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French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

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Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#161

Post by jandrese »

bluecalm wrote: post #134
jandrese wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how copyright works on physical goods, like books, DVDs, etc... The Doctrine of First Sale is a crucial part of Copyright law. The author doesn't get to control your life because you bought one of their works. If you want to use it in some other way then they intended they don't get a say.

But you are not making another copy with physical goods. You are giving/selling it to someone else. Those things aren't analogical (for the same reason making a copy isn't "stealing" it's at most copyright violation). There is a reason for this distinction. Making physical goods costs money, making digital copies is free (basically). If we accept the premise that copyright holder can exercise control over it there is…

The physical printing costs of a book are a negligible amount of its cover price. Saying that because it's cheaper to make a copy of a digital good it needs new rules doesn't seem like a strong argument.

The author's problem are entirely self inflicted in this case, as it is his own DRM that is making him do extra work to allow transfers.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#162

Post by [deleted] »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #159
gamblor956 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still not getting it. It's irrelevant that graphics from 10 years ago aren't as good as they are today because that only matters for games where cutting-edge graphics are part of the selling point of the game (i.e., AAA games). There are plenty of games that don't try for cutting edge graphics and so look the same today as they did when first released, like Cave Story, Celeste, Fez, Braid, etc. The point the p…

It's not that they're not getting it, it's that your point is a poor one. A physical copy also came with the costs of storage, storefronts, retail space, manufacture, shipping, etc. None of that is true now. A digital copy costs almost nothing to store and retrieving that copy is again a nearly costless process. The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer. You're making the same arguments fi…

[deleted]

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#163

Post by jeroenhd »

gamblor956 wrote: post #151
jeroenhd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inherent value for a digital food also decreases over time. Top of the line graphics from ten years ago look bad in comparison to today. Story driven games get their stories spoilt over time, especially the popular ones. Compatibility with controllers and other such devices depend wildly on backwards compatibility (for example, the xbox one controller had loads of compatibility issues with games that only accepte…

You're still not getting it. It's irrelevant that graphics from 10 years ago aren't as good as they are today because that only matters for games where cutting-edge graphics are part of the selling point of the game (i.e., AAA games). There are plenty of games that don't try for cutting edge graphics and so look the same today as they did when first released, like Cave Story, Celeste, Fez, Braid, etc. The point the p…

So, in this case, suppose I lose my phone, then buy a new one, but before opening the box I find my old phone again.

I have spent money on the phone but there is literally no degradation. Is selling the unnecessary phone hurting the industry? How much money is Samsung losing?

The whole "perfect copy" sounds like an invented reason to stop preventing people from exercising their rights to me. I don't see why the quality of a product needs to be degraded before you're allowed to sell it. The market is as big as the amount of people playing your game at the same time, that's how it's always been up until Steam came along. Games were made before Steam and they will be made when they are sold second hand again.

The only difference between hardware and software in this regard is that software actually can be prevented from being resold. I see no reason why we should.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#164

Post by claudiawerner »

_edo wrote: post #143
claudiawerner wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GP currently has the ability to buy a product in a way they like (not purchasing resale rights that they don't want.) Why is GP's freedom more important than my freedom to buy the product in the way I like (purchasing resale rights, or even having them included by default)? On top of that, the fact that GP has the "freedom" now doesn't mean that having the freedom is an inherent good. Remember that slave owners pre…

Really it's the seller's freedom that matters first. It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms. The buyer has the freedom to buy or not buy the product. In this view intellectual property law is only enforcing the terms of the voluntary contract. On Orwell. I was commenting that I could accuse the accuser of Orwellianism of Orwellianism. But I could do it wi…

> It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms.

No they can't, and there's precedent for that: food regulations, warranty regulations, refund regulations, regulations on sale to minors, tax regulations etc. - this is in recognition of the fact that without the resources provided by the state and civil society, they wouldn't be able to sell it (or, in some cases, even produce it) in the first place.

> But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.

This is rather ironic, not only because restriction of freedom is what gives us what we regard as higher freedom (almost by definition, e.g. the case of the savage society being less free than ours since there are no laws against murder and theft, thus people cannot pursue their "higher" ends freely) but also because Orwell was himself a socialist![0]

Restrictions on freedom are not merely trade-offs, they are essential to the functioning of society. The point I'm making is that this restriction on the freedom of the seller in this case is based on a conception of freedom in which its opposite (unfreedom) is held within the noun itself. When you speak of the freedom of the seller, you're also speaking of the unfreedom of everyone else.

[0] "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (George Orwell, 1946, "Why I Write")

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#165

Post by Smithalicious »

purple_ducks wrote: post #152
oliwarner wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely makes sense. All content licenses should be resaleable. But this will have serious ramifications for how we "buy" content. If you can buy a game, play it for 100h and them hand it off to somebody else who can do exactly the same, with the publisher/developer/store are getting nothing from those transactions, they are quickly going to find another business model. There is no degeneration like there is wi…

Seems like a great time to separate the billing of license to play from value added things like data storage & bandwidth.

And how do you plan on doing this without any of:

- $1 game with $49 infrastructure fixed price that you have to pay on every resale

- monthly subscription to play game (which consumers do not like)

- "free to play" nonsense

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#166

Post by _edo »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #159
gamblor956 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still not getting it. It's irrelevant that graphics from 10 years ago aren't as good as they are today because that only matters for games where cutting-edge graphics are part of the selling point of the game (i.e., AAA games). There are plenty of games that don't try for cutting edge graphics and so look the same today as they did when first released, like Cave Story, Celeste, Fez, Braid, etc. The point the p…

It's not that they're not getting it, it's that your point is a poor one. A physical copy also came with the costs of storage, storefronts, retail space, manufacture, shipping, etc. None of that is true now. A digital copy costs almost nothing to store and retrieving that copy is again a nearly costless process. The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer. You're making the same arguments fi…

> The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer.

In the short term they my be losing out (kind of. It's like how I lose out when I don't steal at the grocery store.) but in the long term they're gaining because the companies making the goods they're purchasing get to stay in business.

It's a trade-off. Do you want video game consumers to have a short-term boost because everything's free, or do you want them to have a healthy game development ecosystem where talented devs can get loans to make good games because they'll have a predictable revenue stream from sales. You can try to balance the two, but you can't give them both.

Really all of this I want it free, I want it now just leads to free-to-play games where the developer recoups costs through micro-transactions, loot-boxes, pay-to-play items, etc. And in this model you probably never own the game at all. If the user can't be trusted to own the game, then never give them a complete game! Always keep part of it on your own servers. Force them to log in, force them to be connected, force them to have an active credit card number on file.

If we demand to resell/copy/trade the digital goods we purchase without restriction then this is the world we get - we stream movies, we stream music, we connect to game servers, but we never possess any of it. We never listen to a song without Spotify taking notice and putting it in our file. We never watch a movie in privacy without Netflix, "oh, he's watched Fight Club three times this week." We never get to play a game without server-side analytics being run to look at how tweaking the boss difficulty affects sales of the super-sword.

It's not as simple as saying locking up digital goods hurts the consumer.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#167

Post by _edo »

claudiawerner wrote: post #164
_edo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really it's the seller's freedom that matters first. It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms. The buyer has the freedom to buy or not buy the product. In this view intellectual property law is only enforcing the terms of the voluntary contract. On Orwell. I was commenting that I could accuse the accuser of Orwellianism of Orwellianism. But I could do it wi…

> It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms. No they can't, and there's precedent for that: food regulations, warranty regulations, refund regulations, regulations on sale to minors, tax regulations etc. - this is in recognition of the fact that without the resources provided by the state and civil society, they wouldn't be able to sell it (or, in some cases…

We're getting pretty far off-track which is what I was trying to avoid but ok, I'll try to bring it back around.

I believe a human being has a fundamental right to their own labor, and even if this isn't the case I think we do best acting as if it is. Socialists of all stripes disagree with me; if the state is to claim control of everybody's labor of course you can't hold this right as sacrosanct.

I agree that a market system requires laws and regulations to function. That doesn't mean we should be blindly regulating in the name of consumer rights without thought for the consequences and whether or not it even works. This is why we have the field of economics.

In this case the intended goal of helping the consumer by increasing their "freedom" probably won't be met. Either because 1. game developers can't get funding to develop future games without a stable revenue model so they stop making games, or 2. they realize they can get funding so long as they never actually give the consumer the full game. This leads to the server model where some core functionality of the game only runs on the server and you buy a subscription. Either way, you start with the intention of giving consumers more ownership of games and they end up with less ownership than they started with.

We could spend the next few days waxing intellectual about what freedom really means and all that or we can realize that the plan just doesn't work in meeting its own goals.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#168

Post by ineedasername »

gamblor956 wrote: post #148
jeroenhd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was the famous Oracle vs UsedSoft lawsuit: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/3/3134867/eu-court-of-justic... This basically added jurisprudence that digital downloads can be resold provided that the original is made unusable.

That case was one of the reasons that Adobe and Microsoft switched to a subscription-based model for their software suites.

That makes sense. I also saw some speculation that it's helped accelerate some vendors' efforts to convert customers to cloud offerings. On the other hand, I saw a very insightful analysis that thought vendors fighting this were being short sighted because annual maintenance can often be upwards of 20% of the initial license, and so recipients of second hand software would still be more than making up for the revenue in the not-so-long term.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#169

Post by purple_ducks »

Smithalicious wrote: post #165
purple_ducks wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a great time to separate the billing of license to play from value added things like data storage & bandwidth.

And how do you plan on doing this without any of: - $1 game with $49 infrastructure fixed price that you have to pay on every resale - monthly subscription to play game (which consumers do not like) - "free to play" nonsense

> - $1 game with $49 infrastructure fixed price that you have to pay on every resale

Why would data storage & data bandwidth be upfront fixed price? Bill on usage.

Re: French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

#170

Post by RaleyField »

jboydyhacker wrote: post #87

Surprised to see so much sentiment against this ruling. Digital software sale and distribution is just supposed to make software management easier and faster. A license is the same regardless of wether it's physical or digital. Why shouldn't this apply to resale of said merchandise? I rarely say this- but the French really make a ton of sense here.

Question: If it makes sense for games to be resalable then why not tickets for cinema or concerts? Ianal afaik both are contractual agreements.
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