4 ms·
> 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 ins
by 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...
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoI see, I could stand by that. I don't exclude the possibility that resale could exist (if I sell the whole account, for example), and the concept of borrowing games might be nice, depending on the pricing. For now, the family view allows me to live happily. The recent huge improvement (still in beta) is that family library is made of all the games in the family, multiple copies included, and finally the lock of the library is not global, but per game. This essentially fixed my major complaint with steam, the second one being that I want my children to inherit my account (I love videogames, I want to give them my collection)
- triceratops 2y ago> Steam's existence and destruction of the second-hard market for games, with little downside Why do you think it's trivial? I'm asking sincerely here.