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Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.

You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

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The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.

Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.

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EU parliament unlike nearly every other parliament can't propose legislation, only amend it. That is because it's a fake parliament and the EU is a fake democracy to give the people the illusion that the EU cares about them.
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I think this is going to have unintended consequences if it goes through: funding game development is a very very high risk investment. Adding this type of regulation adds further cost and complication, which makes it an even less attractive investment. Which will result in less monetary and creative risk taken.

Even just open sourcing part of project is expensive. Legal and technical.

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This argument is always pretty weak. All regulation adds cost and complication for companies. If that alone was a good reason to not add regulation, then taken to the logical conclusion, there should be no regulation on companies.

Regulation needs to be seen as a trade-off, for example: We get better behaving companies, and the cost is less risk taken. Then the question becomes "is the benefit worth the cost?"

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I’d go with a simple proposal: if you use the word “buy” the seller is required to refund buyers if the seller’s action removes access (unlike, say, losing access to a CD or DVD after the disc is scratched).

The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.

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I agree, the "buy" on a streamable product implies that as long as the company is solvent and they have the same overall streamable products available, then your "purchase" should always be upheld.

In a an ideal world, if you bought the title then you'd have the ability to download it locally. I understand the licensing is a main driver of taking titles down, but these agreements are completely opaque to the customer at the time of purchase.

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> I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.

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We need consumer boycotts, not legislation. I find it hilarious that people would continue to buy (or license) content from a trash company like Sony after they were caught literally installing rootkits on customer computers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

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> We need consumer boycotts, not legislation.

We need both. 'Buyer Beware' and 'The invisible hand' are necessary but insufficient to correct corporate bad behavior.

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We already have a pretty resilient solution called piracy.
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They’ll be begging for it when they recreate the very piracy problem they were fleeing, but far worse.
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Yeah. This time I'm not living the high seas.

We seen what licensing ala Netflix and Spotify means artists.

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*leaving
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