51–60 of 60 posts
Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass whether they call it buying or licensing . I want to be able to resell my digital goods. This is what needs to be legislated. If a company wants to enjoy legal protection agains someone breaking their DRM, they must provide a way to transfer licenses. This should be the law.
Imagine a country where all decisions are taken by the popularity of the issue....
Oh, wait, we don't have to.
Those concepts have a legal origin because we believed consumers actually had some rights that you shouldn't be able to simply whisk away just because you are a more powerful negotiator. Apparently we decided those basic protections, enshrined by both code and common law, are overrated for an emerging sector of the economy. It was an odd conclusion, decided in a funny way where no citizen nor Senator ever cast a vote and where the open policy discussion on this core economic issue was muted and invisible.
It's time to stop pretending nothing changed.
The solution is a completely unsexy thing: we need to revise the classification of goods in the intro to the UCC, the "Universal Commercial Code," then get states to actually adopt it. We need to completely re-examine the way goods are distinguished from services at common law so that selling a piece of software with no support agreement is a good while mowing a lawn stays a service.
This isn't the moonshot of legal theory, we should be able to handle it without completely breaking society.
Instead of changing the name, how about making sure licensed digital "goods" receive all of the legal protections afforded other goods: warranties, first sale, the whole package. Those concepts have a legal origin because we believed consumers actually had some rights that you shouldn't be able to simply whisk away just because you are a more powerful negotiator. Apparently we decided those basic protections, enshrin…
Or maybe I'm overly optimistic. Again, we'd have to roll up our sleeves and work this stuff out, but I don't put it out of humanity's reach to balance the freedom to share code against the right of consumers to resell digital goods.
Ugh. More laws to the fat stack. A)Don't buy B) Complain and criticize like hell. In the end it's the companies decision to fuck it up or not. Do we want to be more paying taxes so government can regulate buy vs licensing labelling...
Imagine a country where all decisions are taken by the popularity of the issue....
Imagine a country where decisions are made by consenting individuals and where the immediate reaction from someone seeing something they don't like isn't "the government should force them to stop doing whatever I don't like."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel you are completely missing the point here. The point was that draconian licensing is draconian with or without enforcement (eg DRM). > I believe the presence of restrictive DRM could serve as a useful litmus test in gauging where on the scale such "licenses" to intellectual constructs fall and thus whether the term "buy" or "license" would be more appropriate. This is utterly false. You can't deduce anything a…
DRM is a set of technical policies: The user may install the software X times. Y users may use the software at once. This video stream will not decode properly without the private key embedded in chip ABC. This DVD will only play in DVD players that have region code Z. This game requires a persistent network connection in order to crunch game logic and stream assets. If these policies are not guaranteed to provide an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DRM is a set of technical policies: The user may install the software X times. Y users may use the software at once. This video stream will not decode properly without the private key embedded in chip ABC. This DVD will only play in DVD players that have region code Z. This game requires a persistent network connection in order to crunch game logic and stream assets. If these policies are not guaranteed to provide an…
If your complaint is that the presence of aggressive DRM means that the seller/licenser isn't really adhering to the stated or implied license, then the correct remedy still isn't to change the wording from "buy" to "license".
So here's a better idea for software sales:
For software licencing/sales, the terms and conditions of the purchase must be printed before the name of the product in the same font size as the name of the product. If buying a video game encumbers me with a clickwrap licence containing 17,000 words of dense legalese, then let them sell it on a box 300 ft tall.