California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that won’t stop companies from taking away your digitally purchased video games, movies, and TV shows, but it’ll at least force them to be a little more transparent about it.
As spotted by The Verge, the law, AB 2426, will prohibit storefronts from using the words “buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good or alongside an option for a time-limited rental.” The law won’t apply to storefronts which state in “plain language” that you’re actually just licensing the digital content and that license could expire at any time, or to products that can be permanently downloaded.
The law will go into effect next year, and companies who violate the terms could be hit with a false advertising fine. It also applies to e-books, music, and other forms of digital media.
In that case, may as well just pirate everything!
Sure. Digital “ownership” is like trying to put a round peg in a square hole, it’s applying rules and concepts to a fundamentally different thing. As long as it comes along with a tip culture for creators or some kind of guaranteed income.
We can own digital things as long as they let us properly download them. If you pay for a mp3 and have the actual mp3 file that you can do whatever you want with it, I’d say you own that.
They don’t let us download everything though because digital things can just be copied and freely distributed, so there’s often DRM.
Imagine if steam sold games and you got a full no drm copy of the game that didn’t require any hacks to make playable, no concern about viruses from shady distributions etc. People buy steam games because it’s easy, they have great sales making games cheaper, its safe, and they have all the other things like steam friends, chat etc.
But if steam just gave everyone a digital copy with no DRM that you could verify was safe and steam compatible, their sales would drop and more people would pirate.
So its a balance between DRM which steam is, and actual ownership.
By having something digital that represents digital ownership that cant be duplicated, you can solve the problem.
Steam could just publicly host the game for download but it only runs if you own the license. The license can’t be take away from you and is freely transferable.
For games, the problem is still online games. I’m not sure that’s ownable unless they also let you host your own servers and its bundled in the game. But for offline games it’s possible.
I’ll simplify: I don’t want that future. Steam is currently acceptable because they provide a low-impact market, I think their 30% cut is reasonable, and offline mode is adequate. If that changes I’m done. GOG also exists and is a preferable model, but the experience isn’t as polished.
I don’t care if sales drop a bit, the early success of stuff like netflix and spotify and steam proves that most people will happily pay a reasonable price for access rather than pirate. It’s only a “problem” for the capitalists and fuck em.
You can have everything steam has and still have a tokenized license that gives you ownership.
Steam is the worst acceptable format, is what I’m saying. Licenses and DRM are a thing we should move past not embrace.
They do seem to be the best of the implementations, but I really don’t see how we can just move past it. You can’t stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it’s simply not possible. Making digital items that couldn’t be duplicated was exactly what Bitcoin originally solved. It wasn’t possible until 2009.
At least with tokenization you own access to that game now if it was done right, and steam knows you didn’t pirate it and they got paid for it. Just because it’s tokenized doesn’t mean they did it right though. You could still do it and make it as terrible as existing DRM.
Edit: And what steam does is provide an easy to access and SAFE game. We could make safe games as well by providing cryptographic proofs for the game. They just can’t make something like that freely available without being paid somehow. And then of course someone could alter the game to remove the DRM and host it again, but now you’re into the is it safe area again, because it won’t be cryptographically signed as valid.
Generative AI is already doing that. Tech is an extension of human activity, and as humans are observably machines for making their human world worse for each other, trust tech involves some level of harmful ignorance.