4 ms·
Digital purchasing has gutted consumer rights. Remember when you could sell your used games to other people? Someone buying a digital game/book/movie/album usua
by AlexandrB 3y ago
Digital purchasing has gutted consumer rights. Remember when you could sell your used games to other people? Someone buying a digital game/book/movie/album usually has few rights besides consuming the content in question, and even then only until the seller decides they don't want to host the content (or sometimes DRM servers required to run it) anymore. Returns on digital purchases are often impossible (Steam being an exception) as are typical retail niceties like price matching against sales within the return period (e.g. you buy something and it goes on sale the next day).
I don't know what the solution is because a lot of these functions would require complex DRM systems to make a digital product behave anything like a physical one. So legislating to enforce digital consumer rights is effectively legislating for DRM everywhere. The crypto dream of tying every digital good to a token or NFT was effectively an implementation of this kind of DRM using blockchain. However many digital storefronts already implement complex DRM systems, so perhaps at least enforcing some kind of right to return digital goods (including game MTX) would be beneficial.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoJust make it conditional: if you use DRM, then the customer also benefits:)