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Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

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Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#531

Post by giancarlostoro »

acdha wrote: post #491
tragictrash wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point, the producer doesn't have control and therefore you own what you bought, instead of renting it.

I understand that this is the vision used to sell tokens but that's why I asked what reason we have to think that Ubisoft will start doing something which they could already do any time they want without sharing revenue. Their terms of service are what they are because that's how they want them to be, and there's nothing forcing them to use NFTs at all much less implement them with far more generous terms of service.

This is the only way their tokens would sell themselves (and arguably more so) is if they guarantee that even if you lost your account, you could still transfer your NFTs to a new account. Also the ability to sell games you've bought is pretty awesome. Heck under this scheme, if you buy a game plus DLC but you already own the base game, it should let you gift / sell the game to a friend if you paid the full amount of the game + DLC.

I seem to remember a time when people were able to sell games and buy games on the Steam market.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#532

Post by acdha »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #531
acdha wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that this is the vision used to sell tokens but that's why I asked what reason we have to think that Ubisoft will start doing something which they could already do any time they want without sharing revenue. Their terms of service are what they are because that's how they want them to be, and there's nothing forcing them to use NFTs at all much less implement them with far more generous terms of service.

This is the only way their tokens would sell themselves (and arguably more so) is if they guarantee that even if you lost your account, you could still transfer your NFTs to a new account. Also the ability to sell games you've bought is pretty awesome. Heck under this scheme, if you buy a game plus DLC but you already own the base game, it should let you gift / sell the game to a friend if you paid the full amount of…

Why should we believe that gamers will reverse all of their past history and start demanding the ability to resell games? They could do that now, and that would avoid the substantial extra cost of the NFTs.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#533

Post by nkrisc »

cinntaile wrote: post #387
nkrisc wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they ever do that, though? That would allow third party resale of digital copies of their games which would eat away their sales of games. It’s one of the many reasons games are digitally sold now: there’s no physical artifact the owner can sell to someone else. Why would Ubisoft intentionally create a way for homes to be resold without them getting a cut?

I don't expect the incumbents, like Ubisoft, to do that. But you can definitely program NFTs to automatically give a cut of the sale each time the NFT is sold. It doesn't make too much sense for second hand digital games, you'll likely be able to buy the games as long as the platform is alive. In a situation such as this one it could have helped resolve it though. It would have been even better if Ubisoft didn't just…

> It would have been even better if Ubisoft didn't just delete the account

Since mistakes or malice can always occur, the real issue is that it isn't easier to seek legal redress. Somewhat tangential to this issue, I still believe it's wrong for these services to use wording and marketing that suggest you "purchase" or "buy" the game, when in reality you have no such ownership claim to the game as you would a similar, analog purchase of physical media or objects. I don't think it's fair that these companies can get away with using misleading language and obscuring the truth in legalese in a 100 page TOS document.

The "buy" button on these digital games storefront should say something like "purchase limited license," or at least something a little closer to reality.

I don't think it should be possible to "purchase" an online-only game that requires access to the proprietary game servers in order to function. You're renting the game and don't actually own anything.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#534

Post by s_dev »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #523
s_dev wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't expect my account to be terminated after 1 year of activity but I also don't expect it to last forever and to be able to pass it to descendants. Why? It doesn't have to be passed on to descendants -- you could for example sell it before you die. I'm not sure why any time limit would be imposed. It's already happened to me -- EA Origin. I simply can't play my C&C Generals games anymore despite legally purchas…

Actually C&C generals is still available on the Origin store, but only as part of a package

Right but you can't play multiplayer.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#535

Post by derefr »

BoorishBears wrote: post #486
derefr wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Likewise, it doesn't matter where you get a game from, unless you break the DCMA and modify the binary, DRM enabled games will phone home to the "game service provider" to verify your license. If you own the license , then downloading a pre-cracked derivative work of the installation media also isn't illegal (provided that the cracker has put the crack itself in the public domain!) To resume the analogy: Microsoft…

This is wrong on so many counts my head is spinning. Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that. You're also making a copy of illegally distributed software (not just cracking that's a problem, distribution is too...), which opens you up to liability, since again, your license doesn't cover that. And to top it all off, you're still not going to ge…

> Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that.

That's where DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions come into play. If I own an IP license for software X; but there are technological barriers in place preventing me from using the software for the purpose I paid for the license to enable; then computer programs that "fix the problem" to allow me to use the license I paid for, are explicitly a protected class of software under the law.

And the license, or Terms of Service, or anything else, can't say anything to the contrary (or, well, it can, but such terms would be legally unenforceable for reasons of public policy — similar to e.g. contracts stipulating that workers will work without legally-mandated protections, or a contract from a public educational institution granting access to a resource but not to legally-mandated accessibility aides for that resource.)

And that is enshrined explicitly in multiple existing exemptions related to abandonware, which would pertain in exactly the case where a service like Steam goes defunct and all the licensing schemes of its distributed games stop working. The various cracks to get those games working again? Legally exempt!

> multiplayer still requires their servers

Given that two existing DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions are:

> Computer programs that enable wireless devices to connect to a wireless telecommunications network when circumvention is undertaken solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and such connection is authorized by the operator of such network;

and:

> Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay;

These clauses, read carefully by a competent lawyer, could be argued to in combination have a spirit that would extend to include a new exemption: of alterations to online games required to allow them to connect to the "telecommunications network" embodied by a white-room reimplemented private server for the game.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#536

Post by derefr »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #508
derefr wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, you don't need an immutable ledger of visible IP licensing rights if that's all you want to accomplish. But presumably, in a "legal piracy is commonplace, Steam goes out of business" scenario, the studios producing the games would still want to make the games verify your license ownership against something — e.g. to make sure that you're only using your license for one concurrent "seat", rather than usi…

Perhaps, but since the premise of the solution is that Ubisoft must be legally required to provide a certain service to the current bearer of the token, then it seems overkill to put this on a distributed database system with a complicated consensus model. If Ubisoft is already legally required to recognize it, then surely they can also be required to host a service for moving ownership or maintaining a usage counter…

Legally obligating each studio to run a centralized service for license verification would be no better than requiring the publishers/distributors to run such license-verification services; in both cases, the backends would die with the economic actor.

The nice thing about an NFT (per se, a deed), is that you still own it, and it still has legal effect, even after the entity that originally created it ceases to exist. A distributed ledger will remember that Ubisoft granted you an IP license for X, even after Ubisoft stops existing as such, with all their assets sold off or lost. And any games built to check that distributed ledger, will continue to find your license there, and start up just fine.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#537

Post by [deleted] »

tombert wrote: post #147
chris_wot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sadly if something is legal then they can actually do that thing. I don’t like it myself, but that’s unfortunately how it works.

No argument but I feel like that’s an orthogonal topic to “is it moral for me to pirate a game that I purchased a legal copy of?” I’m well aware that I’m legally allowed to do legal things, but “laws” have a lot of politics and emotion involved in their creation, and I don’t feel like they’re a great place to determine the “morality” of something.

[deleted]

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#538

Post by TimJRobinson »

root_axis wrote: post #461
TimJRobinson wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do companies do anything in the consumers interest? Competition. You don't see it now, but once many games allow you to resell the skins or game itself, and gamers get used to that, publishers that don't allow it will look evil. Coordination between many companies is an exceptionally difficult problem without blockchains. This is what NFTs solve in a simple way - a neutral platform that every party can easily int…

Blockchains are not useful here. Just mint something like a PGP NFT and eliminate the pointless waste of the blockchain.

You should probably learn blockchain 101 concepts like preventing double spending before making assertions with such confidence.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#539

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

derefr wrote: post #536
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but since the premise of the solution is that Ubisoft must be legally required to provide a certain service to the current bearer of the token, then it seems overkill to put this on a distributed database system with a complicated consensus model. If Ubisoft is already legally required to recognize it, then surely they can also be required to host a service for moving ownership or maintaining a usage counter…

Legally obligating each studio to run a centralized service for license verification would be no better than requiring the publishers/distributors to run such license-verification services; in both cases, the backends would die with the economic actor. The nice thing about an NFT (per se, a deed ), is that you still own it, and it still has legal effect, even after the entity that originally created it ceases to exis…

But those games are running on hardware that you control. You therefore also control what version of the ledger the games can observe, and you can choose to show it an old version or a fork that has been mined with a tiny amount of PoW, so things like activation counters wouldn't actually give you the guarantees you are claiming. Perhaps for online gaming, the peers could require proof of ownership via the central ledger. But I would imagine that everyone would just apply a crack to disable those checks, because spending crypto fees whenever you join a server just to protect the IP rights of a defunct company is such an overkill solution, and frankly I find the use case highly contrived. I don't think it is realistic to assume that gamers will accept that what used to be a simple license check now involves downloading and verifying gigabytes of ledger history.

Just use off-ledger verifiable receipts. If Ubisoft goes under and sells off its IP, then the buyer should be legally obliged to run a similar ownership service with the digital receipt being the proof of ownership OR release the games to public domain without license checks.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#540

Post by everyone »

vmception wrote: post #429
nopeacefortorp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://opentrackers.org/torrentleech/ account creation on TL is currently open, but unfortunately when I try to create an account via Tor enabled Onion Browser on my phone nothing happens when I push submit. Even with most permissive JS settings in the browser. Sad times.

try a normal VPN then? I hope you are aware that bittorrent is bad for Tor, maybe they are helping you. when you get in, you need to seed something, if you are worried about torrent activity on your network, try to seed something benign like a linux distribution.

Doesn't sound like he is trying to torrent over tor.. Just access the tracker website. I use tor to access several of them cus they are blocked at an ISP level in my country, and tor-browser is a convenient workaround.
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