NY announces game ownership bill requiring ownership rather than licensing

The headline makes it sound like this is specific to NY, but this is a national bill introduced in the House by a NY rep.

Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.

We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.

I hope there's an indie carveout or something for less than like 200k revenue.

And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.

I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point

Consumers always hope that what they gain from a purchase is ownership.

This is amazing. So glad to see stuff like this happening.

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50120101

this is the kinda of stuff ppl should copy around the world

Note the meaning of the original headline is distorted. this is not an NY state law, but an NY member of Congress putting forward federal legislation.

how is this gonna work for those online games like genshin, league, cs etc ????

this bill self deletes on January 3rd

along with everything else introduced that doesn’t go up for vote yet

Personally, this bill makes me want to buy games more. I would likely pirate things much, much, more if everything's "licensed" even if I buy it. I agree with the bill because everyone wins except for the capitalists that want us all permanently renting.

Dupe

A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.

Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.

However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?

A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.

Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.

More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.