough market (especially if this eventually expands beyond games to all purchased software, which I hope to see) that existing suppliers would adapt to either allow their component to be easily severed/mocked, or accept some probably-long-outdated version of their component being included in end-of-life releases (as it would for client-side components), else an alternative would emerge to fill that void.