5 ms·

It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.

by vuln 4y ago

yamtaddle 4y ago
They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  What are you talking about? Do you mean send out games on DVD?
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    There are these thingswe wused to put on DVDs, we call them install files. You can find them on like every torrent tracker these days.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    In the case of games, anything that doesn't mean losing access to an account stops you from being able to play games you already bought. So, GOG wouldn't need to change much, but Steam might. Wouldn't have to mean shipping physical media. Or they can just stop using terms like "buy" and otherwise implying ownership, instead making it clear you're just leasing the game.
jerf 4y ago
It doesn't have to be quite as simplistic. You can give them choices. There could be IP escrow companies you could pay. You can give them the choice of hosting in perpetuity or releasing something on some date. You can tie all these choices to a tax structure, progressive charges, etc. You could make the cheapest thing to simply sell the product outright. In theory you could even tie these additional protections to the a condition of making the release public at some point as a way of incentivizing companies not to use copyright protection on something that is not likely to be that valuable in 95 years, though that's unrealistically utopian of me to suggest. My main point is that it doesn't have to be that simplistic.
paulmd 4y ago
Companies going out of business is a different thing but Amazon, Google, and Epic are not in any risk of going out of business. If you're worried about shell-company games, well, that can be legislated against too. So far the EU hasn't, as far as I'm aware, let any companies out of any previously-mandated penalties for violating consumer protection with "That was google, this is ABC" bullshit. They are, as I stated, much much less interested in playing games than the US is.
csunbird 4y ago
EU isn’t that unfair for companies, it is more likely that they would allow revoking of access rights, but require companies to compensate for thr damages (e.g. issue a refund for the full or partial purchase amount)
dkersten 4y ago
I forced a book publisher to re-host videos on a particular CDN using the exact same URL’s because they advertised that the book came with videos, but the QR codes stopped working. Can’t imagine that was fun or cheap to fix. I made a complaint to the advertising standards authority in the UK. They agreed with my complaint and forced the publisher to get the URL’s working again. I’m not sure how long they will keep working, but I imagine they have to at least for as long as the book is in print. Not the EU, but I imagine the EU has a lot more clout than the ASA does.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  That's actually really good, I am sure I came across a similar problem but never thought of where to make a proper complaint
  - dkersten 4y ago
    This experience taught me that sometimes making a complaint to the correct organisation is worth the minor effort. Most people (and me in the past too) would probably just be annoyed but ignore it. It also emboldened me to make complaints about other things, for example I complained that a local internet provider was advertising having the fastest internet in my country, even though I had internet from another provider that was 3x the speed. They did eventually change their advertising and the funny thing is that I received update letters from my local advertising authority for about two years, addressed to sone bigwig executives at Sky (who had also complained) and… me, a random nobody. I had zero skin in that one, but felt that advertisements should have to be accurate. As for not knowing where to send the complaints, yeah, I get it, it was something I wondered about for a while too before I decided the advertising standards authority. My reasoning was: the book was still listed on their website and on Amazon, and the blurb clearly stated that it comes with videos, so it’s part of the purchasing decision. So since it was advertised that way, it’s clearly false advertising. I took a chance and it turned out correct. Of course not all agencies are quite so receptive or active regarding complaints so it’s hit and miss, but since you can usually do it online in a few minutes I felt it was worth five minutes of my time to try anyway. If I’d had to send a physics letter, for example, I wouldn’t have done it. My experience dealing with the advertising standards authority from the UK, though, was a very good one. They were quick and communicative.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Easy- revoke copyright protection. Your "software X" is not worth hosting any more? Fine, then someone else can host it, maybe they will find it profitable. Maybe even it could be a former employee.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Just keeping it online wouldn't be hard for most companies and most items sold. If something is under pretty active use, that should have been in the original budget, but also you can put it on cloudflare R2. For the long tail of perpetuity, you can pay Hetzner $1200 a year for a server with 45TB (plus parity) and a gigabit port.

It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.

by vuln 4y ago

It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.

yamtaddle 4y ago

They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.

robertlagrant 4y ago
What are you talking about? Do you mean send out games on DVD?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  There are these thingswe wused to put on DVDs, we call them install files. You can find them on like every torrent tracker these days.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  In the case of games, anything that doesn't mean losing access to an account stops you from being able to play games you already bought. So, GOG wouldn't need to change much, but Steam might. Wouldn't have to mean shipping physical media. Or they can just stop using terms like "buy" and otherwise implying ownership, instead making it clear you're just leasing the game.

jerf 4y ago

It doesn't have to be quite as simplistic. You can give them choices. There could be IP escrow companies you could pay. You can give them the choice of hosting in perpetuity or releasing something on some date. You can tie all these choices to a tax structure, progressive charges, etc. You could make the cheapest thing to simply sell the product outright. In theory you could even tie these additional protections to the a condition of making the release public at some point as a way of incentivizing companies not to use copyright protection on something that is not likely to be that valuable in 95 years, though that's unrealistically utopian of me to suggest. My main point is that it doesn't have to be that simplistic.

paulmd 4y ago

Companies going out of business is a different thing but Amazon, Google, and Epic are not in any risk of going out of business. If you're worried about shell-company games, well, that can be legislated against too. So far the EU hasn't, as far as I'm aware, let any companies out of any previously-mandated penalties for violating consumer protection with "That was google, this is ABC" bullshit. They are, as I stated, much much less interested in playing games than the US is.

csunbird 4y ago

EU isn’t that unfair for companies, it is more likely that they would allow revoking of access rights, but require companies to compensate for thr damages (e.g. issue a refund for the full or partial purchase amount)

dkersten 4y ago

I forced a book publisher to re-host videos on a particular CDN using the exact same URL’s because they advertised that the book came with videos, but the QR codes stopped working. Can’t imagine that was fun or cheap to fix. I made a complaint to the advertising standards authority in the UK. They agreed with my complaint and forced the publisher to get the URL’s working again. I’m not sure how long they will keep working, but I imagine they have to at least for as long as the book is in print. Not the EU, but I imagine the EU has a lot more clout than the ASA does.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
That's actually really good, I am sure I came across a similar problem but never thought of where to make a proper complaint
- dkersten 4y ago
  This experience taught me that sometimes making a complaint to the correct organisation is worth the minor effort. Most people (and me in the past too) would probably just be annoyed but ignore it. It also emboldened me to make complaints about other things, for example I complained that a local internet provider was advertising having the fastest internet in my country, even though I had internet from another provider that was 3x the speed. They did eventually change their advertising and the funny thing is that I received update letters from my local advertising authority for about two years, addressed to sone bigwig executives at Sky (who had also complained) and… me, a random nobody. I had zero skin in that one, but felt that advertisements should have to be accurate. As for not knowing where to send the complaints, yeah, I get it, it was something I wondered about for a while too before I decided the advertising standards authority. My reasoning was: the book was still listed on their website and on Amazon, and the blurb clearly stated that it comes with videos, so it’s part of the purchasing decision. So since it was advertised that way, it’s clearly false advertising. I took a chance and it turned out correct. Of course not all agencies are quite so receptive or active regarding complaints so it’s hit and miss, but since you can usually do it online in a few minutes I felt it was worth five minutes of my time to try anyway. If I’d had to send a physics letter, for example, I wouldn’t have done it. My experience dealing with the advertising standards authority from the UK, though, was a very good one. They were quick and communicative.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

Easy- revoke copyright protection. Your "software X" is not worth hosting any more? Fine, then someone else can host it, maybe they will find it profitable. Maybe even it could be a former employee.

Dylan16807 4y ago

Just keeping it online wouldn't be hard for most companies and most items sold. If something is under pretty active use, that should have been in the original budget, but also you can put it on cloudflare R2. For the long tail of perpetuity, you can pay Hetzner $1200 a year for a server with 45TB (plus parity) and a gigabit port.