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.
I don’t understand why they don’t just charge both parties the average cost when one side has waaay more legal resources than the other. Seems like such an obvious issue with the legal system that even the founding fathers should have realized if they thought for a second.
Or they did and this is the intended system.
If anything, that would be worse. Imagine, you sue, and have a single lawyer, on a discount rate. They respond with a team of 100 highly paid lawyers. Your now paying 50-500x what your own lawyer is actually charging. This could also work in both directions.
Sorry what I meant is to pool both parties legal budget, divide it in half and give each the same amount.
Basically disarms all corporates from using their army of lawyers because their big army will never give them an advantage. So they would actually avoid legal battles cause it would cost them money with no unfair advantage.
Now, how do you define what a reasonable budget is? That basically becomes a fee to sue.
Same as speeding tickets in Nordic countries, it’s a parentage of total revenue. Im sure these details can be ironed out but the idea is that a corp can’t use its unlimited resources, it has to share said resources with their opponent to ensure a fair trail, otherwise it’s not justice imo.
That would be very easy to weaponise, particularly against smaller companies. Once you’re dealing with lawyers, you need to assume that worst case scenarios will rapidly become the default. You also then end up with even more red tape, deciding who should pay what, prior to the trial even starting.
How could it be weaponized?
It costs money (relative to your company size) to do any legal action, a big company suing means they lose waaay more $ than the small opponent.
Same thing with the small guy, it’s not a lot of $ to sue but it’s still a big chunk of your business so you would want to avoid unless your pretty sure the law is on your side.
E.g. a competitor “encourages” multiple individuals to open cases. Perhaps with some “financial assistance”. Suddenly, the company is dealing with the costs of 10 cases. Even worse, they can no longer use economies of scale to cope (e.g. have an in-house lawyer). They are on the line for the complainant’s cost. The cases don’t have to go far, the company pays the opposing lawyers either way.
Also, if you can’t see how ambulance chasing lawyers couldn’t exploit a guaranteed payout system (to the lawyers at least), I would question your imagination.