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> First-sale doctrine needs a serious update for electronic content. Who says that there "needs" to be a serious update? You? This is emotional pleading witho

> First-sale doctrine needs a serious update for electronic content. Who says that there "needs" to be a serious update? You? This is emotional pleading without any substance. > It's too important a principle for us to lose. This is false. The rise of Steam and other digital distribution platforms for video games has almost completely eradicated the second-hand market - with virtually zero negative consequences. The real-world nullification of first-sale doctrine for an entire class of digital media extremely clearly illustrates that there have been few, if any, negative consequences for it. > Content licensing, as opposed to outright sale, is a cancer spreading through our collective culture. Now you're mixing two very different problems. Problems of being able to re-sell copies of copyrighted material is distinct from ownership. (the fact that a small part of ownership is the ability to sell to other parties is largely irrelevant)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
Steam works because they are acting nicely toward users. The moment Gabe is out of there, the mess will begin, sadly. And it's hard to capture for normal people, but the pain of digital ownership is pretty evident to every person I know. Granted that's still a very small sample. Nobody can convince you, but you can't claim the opposite too
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Steam works because they are acting nicely toward users. The moment Gabe is out of there, the mess will begin, sadly. I mostly agree with you, but it's important to differentiate between two different things that Steam is doing: The first is the nullification of first-sale doctrine, which is what the GP comment was about - you can't re-sell Steam games, and this is OK. The second is the fact that your entire game library is tied to Steam - beyond merely being unable to re-sell your games, you can lose your games if Steam either goes down or decides to delete them from your library (like Sony and Amazon have done with their respective digital libraries). That is unacceptable, and I fully support legislation to prevent things like that from happening. (e.g. I'm in favor of bills that say that if the servers are shut down for an online game, the developer must provide all the tools for players to host their own servers) But, my point is that the two concerns are separate. You can believe that people shouldn't be able to re-sell digital content without believing that the digital store owner gets to delete content at will, or that it's ok for you to be unable to access hundreds of dollars of games that you paid for because the DRM servers are down.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - throw10920 2y ago
      Now you're just being belligerent. You should take a break and read the HN guidelines, because you're contributing nothing to the discussion, you're actively degrading the quality of discourse on HN, and you're not adhering to the community standards. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - triceratops 2y ago
        > Who says that there "needs" to be a serious update? You? This is emotional pleading without any substance. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throw10920 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throw10920 I'm happy to admit fault if you are. I shouldn't have perpetuated the flamewar that you started. I am sorry for that. And I was a lot nicer about "asking for a citation" than you were. Have a nice day.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
    What about inheritance? We will hit that point sooner or later, where I want to pass my account to my children. And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > What about inheritance? We will hit that point sooner or later, where I want to pass my account to my children. Reverting copyright term from the current insane state (in the US) of "70 years from the author's death" would allow that. Copyright in the US was originally under 30 years[1], but has been progressively extended by corruption and lobbying. If the copyright term was reverted back to 30 years, then games that you played as a teen would be in the public domain for your children to play in their early twenties (assuming you had kids around your late twenties). If copyright term was shortened to 25 or 20 years, then your kids could definitely play the same games in their teens as you did. And, this was the original point of copyright - to allow for a time-limited monopoly on copyright and distribution of a work to allow the creator to get compensated, while ensuring that the work would eventually pass into the public domain and enrich the cultural commons. I'd much rather have a prohibition on "passing down" games, but have those games just become public domain for my kids to play, then allow "inheriting" copyrighted works/licenses, but have those works not appear in the public domain until after I'm dead. > And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases Yes, I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. My point above was that Steam's existence and destruction of the second-hard market for games, with little downside, was proof that we didn't need to adapt first-sale doctrine for electronic media. However, that's completely separate from the fact that yes, if Steam bans you, you lose all your purchases. I whole-heartedly support legislation that gives you strong rights as to ownership of digital media - e.g. if your account gets banned, the platform provider is legally required to give you tokens to redeem to play your games somehow (which, if necessary, means DRM-free direct download - which I assure you will be an extremely strong incentive for platforms to never ban people). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi...
triceratops 2y ago
[flagged]
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Yes obviously I said that. When someone writes a thing it's like they said that thing. You really didn't know that? It's pretty clear that I was questioning your citation for "needs". These kinds of comments are not appropriate for HN. > Says you. And I didn't need to ask if you were saying it. I knew because you wrote it! Amazing, right?! And this. > I have games in my Steam library that I don't like or play. I can't re-sell them or lend them to my friends. If Valve goes out of business all my games could be gone forever. You're mixing two very different categories of thing here. Your ability to play your games contingent on Valve's existence is very different than being able to re-sale purely digital pieces of property, and isn't what's being discussed here. > You might be ok with throwing money away like that but I am not. Snuck premise. You're not throwing money away - you either didn't play the game, or played little of it, in which case you can refund the game, or you played a lot of it, in which case you're not entitled to a refund regardless of whether you enjoyed it or not, because you've already consumed the product. > Can you please elaborate on how the ability to sell or re-sell a thing is not a fundamental property of ownership? Because ownership doesn't give you the unilateral ability to do whatever you want with something. It's legal to buy and own uranium, for instance, as long as you don't refine it. Similarly, it's legal to buy and own a physical book, as long as you don't distribute photocopies of it. It's pretty clear that physical ownership doesn't imply the right to do whatever you want with it. > I'm fascinated This comment is not appropriate for HN.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    > It's pretty clear that I was questioning your citation for "needs". It wasn't clear at all actually. You were being quite combative and condescending. Now you are lecturing me about what's appropriate on HN. It would be needlessly tedious to prefix every single opinion with "In my opinion". And opinions don't need citations. > You're mixing two very different categories of thing here They aren't 2 categories. If I purchase thing, I can use thing or I can sell or transfer thing to someone else. If I don't have thing, I cannot. It's a pretty simple concept. This works with owned physical media, but not with "licensed" digital media. It's clearly a "negative consequence" of going digital. Your claim about things being hunky-dory with Steam and co was just as absent of citations as any of my comments. That negative consequence may not matter to you but you also don't get to deny that others can consider it a loss. We both have our opinions. I acknowledge yours, and it annoys me to see you handwave away mine as "not a real problem". > ... because you've already consumed the product Again, not a problem with physical media. I can play the game for as many hours as I like and still sell it or give it away. > Because ownership doesn't give you the unilateral ability to do whatever you want with something... Except I didn't say "whatever you want", I quite clearly said "resell or lend". I award you a debate point for pointing out the legal exceptions to right of resale. Since digital media isn't uranium (or weapons, or pharmaceutical products, certain chemicals, whatever else has further resale restrictions) that isn't pertinent to the discussion. > Similarly, it's legal to buy and own a physical book, as long as you don't distribute photocopies of it I can resell the original book. The photocopies are a new thing which I rightly can't resell. This is merely a restatement of copyright law.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

Steam works because they are acting nicely toward users. The moment Gabe is out of there, the mess will begin, sadly. And it's hard to capture for normal people, but the pain of digital ownership is pretty evident to every person I know. Granted that's still a very small sample. Nobody can convince you, but you can't claim the opposite too

throw10920 2y ago
> Steam works because they are acting nicely toward users. The moment Gabe is out of there, the mess will begin, sadly. I mostly agree with you, but it's important to differentiate between two different things that Steam is doing: The first is the nullification of first-sale doctrine, which is what the GP comment was about - you can't re-sell Steam games, and this is OK. The second is the fact that your entire game library is tied to Steam - beyond merely being unable to re-sell your games, you can lose your games if Steam either goes down or decides to delete them from your library (like Sony and Amazon have done with their respective digital libraries). That is unacceptable, and I fully support legislation to prevent things like that from happening. (e.g. I'm in favor of bills that say that if the servers are shut down for an online game, the developer must provide all the tools for players to host their own servers) But, my point is that the two concerns are separate. You can believe that people shouldn't be able to re-sell digital content without believing that the digital store owner gets to delete content at will, or that it's ok for you to be unable to access hundreds of dollars of games that you paid for because the DRM servers are down.
- triceratops 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - throw10920 2y ago
    Now you're just being belligerent. You should take a break and read the HN guidelines, because you're contributing nothing to the discussion, you're actively degrading the quality of discourse on HN, and you're not adhering to the community standards. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > Who says that there "needs" to be a serious update? You? This is emotional pleading without any substance. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throw10920 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throw10920 I'm happy to admit fault if you are. I shouldn't have perpetuated the flamewar that you started. I am sorry for that. And I was a lot nicer about "asking for a citation" than you were. Have a nice day.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  What about inheritance? We will hit that point sooner or later, where I want to pass my account to my children. And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > What about inheritance? We will hit that point sooner or later, where I want to pass my account to my children. Reverting copyright term from the current insane state (in the US) of "70 years from the author's death" would allow that. Copyright in the US was originally under 30 years[1], but has been progressively extended by corruption and lobbying. If the copyright term was reverted back to 30 years, then games that you played as a teen would be in the public domain for your children to play in their early twenties (assuming you had kids around your late twenties). If copyright term was shortened to 25 or 20 years, then your kids could definitely play the same games in their teens as you did. And, this was the original point of copyright - to allow for a time-limited monopoly on copyright and distribution of a work to allow the creator to get compensated, while ensuring that the work would eventually pass into the public domain and enrich the cultural commons. I'd much rather have a prohibition on "passing down" games, but have those games just become public domain for my kids to play, then allow "inheriting" copyrighted works/licenses, but have those works not appear in the public domain until after I'm dead. > And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases Yes, I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. My point above was that Steam's existence and destruction of the second-hard market for games, with little downside, was proof that we didn't need to adapt first-sale doctrine for electronic media. However, that's completely separate from the fact that yes, if Steam bans you, you lose all your purchases. I whole-heartedly support legislation that gives you strong rights as to ownership of digital media - e.g. if your account gets banned, the platform provider is legally required to give you tokens to redeem to play your games somehow (which, if necessary, means DRM-free direct download - which I assure you will be an extremely strong incentive for platforms to never ban people). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi...

triceratops 2y ago

[flagged]

throw10920 2y ago
> Yes obviously I said that. When someone writes a thing it's like they said that thing. You really didn't know that? It's pretty clear that I was questioning your citation for "needs". These kinds of comments are not appropriate for HN. > Says you. And I didn't need to ask if you were saying it. I knew because you wrote it! Amazing, right?! And this. > I have games in my Steam library that I don't like or play. I can't re-sell them or lend them to my friends. If Valve goes out of business all my games could be gone forever. You're mixing two very different categories of thing here. Your ability to play your games contingent on Valve's existence is very different than being able to re-sale purely digital pieces of property, and isn't what's being discussed here. > You might be ok with throwing money away like that but I am not. Snuck premise. You're not throwing money away - you either didn't play the game, or played little of it, in which case you can refund the game, or you played a lot of it, in which case you're not entitled to a refund regardless of whether you enjoyed it or not, because you've already consumed the product. > Can you please elaborate on how the ability to sell or re-sell a thing is not a fundamental property of ownership? Because ownership doesn't give you the unilateral ability to do whatever you want with something. It's legal to buy and own uranium, for instance, as long as you don't refine it. Similarly, it's legal to buy and own a physical book, as long as you don't distribute photocopies of it. It's pretty clear that physical ownership doesn't imply the right to do whatever you want with it. > I'm fascinated This comment is not appropriate for HN.
- triceratops 2y ago
  > It's pretty clear that I was questioning your citation for "needs". It wasn't clear at all actually. You were being quite combative and condescending. Now you are lecturing me about what's appropriate on HN. It would be needlessly tedious to prefix every single opinion with "In my opinion". And opinions don't need citations. > You're mixing two very different categories of thing here They aren't 2 categories. If I purchase thing, I can use thing or I can sell or transfer thing to someone else. If I don't have thing, I cannot. It's a pretty simple concept. This works with owned physical media, but not with "licensed" digital media. It's clearly a "negative consequence" of going digital. Your claim about things being hunky-dory with Steam and co was just as absent of citations as any of my comments. That negative consequence may not matter to you but you also don't get to deny that others can consider it a loss. We both have our opinions. I acknowledge yours, and it annoys me to see you handwave away mine as "not a real problem". > ... because you've already consumed the product Again, not a problem with physical media. I can play the game for as many hours as I like and still sell it or give it away. > Because ownership doesn't give you the unilateral ability to do whatever you want with something... Except I didn't say "whatever you want", I quite clearly said "resell or lend". I award you a debate point for pointing out the legal exceptions to right of resale. Since digital media isn't uranium (or weapons, or pharmaceutical products, certain chemicals, whatever else has further resale restrictions) that isn't pertinent to the discussion. > Similarly, it's legal to buy and own a physical book, as long as you don't distribute photocopies of it I can resell the original book. The photocopies are a new thing which I rightly can't resell. This is merely a restatement of copyright law.