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> 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 impor

> 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
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...