What is the future of Ubisoft and what is the future of gaming in your opinion? I wish I could buy Halo Wars 2 but I can only access the game through Microsoft game pass horse crap.
I do not want to use the cloud to play video games. I want to pay money for it one time and save it to my computer... that I own... in my house...
The future depends on how many customers this pisses off to look at "alternative" alternative options when it comes to games, both new and old, that aren't just different games or purchase methods.
There's a very wide cracking network for almost anything, even GoG, where eventually any game with enough popularity gets cracked and released to the wider world web, in part because a lot of the practices by the devs associated with the cracked games are just that fucking greedy some players/crackers go out of their way to crack the game out of spite rather than any intention to play the games.
To use both an older and currently "ongoing" game as an example, Stellaris came out in 2016, it's still updated as in about a month will receive it's 4.0 update yet again drastically changing how everything works. Originally the payment plan was base game and then DLCs which were split into general "content" and "cosmetic" categories where the former was actual game mechanic stuff like Leviathans while the latter was species packs. Content packs usually priced higher than cosmetic packs and various options exists for people to buy them either directly or through other distributors as well as waiting for sales.
At some point in the games history the shift to "seasons" was made as seems to be an ongoing plague in a lot of games now. However not only was the game cracked before that but it's still getting cracked whenever new updates come out so those who don't want to shell out quite frankly stupid amounts of money for a game at this point will continue to just use the cracked versions and potentially spread the awareness of such methods to others.
WoW is another example, there are not only quite a few legacy servers that run older expansion content like Wrath and Legion, but also a server which is only a year behind retail for a service game that usually runs an expansion for 2 years.
As most of the crackers and software involved are in Russia there's next to nothing the devs can do, similar to why a lot of forums based around porn leaks are also based in Russian since DMCA takedowns and similar actions mean sweet fuck all to the hosters there. This does of course mean further "Russia bad" from some but for their own reasons rather than whatever other $CurrentThing might happening in the news cycle.
All of this also comes with a lot of gamers simply getting off the ever moving development train and sticking to both games and eras preferred for higher quality products in a similar way to many tv shows and films now, but also related to how as people grow up they tend to stay relatively close to the music types they enjoyed earlier in life rather than indulging in newer genres and fads although at least in this case it's more about nostalgia and familiarity since both good and bad music is inherent to the field regardless of era.
So you get gamers going back to NES emulators or any other particular gaming era you can think of with games libraries so vast nobody is ever going to run out of things to do before the heat death of the universe, let alone a human lifespan. Modding also adds years to many games no longer officially active providing servers are something that can continue to be sourced.
While this doesn't all seem like much vs the current gaming zeitgeist that is itself slowly changing and not for the better from the POV of the various triple A dev studios. Games with multi-million, multi-year long developments are imploding so badly there are games either dying in the same quarter they were released or flat out cancelled mid-production because it's going to bomb that badly.
It's still going to take time for a full on industry crash to happen but the shift in response is already starting and in the end it will hopefully mean the current crop of corrupt devs are no longer pushing utter shit on a consumer base either too stupid and simp-minded or similarly corrupt to deny en masse the garbage they are being served and told to be grateful for.
What you are seeing is the downstream effects of developers not releasing server binaries to the player base. Once upon a time the players ran the servers, and then Modern Warfare II came out, and changed that. Now most servers are ran by the game publishers themselves, with the only exception seemingly being Valve, which lets players set up TF2/CS:S/CS:GO/CS2 servers as they see fit.
This was inevitable with the consolification of gaming. Get used to it.
It's honestly quite amusing how far the "service-economy" has come.
There's a video on YouTube where a man reviews his newly bought dishwasher, and the bulk of the video is him commenting on the absolute absurdity of him having to connect the dishwasher to the Internet via wifi, and then register an account on the manufacturer's website in order to register his dishwasher on this account to be able to utilize all of the functions on the dishwasher. Some of the functions are otherwise locked unless you've registered the machine on the manufacturer's website and have the machine connected to the Internet.
"You will own nothing and be happy", indeed.
Piracy is more than morally justified at this point. Too bad it's still not quite as easy to download a car. Software is one thing, and fixed capital/tangible assets (i.e. realkapital) is another.
this has technically been true, that's what an EULA is. The only difference is on-disk offline software is not under control of the owner, so nobody gave a shit. Now that everything is digital...
EULAS and shrink wrap licensees are not binding. Certainly not in all jurisdictions.
For example a shrink wrap license or EULA has never been tested in Australia, because it would be thrown out of court. They are a polite fiction only in as far as they are enforceable by kicking people off the service.
Exactly - the dev's rights basically ended the moment a player's hard drive began and he started taking the game apart, adding a NoCD patch, and getting it ready for copious modding. That was something they could never control.
That's really how it should be. I gave them money for a product. They took the product away when they decided I no longer needed it. I should be able to take my money back. It would be different if The Crew, etc. were sold as a subscription service in the first place, but some these games were sold in boxes too! Granny goes to the Old Games Shoppe and buys a game to put in grandson's stocking at Christmas and at no point in the transaction does someone say "By the way you're not actually buying anything here. Might take it away tomorrow if I'm feeling cute. Thanks for the cash."
Build the game from the outset with an end of life plan in mind, like releasing the server code to the public to let others host it. It's not difficult.
What if the server is just some container for AWS, some virtual machine or a proprietary 3rd party program they can't release? What if the server requires special hardware and a gazillion GB of RAM and an enterprise-grade database server, like I would assume MMORPGs do?
Or what about all the libraries and tools that the server uses that were never meant or licensed for public release?
You assume incorrectly. Private servers for mmos have already been around for decades, even ones where the main game was actively running when the private server launched.
Games aren't super bandwidth heavy, most of the data is on the client machine, the server typically just coordinates locations and such, which is why latency is more important for gaming.
And cancerous games that use invasive anti-cheat still aren't running the majority of the game server side. That is why they have am anticheat scanning your machine. What you're referring to would be closer to "cloud gaming" or "game streaming" services than what mmos do.
Having an mmo run most data server side and then send it to all players would be massively more expensive in bandwidth costs, and have latency issues and load time issues. They do often have server checks to make sure client data makes sense, but servers aren't shoving the whole game to each player continuously, only input elements from other players. This is why you can get things like enemy position desync from lag.
So what? If people cheat they cheat. The people who want to keep playing either don't care or figure out their own anti-cheat detection methods. Nobody is claiming you should be able to play every MMO exactly as it was on launch forever. This is mostly about games with a large single player component, and at least being able to launch multiplayer games and still have some access to the product you bought. (possibly with end-user hacking and support needed to be really usable)
It would be like if John Deere - kings of tractors-as-a-service - sold new self-driving models that were all networked together to coordinate and tend your crops as efficiently as possible, and then after a few years they said "Our AI tractor program had a good run but we've decided to end support. All purchased tractors will cease functioning. We will be sending top men to your farms to destroy the equipment to make sure you don't try to keep using them." Naturally some of the farmers who thought they were buying a product will try to get the corporation to make their tractors drivable offline. But inexplicably uninvolved random lurkers chime in with "C'mon man how can you expect The John Deere Corporation to support you greedy farmers forever? These robo-tractors were specifically designed around satellite network connections. You expect them to loan you a satellite? What about all the proprietary IP that powers the AI on a central server and wasn't licensed for public release? Without that server connection someone could drive their tractor into a crowd of people!"
(I point out the latter not to single out you specifically, but because such comments are constantly brought up by anons when this topic is raised. As if we need to consider the publisher's feelings, or they're afraid action here could put game dev in danger despite us having multiplayer games for decades before GaaS.)
For better or worse, that is how ALL software has been for decades. And every DVD and CD. Because you don't get the rights to the song or movie. If it were not that way, and the disc was anything but a license, then you'd be the new IP owner.
Seems like every couple years, someone learns this and it's news again.
Not really. Afaik buying a game meant you own the copy as long as you don't tamper with it or redistribute it for money. Backups were a bit of a grey area, but since everything is digital nowdays...
Movies and music are also a bit iffy, companies get pretty anal when you use a song or a clip on YouTube (even thought it should count as transformative use if used for a review), but corpos wouldnt argue getting your friends and family together to watch a movie is copyright infringement...
you own the copy as long as you don't tamper with it or redistribute it for money
What do you think you call limited "ownership" with specific provisions on what you can do with the media? It's called a license. If you actually owned the contents of the disc/download, there would be no restrictions.
You know that isn't what's being discussed, don't act stupid. This is about Ubisoft turning off servers and you can't ever play a game again, even when it's a single player CD you bought with cash from a store. This is about them turning all of their games into Games as a Service.
Even your first quote, and the article itself, says LICENSE TO ACCESS. "Access" does not mean "IP ownership," it means "It's in my house and I want to use it now since I paid for it 10 years ago."
This one is interesting because the expiration on the activation code suggested that it should be usable that long.
But the article is written as if it's a license vs. ownership question. Rather than a question about the license's terms. I don't know why people are HERE of all places trying to cover for fucking IGN's bad journalism.
Yes, but the fact is there normally comes an ownership gray area once that product is no longer "current" and support is discontinued. Where the manufacturer indirectly cedes responsibility of the product's upkeep unto the owner. Apple will not fix a 20 year old iPod, for instance, but they might offer you a new iPhone at a slight discount.
Take cars for instance. Other than extreme edge cases with experimental technology like the GM EV-1, cars are NEVER called back to the company to be destroyed once they reach a certain age and decide to stop stocking parts for them. But at the same time, during my continued ownership of an older car, I never become the owner of the car's intellectual property. I do not own the rights to the 1990s Toyota Camry in its totality, I just own AN example of one. And in owning that car, I can do whatever I like with it without the company sending me nasty legal letters. Drive it for another half a million miles. Change the body or engine parts. Lower it. Repaint it. Chop the roof off. Put my name on the back instead.
The same should apply to other forms of media. I don't own a film or a game, but I own an example of it. And given that product has now had support officially terminated, there should be absolutely NOTHING holding me back in enjoying that product even though support is gone. Whether that's as simple as playing it or giving it a total conversion into another game entirely through modding and remastering.
And until a landmark case rules in our favor, which is likely never, I am going to keep pirating, cracking, and distributing the tapes because if licensing beyond the original support window isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing. End of.
For better or worse, that is how ALL software has been for decades.
You could have stopped there, and had something of a point, although it's still terrible business practice to come out and tell the customer that they don't actually own shit.
And every DVD and CD. Because you don't get the rights to the song or movie. If it were not that way, and the disc was anything but a license, then you'd be the new IP owner.
This is just a really strange argument, though. Like with any product, you can access your property for as long as it remains functional. The DVD and CD are yours, as is everything on them.
That's like saying your car is a license, or something.
Seems like every couple years, someone learns this and it's news again.
Except you're just wrong.
Many things are licenses, and they aren't open about that, sure. But that's totally different than what you're painting.
it's still terrible business practice to come out and tell the customer that they don't actually own shit.
It's the only business practice. Trying to be quiet about the terms of an agreement and then spring them on people later is the worst possible thing you can do. A business ideally wants to make it as clear as possible so if it goes to trial there is no question at all. Being vague does not benefit them; the terms being crystal clear but inconvenient to read does.
This is just a really strange argument, though.
It's not. It is the way it's been at least as far back as I can remember. You own the physical disc, but only a license to access the content stored within it. Yes, you can keep using it (within the terms of the license) until it breaks. You can even sell it and transfer the media's license to someone else.
as is everything on them.
This is where you're wrong. If I owned the data on a DVD, I'd be free to copy and distribute it however I, the owner, wanted to. But you cannot. Public presentation, file sharing, etc. can violate the license.
That's like saying your car is a license, or something.
The software running in your car probably is licensed somehow. But no, tangible goods and digital media are different beasts. Though, Ferrari has tried some weird contract shit.
Anyway, we're mainly talking about games. Here's the text that appears along the top edge of Tomb Raider II for the PS1:
Licensed by Sony Computer Entertainment America for use with the PlayStation game console.
Now we can get into Fair Use and enforceability, but it's still a license. One that aims to keep you from doing anything with the media therein that the PS1 itself does not enable you to do. And yeah, things were less explicit before the disc era. The 16 bit era only had copyright notices from what I saw in my collection. It was only once you could read the media with a home PC that they got touchy about it.
Anyway, my point is that these articles should be talking about license terms and the fact that they shouldn't be revocable. Or that in the case of revocation, the customer is made whole. But people constantly finding out for the first time that digital media is licensed is tedious.
If I owned the data on a DVD, I'd be free to copy and distribute it
They can't take away the disk or data. You own it, for all intents and purposes. That's totally different than online distribution, and you know this.
Now we can get into Fair Use and enforceability, but it's still a license
But again, talk practicality. If you own a PlayStation, and you own a Tomb Raider II disk...you own Tomb Raider II. No, not the IP or anything, and no one was saying that. But you own that copy of the game. They're not going to come revoke your license, so it doesn't matter if it's technically a license or not. You're not going to lose access to Tomb Raider II, unless, as mentioned, your property breaks.
That's totally different than buying a modern game, and someone on the distribution store, or at the game company, or whatever, deciding you actually can't play it anymore.
That's totally different than online distribution, and you know this.
I never said it wasn't. In fact, I said that makes the difference between if the license can be revoked or not.
But you own that copy of the game
No, you don't. You own:
The physical object
A license to use the digital contents of that physical object
You don't own the software on the disk. If you did, you could freely copy it. Maybe there are some countries render the license terms null, but we're not talking about the exceptions.
it doesn't matter if it's technically a license or not
We can talk all day about digital distribution and how it's a very consumer-unfriendly environment. I've said it several times already, but people prefer to read in things I didn't write. The conversation should be about what are reasonable license terms for software, not the "OMG, CAN YOU BELIEVE A COURT SAID SOFTWARE IS JUST A LICENCE?!" clickbait. It turns uninformed readers into a smokescreen that prevents actual discussion about things like the lack of first-sale, forced arbitration, general EULA enforceability, etc.
Go back and look at the boxes/manuals of games that even came on 3.5" diskettes. Software being license-based has nothing to do with software as a service. I don't blame you for not realizing it because most people never bothered to understand that because "physical object = license" made it a distinction without difference.
Remember shareware? "Shareware" refers to the license terms. Open Source? GPL is a license. Apache is a license. MIT is a license. BSD is a license. They are all licenses. They always have been. It has nothing to do with digital distribution, subscriptions or SaaS.
Even the non-commercial stuff is usually licensed. Maybe there's some rare commercial software release out there that had no terms whatsoever, but that would be such a rare case it's not really worth considering. So yes, it's the only business practice.
At least in America where corporate lawyers write IP law you might be right. There might be a chance in the EU or countries with actual consumer protection laws.
Court of Justice of the European Union, PRESS RELEASE No 94/12, Luxembourg, 3 July 2012
An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet
The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a licence is exhausted on its first sale
Emphasis mine. The EU might have more regulation about what license terms can contain, but software is still licensed.
Well no that's not the alternative at all.
Yeah, I went a little to far with that one. Sequels, etc. would still be an issue of copyright. But if you own the disc and the contents, why can't you make 50,000 copies and give them away? It's yours, right?
Ubisoft about to learn they don't have unfettered ownership of the money customers give them.
What is the future of Ubisoft and what is the future of gaming in your opinion? I wish I could buy Halo Wars 2 but I can only access the game through Microsoft game pass horse crap.
I do not want to use the cloud to play video games. I want to pay money for it one time and save it to my computer... that I own... in my house...
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/6294dff921259b83f5421528dc2dc8a1b8aea223f8c6e06331545827e0cfea5b_1.jpg
Piracy?
The future depends on how many customers this pisses off to look at "alternative" alternative options when it comes to games, both new and old, that aren't just different games or purchase methods.
There's a very wide cracking network for almost anything, even GoG, where eventually any game with enough popularity gets cracked and released to the wider world web, in part because a lot of the practices by the devs associated with the cracked games are just that fucking greedy some players/crackers go out of their way to crack the game out of spite rather than any intention to play the games.
To use both an older and currently "ongoing" game as an example, Stellaris came out in 2016, it's still updated as in about a month will receive it's 4.0 update yet again drastically changing how everything works. Originally the payment plan was base game and then DLCs which were split into general "content" and "cosmetic" categories where the former was actual game mechanic stuff like Leviathans while the latter was species packs. Content packs usually priced higher than cosmetic packs and various options exists for people to buy them either directly or through other distributors as well as waiting for sales.
At some point in the games history the shift to "seasons" was made as seems to be an ongoing plague in a lot of games now. However not only was the game cracked before that but it's still getting cracked whenever new updates come out so those who don't want to shell out quite frankly stupid amounts of money for a game at this point will continue to just use the cracked versions and potentially spread the awareness of such methods to others.
WoW is another example, there are not only quite a few legacy servers that run older expansion content like Wrath and Legion, but also a server which is only a year behind retail for a service game that usually runs an expansion for 2 years.
As most of the crackers and software involved are in Russia there's next to nothing the devs can do, similar to why a lot of forums based around porn leaks are also based in Russian since DMCA takedowns and similar actions mean sweet fuck all to the hosters there. This does of course mean further "Russia bad" from some but for their own reasons rather than whatever other $CurrentThing might happening in the news cycle.
All of this also comes with a lot of gamers simply getting off the ever moving development train and sticking to both games and eras preferred for higher quality products in a similar way to many tv shows and films now, but also related to how as people grow up they tend to stay relatively close to the music types they enjoyed earlier in life rather than indulging in newer genres and fads although at least in this case it's more about nostalgia and familiarity since both good and bad music is inherent to the field regardless of era.
So you get gamers going back to NES emulators or any other particular gaming era you can think of with games libraries so vast nobody is ever going to run out of things to do before the heat death of the universe, let alone a human lifespan. Modding also adds years to many games no longer officially active providing servers are something that can continue to be sourced.
While this doesn't all seem like much vs the current gaming zeitgeist that is itself slowly changing and not for the better from the POV of the various triple A dev studios. Games with multi-million, multi-year long developments are imploding so badly there are games either dying in the same quarter they were released or flat out cancelled mid-production because it's going to bomb that badly.
It's still going to take time for a full on industry crash to happen but the shift in response is already starting and in the end it will hopefully mean the current crop of corrupt devs are no longer pushing utter shit on a consumer base either too stupid and simp-minded or similarly corrupt to deny en masse the garbage they are being served and told to be grateful for.
What you are seeing is the downstream effects of developers not releasing server binaries to the player base. Once upon a time the players ran the servers, and then Modern Warfare II came out, and changed that. Now most servers are ran by the game publishers themselves, with the only exception seemingly being Valve, which lets players set up TF2/CS:S/CS:GO/CS2 servers as they see fit.
This was inevitable with the consolification of gaming. Get used to it.
Boy, I'd be pissed, if I ever wanted to purchase any more Ubisoft games.
It's honestly quite amusing how far the "service-economy" has come.
There's a video on YouTube where a man reviews his newly bought dishwasher, and the bulk of the video is him commenting on the absolute absurdity of him having to connect the dishwasher to the Internet via wifi, and then register an account on the manufacturer's website in order to register his dishwasher on this account to be able to utilize all of the functions on the dishwasher. Some of the functions are otherwise locked unless you've registered the machine on the manufacturer's website and have the machine connected to the Internet.
"You will own nothing and be happy", indeed.
Piracy is more than morally justified at this point. Too bad it's still not quite as easy to download a car. Software is one thing, and fixed capital/tangible assets (i.e. realkapital) is another.
Relevant video. Also keep in mind that is a Bosch 500, a dishwasher that costs about $1200USD.
Yes indeed; that is the video I was referring to! :-)
"[,,,] a dishwasher that costs about $1200USD."
Uff.
Indeed, the time of living in the pod and consuming the bugs in approaching.
this has technically been true, that's what an EULA is. The only difference is on-disk offline software is not under control of the owner, so nobody gave a shit. Now that everything is digital...
EULAS and shrink wrap licensees are not binding. Certainly not in all jurisdictions.
For example a shrink wrap license or EULA has never been tested in Australia, because it would be thrown out of court. They are a polite fiction only in as far as they are enforceable by kicking people off the service.
Exactly - the dev's rights basically ended the moment a player's hard drive began and he started taking the game apart, adding a NoCD patch, and getting it ready for copious modding. That was something they could never control.
No need to give you permanent ownership of currency then...neat!
That's really how it should be. I gave them money for a product. They took the product away when they decided I no longer needed it. I should be able to take my money back. It would be different if The Crew, etc. were sold as a subscription service in the first place, but some these games were sold in boxes too! Granny goes to the Old Games Shoppe and buys a game to put in grandson's stocking at Christmas and at no point in the transaction does someone say "By the way you're not actually buying anything here. Might take it away tomorrow if I'm feeling cute. Thanks for the cash."
Ubi can fuck off and die. Oh wait, they already are, carry on, fucktards.
I mean, what's the alternative? Forcing companies to keep game servers open forever?
Curious to see how that'll turn out.
Build the game from the outset with an end of life plan in mind, like releasing the server code to the public to let others host it. It's not difficult.
Isn't it?
What if the server is just some container for AWS, some virtual machine or a proprietary 3rd party program they can't release? What if the server requires special hardware and a gazillion GB of RAM and an enterprise-grade database server, like I would assume MMORPGs do?
Or what about all the libraries and tools that the server uses that were never meant or licensed for public release?
You assume incorrectly. Private servers for mmos have already been around for decades, even ones where the main game was actively running when the private server launched.
Games aren't super bandwidth heavy, most of the data is on the client machine, the server typically just coordinates locations and such, which is why latency is more important for gaming.
This isn't the 90s anymore. Anything that's not calculated server-side will be cheated.
And cancerous games that use invasive anti-cheat still aren't running the majority of the game server side. That is why they have am anticheat scanning your machine. What you're referring to would be closer to "cloud gaming" or "game streaming" services than what mmos do.
Having an mmo run most data server side and then send it to all players would be massively more expensive in bandwidth costs, and have latency issues and load time issues. They do often have server checks to make sure client data makes sense, but servers aren't shoving the whole game to each player continuously, only input elements from other players. This is why you can get things like enemy position desync from lag.
So what? If people cheat they cheat. The people who want to keep playing either don't care or figure out their own anti-cheat detection methods. Nobody is claiming you should be able to play every MMO exactly as it was on launch forever. This is mostly about games with a large single player component, and at least being able to launch multiplayer games and still have some access to the product you bought. (possibly with end-user hacking and support needed to be really usable)
It would be like if John Deere - kings of tractors-as-a-service - sold new self-driving models that were all networked together to coordinate and tend your crops as efficiently as possible, and then after a few years they said "Our AI tractor program had a good run but we've decided to end support. All purchased tractors will cease functioning. We will be sending top men to your farms to destroy the equipment to make sure you don't try to keep using them." Naturally some of the farmers who thought they were buying a product will try to get the corporation to make their tractors drivable offline. But inexplicably uninvolved random lurkers chime in with "C'mon man how can you expect The John Deere Corporation to support you greedy farmers forever? These robo-tractors were specifically designed around satellite network connections. You expect them to loan you a satellite? What about all the proprietary IP that powers the AI on a central server and wasn't licensed for public release? Without that server connection someone could drive their tractor into a crowd of people!"
(I point out the latter not to single out you specifically, but because such comments are constantly brought up by anons when this topic is raised. As if we need to consider the publisher's feelings, or they're afraid action here could put game dev in danger despite us having multiplayer games for decades before GaaS.)
Who cares? Private servers means private ethics enforcement. If I don't want niggers and jews and aim-bots on my server, then I'll IP ban them all.
Forget the server, just send a patch that removes the online requirement that, inexplicably, some single player only games still fucking have.
If buying the game isn't owning it, then pirating it isn't stealing.
For better or worse, that is how ALL software has been for decades. And every DVD and CD. Because you don't get the rights to the song or movie. If it were not that way, and the disc was anything but a license, then you'd be the new IP owner.
Seems like every couple years, someone learns this and it's news again.
Not really. Afaik buying a game meant you own the copy as long as you don't tamper with it or redistribute it for money. Backups were a bit of a grey area, but since everything is digital nowdays...
Movies and music are also a bit iffy, companies get pretty anal when you use a song or a clip on YouTube (even thought it should count as transformative use if used for a review), but corpos wouldnt argue getting your friends and family together to watch a movie is copyright infringement...
What do you think you call limited "ownership" with specific provisions on what you can do with the media? It's called a license. If you actually owned the contents of the disc/download, there would be no restrictions.
You know that isn't what's being discussed, don't act stupid. This is about Ubisoft turning off servers and you can't ever play a game again, even when it's a single player CD you bought with cash from a store. This is about them turning all of their games into Games as a Service.
Even your first quote, and the article itself, says LICENSE TO ACCESS. "Access" does not mean "IP ownership," it means "It's in my house and I want to use it now since I paid for it 10 years ago."
This one is interesting because the expiration on the activation code suggested that it should be usable that long.
But the article is written as if it's a license vs. ownership question. Rather than a question about the license's terms. I don't know why people are HERE of all places trying to cover for fucking IGN's bad journalism.
Yes, but the fact is there normally comes an ownership gray area once that product is no longer "current" and support is discontinued. Where the manufacturer indirectly cedes responsibility of the product's upkeep unto the owner. Apple will not fix a 20 year old iPod, for instance, but they might offer you a new iPhone at a slight discount.
Take cars for instance. Other than extreme edge cases with experimental technology like the GM EV-1, cars are NEVER called back to the company to be destroyed once they reach a certain age and decide to stop stocking parts for them. But at the same time, during my continued ownership of an older car, I never become the owner of the car's intellectual property. I do not own the rights to the 1990s Toyota Camry in its totality, I just own AN example of one. And in owning that car, I can do whatever I like with it without the company sending me nasty legal letters. Drive it for another half a million miles. Change the body or engine parts. Lower it. Repaint it. Chop the roof off. Put my name on the back instead.
The same should apply to other forms of media. I don't own a film or a game, but I own an example of it. And given that product has now had support officially terminated, there should be absolutely NOTHING holding me back in enjoying that product even though support is gone. Whether that's as simple as playing it or giving it a total conversion into another game entirely through modding and remastering.
And until a landmark case rules in our favor, which is likely never, I am going to keep pirating, cracking, and distributing the tapes because if licensing beyond the original support window isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing. End of.
You could have stopped there, and had something of a point, although it's still terrible business practice to come out and tell the customer that they don't actually own shit.
This is just a really strange argument, though. Like with any product, you can access your property for as long as it remains functional. The DVD and CD are yours, as is everything on them.
That's like saying your car is a license, or something.
Except you're just wrong.
Many things are licenses, and they aren't open about that, sure. But that's totally different than what you're painting.
It's the only business practice. Trying to be quiet about the terms of an agreement and then spring them on people later is the worst possible thing you can do. A business ideally wants to make it as clear as possible so if it goes to trial there is no question at all. Being vague does not benefit them; the terms being crystal clear but inconvenient to read does.
It's not. It is the way it's been at least as far back as I can remember. You own the physical disc, but only a license to access the content stored within it. Yes, you can keep using it (within the terms of the license) until it breaks. You can even sell it and transfer the media's license to someone else.
This is where you're wrong. If I owned the data on a DVD, I'd be free to copy and distribute it however I, the owner, wanted to. But you cannot. Public presentation, file sharing, etc. can violate the license.
The software running in your car probably is licensed somehow. But no, tangible goods and digital media are different beasts. Though, Ferrari has tried some weird contract shit.
Anyway, we're mainly talking about games. Here's the text that appears along the top edge of Tomb Raider II for the PS1:
Now we can get into Fair Use and enforceability, but it's still a license. One that aims to keep you from doing anything with the media therein that the PS1 itself does not enable you to do. And yeah, things were less explicit before the disc era. The 16 bit era only had copyright notices from what I saw in my collection. It was only once you could read the media with a home PC that they got touchy about it.
Anyway, my point is that these articles should be talking about license terms and the fact that they shouldn't be revocable. Or that in the case of revocation, the customer is made whole. But people constantly finding out for the first time that digital media is licensed is tedious.
They can't take away the disk or data. You own it, for all intents and purposes. That's totally different than online distribution, and you know this.
But again, talk practicality. If you own a PlayStation, and you own a Tomb Raider II disk...you own Tomb Raider II. No, not the IP or anything, and no one was saying that. But you own that copy of the game. They're not going to come revoke your license, so it doesn't matter if it's technically a license or not. You're not going to lose access to Tomb Raider II, unless, as mentioned, your property breaks.
That's totally different than buying a modern game, and someone on the distribution store, or at the game company, or whatever, deciding you actually can't play it anymore.
Totally different beasts.
I never said it wasn't. In fact, I said that makes the difference between if the license can be revoked or not.
You don't own the software on the disk. If you did, you could freely copy it. Maybe there are some countries render the license terms null, but we're not talking about the exceptions.
We can talk all day about digital distribution and how it's a very consumer-unfriendly environment. I've said it several times already, but people prefer to read in things I didn't write. The conversation should be about what are reasonable license terms for software, not the "OMG, CAN YOU BELIEVE A COURT SAID SOFTWARE IS JUST A LICENCE?!" clickbait. It turns uninformed readers into a smokescreen that prevents actual discussion about things like the lack of first-sale, forced arbitration, general EULA enforceability, etc.
You do realize software existed and was sold as a product before the software as a service business model was created, right?
Go back and look at the boxes/manuals of games that even came on 3.5" diskettes. Software being license-based has nothing to do with software as a service. I don't blame you for not realizing it because most people never bothered to understand that because "physical object = license" made it a distinction without difference.
Remember shareware? "Shareware" refers to the license terms. Open Source? GPL is a license. Apache is a license. MIT is a license. BSD is a license. They are all licenses. They always have been. It has nothing to do with digital distribution, subscriptions or SaaS.
Even the non-commercial stuff is usually licensed. Maybe there's some rare commercial software release out there that had no terms whatsoever, but that would be such a rare case it's not really worth considering. So yes, it's the only business practice.
At least in America where corporate lawyers write IP law you might be right. There might be a chance in the EU or countries with actual consumer protection laws.
Well no that's not the alternative at all.
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
Emphasis mine. The EU might have more regulation about what license terms can contain, but software is still licensed.
Yeah, I went a little to far with that one. Sequels, etc. would still be an issue of copyright. But if you own the disc and the contents, why can't you make 50,000 copies and give them away? It's yours, right?
And that's why EULAs basically never hold up in court?