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IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?
California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.
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Buy only means buy if you can use the product as advertised after breaking all ties with the vendor. Let's not broaden this definition in favor of the vendor.
Is this an official definition defined in law?
IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?
I'm not saying that it is not worth trying to fix this, but now that the technology enables content owners to more fully control your access, they're not going to be keen to relax that only to leave that money on the table.
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That's one thing. The other is price. Consoles can be sold at a loss, particularly early in their 10-year cycle, when early on the loss is high, but close to the end of the cycle the loss is minimal, and so they appear much cheaper.
Given recent price rises for console hardware I think they're struggling with that too though. The model doesn't work as well if the components get more expensive over time and not less?
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Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely". Sadly the case was settled, see: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/apple-settles-alleg...
Not even a defense of Apple here… but I think most everyone does know. We just agree to bury our heads in the sand and not to do anything about it as long as service continues in good faith. It comes up occasionally ever few years, whenever Amazon claws back an ebook or something like this (particularly egregious) thing happens. But then we just go back to normal. Blurays are obscenely customer hostile too, but I dec…
Regarding BluRays, and to some extend DVDs, I'm in the same boat. I have season one of a TV show, but season two never made it to DVD and now it's locked away in the vaults of some production company, you can't even stream it. There are so many movies and shows that will just be lost in the future.
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Laws are great and all. But what we really need is a massive boycott. Stop buying shit manufactured or sold by Sony for a year. That alone will probably force them to backtrack every single anti consumer decision they've made recently.
For the love of god please understand 80% of people are trying to just get on day by day. They don't give a shit about any of this. They probably don't even realize it's happening. Some subset of them might be hit by this but most just don't care. The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.
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That doesn't really make sense. Consoles have always occupied a different space to PCs, not least because they plug into living room TVs. Very few people are going to trade that for a (considerably more expensive) PC. Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc. Consoles are pick up and go. I very much doubt they're dead yet.
You'll likely see a lot more Steam Machine-like PCs because of this. SteamOS fixes most of the problems you mention. Price is the new normal and you should expect next gen consoles to come closer to it. It's not a bad deal anyway when you consider the bigger library, cheaper games, and no subscription required. https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?
Laws like that are just going to give rise to new tortured wording. You're buying a revocable license to view the content under certain conditions. It was already in that territory even with physical media; that's what region locking is. Likewise, if bitrot set in and your disc became unplayable, the distributor didn't send you a new one. You never had a perpetual, irrevocable, and otherwise unrestricted license to v…
Things you can buy have to be accurately described as what you actually get, so "buy this" ought to be an accurate description of what the deal actually is, too.
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Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them. Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip. Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy.…
Can we though? There is marked difference in how the government reacts to populist demands. Notably, they learned from Vietnam how to manipulate the population to divide public opinion. I am not sure people today can overcome such organized machinations.
Using foreign wars to prosecute domestic agenda is a strategy that predates written history, let alone Vietnam. Rulers have always understood which levers were available to them, this is not a modern discovery. Classical history in particular is full of this sort of thing and worse in a democratic context, which is comforting in the sense of where we stand and concerning in the sense of where things could go.
Machinations were always organized. I'm reading about Louis Brandeis and I'm struck by how familiar the robber baron talking points are; they are exactly the talking points I heard from neoliberals growing up. Time is a flat circle when it comes to antitrust. Also: they tried to coup FDR! They got themselves a strongman figurehead and everything, it just didn't work.
I'd actually give us the advantage today: the information environment is messier and more difficult to control and machine politics is barely starting to form rather than firmly established everywhere at every level.