The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it
DRM violates this principle. Atreides forever
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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How do you figure? If the DRM depends on them, doesn't that give them the power to destroy it?
DRM infected files mean that you as a consumer don't own anything. As someome else can destroy it.
They will get around it. Instead I suggest that buy buttons should say what you're buying.
For example: Just "buy" should not be allowed.
"Buy License" or "Rent Game" for games with DRM. "Buy game" where you own your digital copy and can do whatever you want with it.
"Buy game" where you own your digital copy and can do whatever you want with it.
We ain't ever seein' that one.
Probably not. Still "buy licence" at least gives us more transparency.
Even better, "buy non-transferable license", because that's technically what it is.
How would it work, anyway?
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Much like California's other good-sounding laws, the fine print is what gets you on both ends, both in the law and in the EULA you agree to when signing up that's going to say that all transactions are explicitly a terminable and revocable license.
A revocable license for a virtual "product" whereupon they absolutely do not give you back your real world dollars if they terminate said license.
There's no power imbalance in this transaction at all, no siree.
Anyway, I'm all for making backups of things. So you de-licensed me. Big whoop. I still have the file and I can still play it, and nobody can physically stop me.
I suppose that's the difference between laws in the US vs the EU. In the US the wording of the law is everything. If you find some absurd loophole due to weird grammar, good for you. In the EU, at least from an outsiders perspective, the law is enforced as it was intended to be, and if you try to fuck around with wording you get fined.
That's the thing, though, it's not a loophole. It's intentional. It makes a good headline, but it doesn't really do much.
That's probably a better way of putting it. "Pretending to help"
Next: make it so games can't suddenly lose their music license. This is so incredible annoying. I know it's depending on what the publishers negotiated, but it shouldn't be possible to suddenly patch out soundtracks because of a license expire.
Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that's acceptable).
I'd never even heard of this before. Wtf
Try downloading any GTA before 5, there will be a community guide about the missing songs and how to restore the radios.
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require games to buy perpetual licenses for the music?
Other way around. Require sales of licenses to games to be perpetual. The way you phrased it means that the license holders can charge way more.
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If you're not receiving physical media, and you're not saving a copy to local storage, then you're not buying anything. You're renting it.
That's not even the best metric. You save Destiny 2 to local storage, but you still don't own that either.
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"Ubisoft take note"
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve... You don't own anything you purchase on Steam and it's the biggest store by a huge margin, don't know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically...
You don't own anything you purchase on Steam
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam's DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
They don't make it clear which games have steam DRM and which games have nothing at all, they only list it if it's a third party solution like denuvo.
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In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that "end of life" plan for it to actually be genuine.
"Valve reps have said" is worth as much as the paper it's written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it's something the publishers of games would allow.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: "well, so far so good".
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
"So far" proves nothing because it can be "so far" only because the conditions for something different haven't yet happenned or it simply hasn't been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an "end of life plan" in a way such that they can't legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
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Let's just face it. There isn't ever going to be a publishing company that doesn't fuck us however they can for an extra dime. Companies are machines full of people deciding whatever they have to for money.
There also will never be a way they can keep us from just copying files.
They've already invented ways to keep us from just copying files: in that they don't provide us with all of the files in a lot of cases anymore.
If it can display on your screen or play through your speakers, you can copy it.
If it's software as a service, just don't buy. We can live without whatever it is they make.
I don't buy it in that case, but it takes me a lot of leg work a lot of times just to figure out what I'm buying, because no one is interested in making it clear besides GOG; even then, there are things I wish they did better on that front.
Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.
For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.
And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == 'whru686', it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.
I figure the content that's not popular enough to already be pirated is coming from smaller artists who should probably have my money.
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Do they need "buy" or "purchase"? All they need is "pay", and nobody would notice.
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I’m not sore how downloading cars works but when I do it it feels like I own it…
Just let me buy a license then download it wherever I want
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