It’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc. And it’s a major reason many understand we should favor local (or local-capable/open-weight) AI/LLMs. I think “for any product whose support is discontinued, with more than X users, either open source all relevant software and hardware schematics, or provide a binary that will work on the hardware in perpetuity without DRM checks, based on industry” is a miniscule request in the face of any of these industries. I’d say, for instance, weights for discontinued Claude and OpenAI versions would fit. And it’s exactly the type of problem (functioning) democracies are meant for.

It's really not. Opposing rent-seeking in a general sense isn't what motivated the American revolution; and the King of England in the 18th century wasn't primarily a rent-seeker. The royal family did and does own a great deal of land in Britain which they collect rents on, but this is true of a lot of the historic and current British nobility; and the institution of the British monarchy was and is doing a lot of other things socially that just have no relationship to rent-seeking one way or the other. Ruling monarchs aren't "rent-seekers" where their citizens are "products", except insofar as any government of any group of people is; and I think that's way too reductive a way to explain why societies and governments work the way they do.

Rent-seeking is a temptation that all sorts of people under all sorts of political and economic systems are prone to. Democracy is no particular guard against it, because people who benefit from rent-seeking in some particular set of circumstances can vote too.

This isn't to say that rent-seeking is good, but it's also a pretty hard thing to regulate. It's really hard to codify in law which economic activities are rent-seeking and which ones are people buying a product or service that someone else thinks is a bad deal for them.

IANABankrupcyLawyer, but I believe the status-quo is that various promises like "we'll open-source the server in the end" or "we'll never sell your data" can become voided in the name of making a buck to repay the landlord or business-partner.

For example, imagine an MMO, where the buyer says: "I want the trademark and the copyright to all textures and 3D models, but I am not buying the copyright to the source code because I'm going to make a sequel."

This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).

(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)

b) yes, there are more important regulations to take into account. But governments also deal with hundreds of proposals. I can want proper digital ownership and still care about building more housing, creating stronger labor protections, and overhaulijg urban development.

1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.

2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.

> "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause. I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way. What's lacking is the will.

That's precisely the problem here. You're "sure" that a problem you don't actually fully understand is trivially solved in a simple manner, when the reality is that this sort of thing is incredibly complicated, and there's a multitude of reasons and competing interests that have resulted in the current equilibrium.

This is the sort of change that requires a country's laws to have to be rewritten from the ground-up, because it invalidates so many assumptions. It's the sort of thing you typically need a constitutional amendment (or at least, a novel interpretation of the existing text) for.

So, yeah, they're lacking the political will for that.

The thing is, you never did _buy_ that Steam game. And you never bought the software on the TV, which you did buy the hardware of, you bought a software lease along with the hardware.

The latter case I can see something to do about - define the software and its functionality as an "essential component" of the hardware, and require companies to not break essential components of hardware they sell. They can stop offering online services, but the rest of the device should keep working.

For pure software leases, I don't see a good way to not have them be whatever the contract say they are, not without reclassifying them as something else than a copyrighted work. (But then "sellers" should be very clear what you're "buying".)

I'm fine with companies leasing software. I don't like it, and I much prefer buying, but that's fine. That is what software subscriptions are, the terms and conditions are clear.

"Buying" something where access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, needs to become illegal.

One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.

I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.

Your post made me go on a thought exercise: imagine a world where you could either own or lease software products. Game developers could decide whether their customers can actually buy the product (which involves ownership) or just the traditional licensing/leasing, which is the prevailing model today.

How would ownership actually work? What does ownership of digital goods mean? Can they even be owned? You get 1 copy of the bytes? How is this enforced? What's to stop you from just selling it multiple times?

If you can't resell it, then what do you actually own? The right to use the product in perpetuity? But that's just another form of lease, no?

Am I getting bogged down in semantics?

Perpetual lease is not a valid concept. I mean it is, just like perpetual employment is - we call it serfdom or slavery.

Iy serves no legitimate purpose. It’s just a workaround.

If you cannot define meaning of “Buy” then you cannot govern at all.

Why would they ask me? I'm a nobody.

Now, I'm sure some disciplined software lobbyist have spent a very long time and can answer such questions in legslese that protects the customers. Let's find them.

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_the_United_States_...

That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.

I think the apple sympathizers are a great case on some of the hypocrisy, actually. Seeing people condemn the DMA definitely shows some people will play favorites when push comes to shove.

People who "generally" oppose "regulation", in my experience, very often have very good reasons for having adopted that stance, that are rooted in examination (or at least knowledge) of several actually existing regulations. And I would hope we all agree that there are plenty of really bad regulations out there. (If not: I invite you to check out the book https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp... , and consider how this legal state of affairs could come about.)

The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd. Where the guidelines say

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

this is the exact mechanism for "trampling curiousity" I imagine the site staff have in mind. Why would anyone who can offer you an alternative point of view, want to participate in an environment where responses read like this?

Yes, there are really bad regulations out there. Some of them are well-intended but poorly thought out, but even more are regulatory capture that is enabled by the same "they're all bad anyway" attitude. Let's work on improving regulations. In my experience, the people who are "against regulation in general" are not the ones who are interested in improving the regulatory body as a whole, and in fact work directly against it.

> The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd

I was not accusing anyone of cronyism. I was saying that people who have friends who work at, say, USGS, probably talk about what they do and understand that they actually serve a useful function. I am challenging those people to consider the fact that perhaps agencies they've barely heard of also serve a useful function, and they would also support the existence of that agency if they had had conversations with people who work there. Cronyism has nothing to do with it, only familiarity, understanding, and a personal connection.

Your comment trying to defend yourself is also full of fallacies and emotional manipulation. Don't do that either.

It is an ideology based in short-term self interest. It is the way toddlers think about the world before growing up.

Laws should help to create a well functioning society where everybody can participate and benefit from it in a fair system. Regulations are part of a functional society.

Digital ownership is not different from anything else. Regulate it correctly or the most powerful people will just take away everything from you.

It's not a common way of thinking, not in my observation.

Conservative / neo-liberal narratives push strongly against any form of "bigger picture view", more explicitly against solidarity, fueling this mindset of "I only support what profits me personally", i.e. "everyone's taxes should be used for roads (because I have a car), public transport is a waste of money (everyone should buy a car)".

-> It's a vertical word-view, where others are seen either above you (appease them) or below you (disregard them, they should appease you)

--

Liberal citizens still (try to) build on a sense of solidarity, of common investments for the "greater good" of a just (future) society, i.e. "I do have a car, but a stronger public transport system is a benefit to me and my peers"

-> It's a horizontal world-view, where others are seen equal to you and people are much more willing to stand up for each other and unite their voice for a cause.

--

I'm aware that this is not that visible in US, because there are only two major parties here, which both try to please the maximum of the middle spectrum. So both follow a rather conservative narrative and tend to pay lip-service only.

In countries with more than two major political parties it's more visible because the "center-left" democratic party is also threatened by competition from the "left", not just from the "center-right"/"right" party, so they need to acknowledge that citizens raise DEMANDS to them and are willing to walk away if they are not met.

Does such strawman regulation even exist? Some regulation is intentionally designed to limit “progress”, where “progress” happens to have negative externalities.

It’s kind of a self-legitimizing opinion. Of course anyone would be against unnecessary regulations. I think the real world is not arguing about whether a regulation is necessary, but rather if the economic burden it creates is worth the positive impact it has on society, which is highly contentious, highly subjective debate.

Pex plumbing is banned in Chicago as a union protectionist regulation.

The "chicken tax" regulation scheme has screwed up the US truck market for decades.

Electrical code requirements for the wiring of kitchen islands have changed drastically with very small justification within a short span of time.

To this day it is illegal to trade onion futures in Chicago due to an attempt to corner the market on onions decades ago(probably over a century can't be bothered to check).

Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer.

The affordable care act is written in such a way that the only way for insurers to increase their profit margin on health plans is to increase the cost they pay out to providers ("gold plating")

CAFE fuel economy standards have lead to the arms race of increased vehicle sizes for unnecessary reasons.

Cite your sources.

There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership.

And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts of northern Europe with weird hangups about air conditioning.

But as best I can tell this claim is false; the biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States is that the climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.

It certainly is a transitional period where each summer more and more people realize that eventually something needs to be done, "maybe a/c next year" for many years until the year of installation finally comes.

In Northern Europe it certainly is still a rare occurrence that everything gets heated so warm that the air does no longer cool during the night and you can't cool down for the next day. Yes, we do get heat waves but they don't last very long. Yes, summers are mostly getting hotter but it's still nothing like in southern Europe. We might have several weeks of 25-28C with a lot of lakes and sea to dip into.

Admittedly it can be tormenting in city apartments where you might not have a place for A/C even if you wanted to, and where you might not have enough outside walls to effectively cross-ventilate. Further, the stone and pavement in a city absorb heat like a sponge which keeps the average a few degrees warmer than greenleaf areas across the hot season.

Yet I think maybe half-ish of households (or at least detached houses) already do have A/C. Installations have been steadily creeping up in the last 25 years. But those units aren't there because of their cooling capacity (which isn't necessarily always even used). Those are air-to-air heat pumps that keep the house warm in the winter, and can be used for cooling in the summer.

I would qualify that as it hasn't required it since the invention of air conditioning.

Which also isn't strictly true; the high temperature for Paris on July 1st this year is identical to the high for the same day back in 2015[1], and there are several times since 1970 that the temperature was over 30C.

Other sources[2] indicate 1947 was just as brutal as 2019 and 2022, and the warmest night was in 1772 (27.5C)

[1] https://weatheronthisday.com/intl/paris/7/1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Paris (standard Wikipedia reliability warning applies)

You might be the first person in history to say that

It may not have gotten the headlines of this year’s heatwave, but we were in Switzerland and Germany for a month last July. For three of those four weeks, it was stinking hot. The maximum temperatures weren’t so bad, but the nights were oppressive, and there was no letup. If that’s going to be the norm most summers, it absolutely justifies investing in air conditioning.

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

Hint: that's not "It's banned in Europe", that's "Landlords generally suck in any possible way"

The Danish Building code has requirements for retaining heat in the house, which is great in the cold winters, but devastating in the heart of modern summers. Combined with rules that practically require large south-facing windows to satisfy the total energy requirement limits, it gets very, very hot. And air conditioning subtracts significantly from your energy rating, making it almost impossible to include AC in a new building and satisfy the emission rating that any new building must satisfy.

The code allows only 25 hours a year where indoor temperature exceeds 28 degrees, but the validation of a building uses old temperature data, so on practice it's more hours of higher temperatures, and for houses that, even if you want to add AC later, wasnt designed for that.

Abs to add insult to injury, if you renovate an older building, you _can_ be required to bring it up to modern specs. That can be so expensive that it's cheaper to tear it down and build a new building. Because you can't do something half-good?

The building code _is_ a real problem, and changes ... well, haven't happened yet, so the buildings built today will be unlivable for as long as they stand in the new hotter summers.

I can cool down entire 70 square meters apartment with single 3.5kw split; that has worked well in the recent 40 degree heatwave. It does not even use "higher gears" to maintain the 24-25 degrees inside.

Not to mention it's usage overwhelmingly correlates with sunshine availability.

I keep seeing people say this but they don’t have any evidence, seen it tons online the last few weeks even on HN. What’s the deal? One person the other day went so far as to say that multiple EU nations have banned AC, which is completely false. You can absolutely have air-conditioning in Europe. Some places have stricter rules about permanent installation, such as HVACs in older areas, but there are plenty of air-conditioning units people can just pick up and use the same day in those cases. You can get AC units in European nations. You don’t have to just roast for no reason because of the government.

Not everyone has the ability to install personal unit where they live, that's true, same way they can't install satellite dishes for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act passed in 1958, just FYI.

> In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside.

Substantially all air conditioning units affect the appearance of the building from the outside because they require a coil or vent somewhere on the exterior of the building to expel heat.

> Building regulations already require new residential buildings, including houses, flats, student accommodation, residential care homes and children's homes, to be designed to minimise overheating.

If planning permission for aircon was denied, worry not, because the building code now requires measures that will keep some new buildings to a temperature ten or twenty degrees cooler than the older buildings (planning permission for aircon likewise denied), which is quite a difference when even the newer buildings are over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

They wouldn't need to spin it like this if there weren't actually buildings where people want to install air conditioning and are prohibited from it, because if that was the case they would have said that.

> If planning permission for aircon was denied

Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission! There are regulations you must follow about the size and location but, as long as those are followed, you don't need planning permission. At most, you alert Building Control who will tell you the process and, as long as you follow it, they will sign it off.

For the avoidance of doubt: getting work signed off by your council's Building Control department is not planning permission. As long as your work follows the regulations, they will sign it off. Planning permission is ONLY needed if you want to do work outside of what building regs normally allow for residential properties.

> They wouldn't need to spin it like this if there weren't actually buildings where people want to install air conditioning and are prohibited from it

They wouldn't need to spin it like this if the media and their useful idiots like you didn't outright lie about what was actually happening.

They're referring to regulations by the local council. All of them are different. Millions of people being able to install a satellite dish is entirely compatible with any number of different people in different localities being refused because the condenser is "ugly".

> Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission!

It literally says:

> In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside.

Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway and there are cases when it would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside" since otherwise they wouldn't need to qualify it.

"Ugly" is not part of planning regs. Local council planning regs cannot override statute and they don't deviate that much. You'd know this if you lived in the UK (which you don't).

> Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway

I explained why you might need planning permission: because your planned work sits outside of building regs.

> there are cases when it would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside"

Yes, those are things like "it's too big" or "it's a listed building." Instead of hand-waving about things you don't understand, put some fucking effort in and show these cases that are obviously reasonable but still being blocked.

Here, let me add yet more research since you won't do it yourself: https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/expert-advice/air-condition...

A list of reasons air-conditioning might require planning permission. Are you telling me that you, Anthony, know more about building regs in the UK than:

* Residents of the UK who have to work with them when they want to building work on their home.

* Companies who work with building contractors in the UK.

* The UK Government.

The phrase "materially affect the appearance of the building" has a pretty strong implication that the aesthetic effect is regarded as undesirable.

> Yes, those are things like "it's too big" or "it's a listed building."

And what then happens in the cases where "it's too big" or "it's a listed building"?

It also includes things like "it's going on a pitched roof" or "it's too close to the property line".

> show these cases that are obviously reasonable but still being blocked.

Demanding "obviously reasonable" is the crux of the banality of evil. Many things are non-obviously reasonable.

Who needs to put the unit on a pitched roof? That's weird. Just put it on the ground. Unless you own a unit on the second floor of a building and someone else owns the yard, and then you can't.

Your link has "too close to the property line" at within a meter. That's really close, who would need to do that? Well, the UK has millions of terraced houses that directly abut the property line. Some of them don't have a yard at all (and then we're back to the roof), others have one so small that being that close to the property line may be the only available place to put it.

Are these cases "obviously reasonable"? Putting the unit on a pitched roof is still weird and ugly. It's not that hard to understand the neighbors not wanting it that close to the property line.

But there is nowhere else to put it and then July makes the building hot enough to be a danger to life. At which point a rule motivated by the aesthetics is doing something objectionable.

You can install AC in the UK. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be.

There are very few laws which can say what you are allowed to do with your owned house. One of them is when it is of historical value. Then you aren’t allowed to change pretty much anything.

The rest are just landlords who want to fuck you over.

A lot of these examples are pretty subjective or missing context...

Yes, the DMCA is a great example, but corporations write those regulations and bribe government to pass them. That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations, although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.

It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations and the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests. Only one of them is bad at their job.

> although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.

It's actually the perfect example of something where "money in politics" isn't the problem. The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them, which would continue to be the case even if they couldn't transfer a dime into the politician's own coffers.

Individual people are diverse and creative. The behavior of large organizations differs because that individual behavior is getting merged into an aggregate. The choices of any given individual are diluted to such an extent that the organizations then behave stochastically in response to incentives, and therefore the same as one another when they're operating under the same set of incentives.

Which corporation would you propose to shut down? It would have to be all of them, and then the ones that replace them again. And the government itself, since it too is a bureaucratic organization that will engage in regulatory capture to expropriate more funding/power.

You cannot prevent the incentive to seize power, which comes from human nature. What you need is a system which is structurally resilient against its concentration/centralization.

Bribery is not advocacy.

> the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests.

No argument there, but so far companies and corrupt politicians have conned a large percentage of the public into accepting that it's okay and that any constraints on what a company wants to do is a terrible thing. We're currently under a very pro-bribery admin.

> The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them

I'm not entirely convinced that media coverage is more influential than bribes, donations, and the revolving door. That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/energy-indu...

The revolving door is bribery, but now propose a solution to it that doesn't preclude every member of a politician's extended family from having a job in private industry regardless of whether that person had any say in their relative running for office.

Running issue ads pretty much the definition of advocacy.

> That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth

The industries that it does work for are some of the biggest problem ones. Media consolidation is a major long-term problem that the government seems entirely incapable of redressing, and the same issue presents with tech companies. Twitter/Facebook/Google at this point have more influence over what people believe than CNN/MSNBC/Fox News.

Moreover, influence over the media is only one way that corporations influence politicians. Let's take your example. From soup to nuts, the US oil and gas industry employs more than 10 million people, and those people are concentrated in specific places. (This is also why coal in the US is dying and never coming back; employs less than 1% as many people.) The auto industry employs another 10 million Americans and has a strong preference for cheap gas.

The major alternatives to oil and gas are electric vehicles (majority of worldwide EV batteries made in China) and solar panels (made in China again). The US could make those things, but it would require significant taxpayer subsidies, since China subsidizes them too. Moreover, it will never be the same number of jobs because EVs and solar panels are simply less labor intensive. EVs are mechanically simpler and require less maintenance/repair than ICE powertrains and solar panels are essentially semiconductor manufacturing, which is not a major source of blue collar jobs.

Meanwhile the main argument against oil and gas is CO2, which is a huge international problem that countries have a poor incentive to tackle individually. So the political incentives to address it in the US are screwed regardless of whether the industry pays the politicians a cent, because the politicians don't want to lose millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue (which, despite the subsidies, the oil industry still pays on net).

More to the point, it's the media that keeps telling people that it could be fixed with campaign finance reform, even though it can't, because that's the one that privileges them as the ones who can run advocacy pieces without paying a third party to air them.

Whereas to actually make a dent in the part of the problem related to money being used to pay for attention, you need something more like antitrust so that you don't have megacorps like Comcast NBCUniversal, Google and Facebook in control of what such a large proportion of the public believes. Which is exactly what the media corporations don't want, so they redirect blame onto something else.

Also, regulation is not universally supported by knowledgeable consumers. Often quite the opposite, in fact.

That's not really it.

The main case against regulation is that it shouldn't be used when competition would do it better, which is most of the time. The trouble in this case is that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, which means this isn't one of those times, because competition is being foreclosed by statute. It can't be the thing that saves you in the case where the government is prohibiting it.

To put it another way, the thing that would really reduce regulations is to get rid of copyright, but maybe we want to be pragmatic here and instead of demanding that it be abolished entirely, we just want the prohibition the government is imposing on the users to not be extended through an unconscionable power grab and destroy the rights of First Sale and Fair Use that have always belonged to the customer.

Microsoft may have a monopoly on Minecraft, but they still have competition from other games (Roblox, Fortnite) and other forms of entertainment (social media, youtube, books, IRL friends).

To me, the problem is more one of the terms of the deal changing; if a person brought minecraft with a 'mojang' account and loses their purchase when those accounts disappear in favour of 'microsoft' accounts, for example.

Which is not at all the same thing, not least because software has a network effect. It's like saying that a company having a monopoly on cars is fine because you can walk or take the bus.

If your claim was actually true then copyright would have no purpose since "granting a monopoly" is its mechanism of operation.

> To me, the problem is more one of the terms of the deal changing; if a person brought minecraft with a 'mojang' account and loses their purchase when those accounts disappear in favour of 'microsoft' accounts, for example.

How does that help you when the next game comes out, requiring a "Microsoft" account from the first day? The problem is inherently that you can't get the game from anyone -- even a used copy from an existing customer -- without subjecting yourself to the requirement you reject, or de facto being stripped of your rights under First Sale.

At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".

At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.

Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.

And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)

100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)

The complexity and realism of some particular regulation aside, I honestly don't understand dismissing other people's opinions on the grounds that not a lot of people care about them. Should people not have an opinion because lots of other people don't share it? Or should those opinions just not be expressed?

Everybody's got their own personal interests and values. It's natural to express and even vouch for them. If they aren't shared by enough other people, they probably won't make it to the top in a democracy. That's how it works and it's fine. But I don't get the idea that someone shouldn't express an opinion about X because lots of other people don't care about X.

And it works both ways - people are allowed to care about something, express that, and others are allowed to not care about it, and express that :)

(in this case, as I mentioned in sibling comment, I care about the same cause as well:).

> In Comments

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The GP did indeed seem to be arguing it's default-bad (though I note you didn't go off at them for this). The reply has said nothing about it being default-good: only that it's not necessarily default-bad. You're assuming a black-and-white binary & by extension you're seeing arguments that weren't made.

There's nothing bad faith about the commenters post & assuming the role of a moderator in a discussion you're inventing phantom arguments in isn't doing you any favours.

I can literally list all the stupid regulation that needs to be removed from my industry. A lot of it is incredibly boneheaded. There's exactly 1 thing I do like, and it was extremely situational and set down in the 90s to avoid a very specific potential failure, and could easily be repealed without issue right now.

I presume, based on the experience in an industry I am very familiar with, that at least 60% of the regulation put on other industries is likewise counter productive and boneheaded. And every now and then when I do a deep dive somewhere I tend to confirm that.

We don't have to have new regulation. We just need to enforced basic existing standards. Buy means buy. Rent means rent. Lease means lease. All have their place. But this is not what is happening now. We have an ecosystem that mischaracterizes not just type the type of sale, but user's rights and obligations under it.

All that is basically fraud. We just don't call it that. We call it innovation.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.

The best way to not have loopholes is to put some effort in not creating them in the first place, not patching them later.

I have news for you, in a democracy in which bribery is illegal, these loopholes can be closed by politicans who actually want to.

This is why things really need to be DRM free from the start, and portable (have the ability to back them up, move them, etc). It’s the only way to ensure they can’t pull that kind of stuff.

Traditionally the whole industry has been fine with it as long as direct media copying was too hard for the layperson, especially since lending games around was like word of mouth advertising.

Digital platforms change a whole bunch of these things.

Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.

They can delist a game from the PS store, but I doubt they would make a game unplayable if it's already installed or if you own it physically.

You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.

It's not based on a legal or technical guarantee. But it's based on what Sony did in the past:

P.T. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game) ) was pulled from the PS store. But Sony didn't make it unplayable if it was already installed. In fact, the wikipedia article says:

> After the cancellation, PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed were listed on eBay for over $1,000

But they do require certain firmware updates to play games, at least they did in the PS3 days. If you hadn't updated to that firmware (say, because you didn't want certain features you used like the OtherOS installation to be deleted) your new physical media would not play. I bought Dark Souls on a disc and could not play it on my console.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse> <https://free60.org/Hardware/Fusesets/#fusesets-07-11> <https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Fuses#Anti-downgrade> <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/google-gives-develop...>

In other words, you completely missed the point that this is about DRM and not physical vs digital.

I worry about shenanigans where you "buy" the game from a shell company and that shell company "folds" and doesn't uphold it's promises. Same is true for a smaller, but not shell, company. If the non-DRM version isn't already created and held in trust, then it's not trustworthy.

Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.

Good regulation is good. Bad regulation is bad. Being anti-regulation is dogmatic.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

Not really. As long as it's clear that everything is a rental, consumers are free to go along or not.

Physical media offering near-permanent storage is also relatively new. 8-tracks, cassettes, and even CDs would wear out over time. Yes, I could hold a cassette in my hand, but I also knew it would wear out over time and I'd have to buy another one - and I did.

We need to change our language around buying something so it's clear that it's not permanent ownership, unless it really is. I suspect we would see services/media start to come to market that offer true ownership if the demand was there.

This could also be fixed by removing regulation.

a service you pay for is not your property. and the licenses for games could be seen as a service rather than goods since they are now digital. ofc this is not nice or good, but its possible to do it to skirt ownership rules regarding 'goods'.

for PS5 the problem might be this.

you can sell a license and enable download for games but how many games can you realistically fit inside of a ps5 without some weird storage array in there... games are huge these days and wont get smaller.

for PC customers, storage is their own responsibility. for ps5 im not sure it could work the same, how extensible is the storage etc.

i would expect such things to come with a subscription, so u can access all games u want anytime while the subscription is active and install/download on demand.

the subscription cost being low vs game prices would offset the ownership problem for a lot of people.

i know many people who have subscription to platforms who do this today on PC in order to access many games they cant afford to all buy. (they buy ones maybe if they end up played a lot).

the problem now with these platforms for PC is still they only offer a selection of games, to encourage purchases (because the platforms are more independent from PC and game makers than say PS5 and sony are..)

But that does also beg the question, if we do eventually regulate this better, do you own streamed products? IE with Google stadia (and I think Amazon Luna) you buy a game but the game data is streamed to your device. If they shut the service down (like Stadia did) then what happens to your game collection?

It's a hypothetical, but interesting to think about nonetheless

Is it? It's the bare minimum and if you replace games with anything else it might not look so "pretty cool" anymore.

My hairdresser forcefully bleached/uncut my hair but pretty cool that i got my money back.

Ford forcefully impounded my car without my consent but pretty cool that i got my money back

Realtor kicked me out of my house but pretty cool that i got my money back

And that's ok since everyone will understand the deal going in. Consumers can decide if it's worth paying the price for a 5 year rental or not.

You mean the full color box thats for all practical purposes the same size and prominence as the cart you're checking out?

https://imgur.com/a/0fkh4l3

(iirc this was also Sony, ironically.

Fake edit, I looked it up; it was Sony that put a rootkit in its CDs, they were sued and settled out of court https://boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony-anticustomer-te.html). Microsoft, Yahoo and Wal-Mart changed their services in such a way that music was no longer playable in 2008 (https://opensource.com/life/11/11/drm-graveyard-brief-histor...), with Yahoo even encouraging users to burn their music to CDs to keep it. In 2011 Rhapsody recommended to back up their older DRM'd RAX files to another format so they remain listenablle.

What games and some software do these days is much worrse. You have a license to use their "software installation service" and their "let me run the game" service until they decide to turn them off. At any point, at their discretion, they can remove your ability to install a new copy or even run it all together.

Very different and quite recent.

I was never in the "resell software" mindset, similarly to books, I don't sell those, unless I get a present that is mistargetted. No one gifts me software sadly.

These are not the same situation.

Then let the market decide.

It's a job for piracy.

do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????

Now change "attend the cinema" with "play a videogame" in those phrases. We should be able to freely exchange games between us. I should be able to sell them to you. The medium (digital, physical) is irrelevant.

no, because you already play it

You should not be able to read a book or watch a DVD movie and afterwards give it to a sibling or friend, or leave it on a bench on the street for someone else to pick up?

I don't care if the medium is physical or digital, we should be able to, and OUGHT to do those things.

As for resale, interesting you bring up tickets as scalping / reselling them is a major issue, which is also hostile to consumers as they can pay multiples of the original selling price for high profile concerts and events, which has led to legislation and / or industry rules that prevent resale or at least prevent it through 3rd party services so that they can manage the resale price (and take their share a second time).

When you pay for content locked to a platform, you're not buying an asset, you're paying for a service. The platforms grow around not only providing a convenient service to the end user, but also to the content creators, who publish on them with the expectation that their content is protected by DRM. Creators are free to choose where they publish, and end users are free to choose which services they use.

I don't think it makes sense for the government to define what it means to own a digital asset or to force every service platform to become a retailer and ownership-tracker. Where there's demand for DRM-free downloads or physical media, the market will respond.

(Not universally, but in many cases.)

Too many still think in the old days of buying physical goods, you 'buy' a tin of beans, they are now in all sense my beans.

I'm all for helping people distinguish, when something is a straight forward property transaction, or an agreement based on permisions, constraints and obligations ... a license.

Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there?

Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever. Will that relieve your sense of persecution? Or would just you find another way to cast game publishers as the conniving evil empire (market control, collusion to reduce consumer options, etc.) because they aren't giving you what you want?

Games (and other digital media), are sold as products, not services, mostly.

TFA is arguing this should persist and not be replaced as games as (subscription/licensed rental), services. It argues the move to digital is being used by businesses to switch to a services model under the hood, and that this should be resisted and it should remain a product model.

> Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store?

Demonstrably, provably: yes.

> Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever.

Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected?

Games are overwhelmingly not sold as services these days (MMOs being the exception, + a few others). The sale of a game as a product is built into the model of 'give money, get permanent access to game'. If that access is not permanent, then you need to set a time limit there. Subscriptions usually do it per month, but you can do whatever you want, except leave the field blank.

Your suggestions are either:

- make publishers distribute goods without anti-piracy protection

- make buyers pay for games on an ongoing basis rather than just once

Publishers and buyers are generally happy with the current exchange as is even if you aren't. Digital games sales are increasing rapidly ever year while physical sales are declining. Why do you get to be the gaming czar?

They don't have to provide a DRM-free version on day 1 if they don't want to. But they do have to provide for a way to use the game after end of support. Doing anything else is unreasonable.

Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.

In terms in consumer protection, at least in UK and Europe (not saying not elsewhere, just don't know much), there is an amount of regulation that tries to help consumers not get screwed in the legalese of these agreements, and some basic protections that can't override.

I'm arguing unfair terms shouldn't be upheld, or really in the agreement in the first place. This is on paper how it should work in Europe, but we (apparently) haven't quite figured that out yet.

Those EULAs often get overturned because the language is often more of a scare tactic against suing them than it is an actual legally binding position.

When you bought a VHS of a movie, you purchased the video cassette hardware, but also a license which was bundled with that object.

That license explicitly had some constraints on it, such as not broadcasting the IP in a public setting, even calling out specific locations like oil rigs.

Distinguishing between products and service, isn't great, as neither are well defined, and end up back in the same debates.