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Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

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Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#111

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

tetrisgm wrote: post #92

This is going to backfire spectacularly. Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time. There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.

Yeah I've already decided there won't be any new Sony consoles in my household. Games are so big now I can't possibly download all my games at once so if the store goes down I lose all those games permanently and $70+ for AAA games that are really hit and miss in the "fun" category is no longer worth it to me. The PS5 was also pretty darn expensive when it came out and I can't say I've played too many PS5 exclusive games since I bought it. Most of the PS5 catalog has been indie games available on Steam or ported PS4 games... and with Sony reportedly releasing a new console next year they are clearly high on their own supply.

Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#112

Post by john_strinlai »

nerdjon wrote: post #107
dataflow wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too? Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight. The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to…

>You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.

it's not the same overall risk though.

accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not.

if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#113

Post by kmeisthax »

> This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense.

Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.

But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.

A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).

[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.

[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#114

Post by applfanboysbgon »

ux266478 wrote: post #103
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their policy is exactly the same. It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it. Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse t…

To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.

> To be clear, you never owned the games

To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#115

Post by TuxSH »

dcow wrote: post #84
antiframe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have the same risk and not really ownership. You don't, though. When I download a game on Steam or GOG, I have the files on my PC. I can back them up. I can modify them. Yes, live service games still have an online component I don't control, but I do still control the files on my computer. I don't on a console. Actually, I don't own any consoles for reasons of software freedom but I hear they are much more diff…

Yes, you do. When you play a digital game on Playstation you also download the files... It may be harder like you say but the law doesn't really see it any differently PC vs Console if you want to archive/backup your digital game media.

On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#116

Post by dcow »

nerdjon wrote: post #107
dataflow wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too? Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight. The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to…

We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#117

Post by dcow »

john_strinlai wrote: post #112
nerdjon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight. The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to…

> You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. it's not the same overall risk though. accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not. if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

[flagged]

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#118

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

cratermoon wrote: post #8

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.

Arguably, piracy has never been theft as "theft" means to deprive an entity of their item/copy and downloading does not destroy the original. The usual counter-argument is that piracy deprives them of a sale, but that is not necessarily true and it doesn't really fit the meaning of "theft".

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#119

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #62

I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base. Linux support for GPUs has never been better than what it is today. I've spent the last 4 or 5 years gaming exclusively on Linux just to highlight how good it has gotten, and no I don't have to run around doing command line incantations. Linux has improved a lot, heck, even AI you have a drastically better exper…

[deleted]

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#120

Post by john_strinlai »

dcow wrote: post #117
john_strinlai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. it's not the same overall risk though. accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not. if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

[flagged]

>You have clearly never negotiated a contract.

feel free to make an actual point rather than vague assumptions about my history.

when you do risk assessments, which over my career i have done thousands, you include historical data.

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