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I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'" Wit

• Etheryte 1y ago
  Words mean something and the meaning matters. If you buy a lawnmower from me and I come around later claiming you were only renting it, you would justifiably tell me to piss off. That this was ever allowed to pass in the digital world is a shame.
  • contrarian1234 1y ago
    So you think changing the Buy buttons to Lease License buttons would genuinely solve the author's problems?
    • lukebechtel 1y ago
      Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it. Changing these buttons to "Rent" would force people to acknowledge what they're getting for their $60 bucks -- effectively a rental. Once the problem is identified en masse, capitalism can do its work more efficiently.
    • Qwertious 1y ago
      It would be more honest, although giving users a notification that you're about to screw them is obviously not very good - mainly because in practice, what will happen is they'll say "don't worry, we only put in that warning for legal reasons. We won't actually screw you" for the few years before they screw you. Also known as "please pay attention when kickstarter says this is a crowdfunding system and not a preorder system".
• exe34 1y ago
  > If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit. This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept. I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all. People need to vote with their wallet.
  • contrarian1234 1y ago
    In the first paragraph I thought you were on to something. You don't like their terms, don't engage But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it.. How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
    • exe34 1y ago
      You don't get to sell me something and then take it away. In any other sphere of life it would be considered theft.
  • danlitt 1y ago
    > This is the thing people should learn to accept > People need to vote with their wallet. Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
  • jojobas 1y ago
• aprilthird2021 1y ago
  > But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game. What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that. There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
  • contrarian1234 1y ago
    So in your ideal world the only way software can be distributed is in a way where it can be reused anywhere - in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
    • nottorp 1y ago
      > in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment <cough> emulators.
• xeonmc 1y ago
  Just because something is permitted by legal gymnastics doesn't mean it's not perverse.
• rendaw 1y ago
  Maybe they should make the buttons say "Lease" and see how it goes.
• klamann 1y ago
  I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy. Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much. Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
  • grues-dinner 1y ago
    > And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights (a loicence if you will!) for public display of the content. They even changed the law in 2016 to make it apply to venues that don't charge admission (e.g. staff rooms): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-section-72-public-showing-or-playing-of-broadcasts/changes-to-section-72-public-showing-or-playing-of-broadcasts https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-sectio... Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
• danlitt 1y ago
  I agree with you that it's a silly semantic argument. I would not be satisfied by replacing all the "buy" button by "rent". But I vehemently disagree with everything else you say: > the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences > You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work > If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books? I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
  • contrarian1234 1y ago
    There are countless cases of historical figures burning their unfinished works before their death. It's absolutely their right. I find it grotesque to feel you have a right to other people's work. You have don't nothing for them. They owe you nothing. You're just a faceless/nameless consumer that they don't know - who only cares about your own pleasure and not giving anything > What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? I think it doesn't solve anything ultimately. It just makes things worse and more inconvenient. For instance piracy just made everything a SaaS where the code isn't even accessible and is on a server behind an API. If everyone can own and copy games, then business models will just shift to where nobody ever sells games and everyone just has to stream through some online service. Everyone will lose out
    • danlitt 1y ago
      Unfinished works are a slightly different matter. I still disagree by and large with destroying them, but I can see the argument for it, especially when it is the explicit wish of the author. Published works are different: you released it, why? People publish art precisely so that it can be enjoyed by others. Your argument as stated seems to naively imply that if I write a book and decide later I'm embarrassed by it, I should be able to remotely destroy all the copies. That's probably an unfair reading and not what you meant, but there is nothing in your argument that rules it out. Sharing a creative work is a reciprocal act. The consumer (who usually pays for it, by the way) gets pleasure in enjoying the work, and the creator gets pleasure from their reputation and from feeling like they made something important. It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work. Why do you think so many people form communities around the kind of art they like? Bands are nothing if they have no fans, artists are nothing if they have no following. To just dismiss this as a nameless/faceless consumer is honestly not even offensive, I just don't believe you.
• nodja 1y ago
  I'll take the bait. > I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument > "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'" > With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now. The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily. > They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit. The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed. The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.