With the end of physical PlayStation games looming, the need for clear digital ownership rights is more pressing than ever.
For its part, Sony believes your rights are very clear: you do not own your digital games, and it’s unlikely you’re stupid enough to believe otherwise. At least, that’s roughly the argument the company’s lawyers are presenting in response to a proposed class-action lawsuit.
Sony argues that its current customer-facing disclosures ensure that “reasonable consumers would not be misled” into believing they actually own their digital games. That’s according to a Game File report (paid article link) citing an August 21 filing Sony’s lawyers made in California’s Northern District.
If we don’t own games then we should just rent them for a small fee and then when done, cancel service
I was gonna buy a new PlayStation but now I’m not.
Did they teach this in business school? Repulsing customers for profit.
I’m really against the idea of buying any new consoles at this point.
Xbox had a good thing for casuals like me with gamepass. Its very rare I have the drive to replay a game unless it’s solely out of nostalgia…and I find it hard to get “into” a game, so gamepass was perfect for people like me…at the old price point.
Now? Hell nah.
Nintendo made having more than one Switch super fucking annoying if you have a lot of digital games. God forbid you ever want to take one of your portable systems out of the house to play a game, you have to make sure it’s released from the other system first.
And now this crap with Sony.
I feel especially burnt by Nintendo because I still want their exclusives damnit.
I bought a switch 2 on points because of duskbloods. I have 3 switch lites and a regular switch. I kinda stopped playing for a while and missed the whole virtual card thing until I fired up my new switch 2. So enraged I almost threw it at the window. Luckily 90% of my frames are physical though. But ya the proximity and having them online is bullshit. It’s the same problem I gave with Netflix. Driving somewhere with no WiFi or cell dead zones? Don’t assume those saved videos with play!
Before virtual card, a lot of my switch games were virtual, and it worked well for us.
I was okay with the risk of a license being revokable for any reason, tbh, because I found that to be lower than the risk of my kid losing a game cart.
I’ve been proven right at least once…Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which I reluctantly bought because I really wanted to play Galaxy and Sunshine…but I digress. Pretty sure he lost the Forgotten Land cart too.
Now tho? I’ll take that chance, to hell with the odds. The amount of times I can’t play a game because it’s on the other switch that’s offline is too damn high.
God damnit Nintendo, convenience is like, the #1 selling point of digital games, and you somehow managed to completely screw the pooch on it.
It’s the kind of anti-consumer practice that drives me mad and honestly justifies piracy far, far more than it disuades it.
And on top of that, it was a rug pull. Meaning it cost my trust in Nintendo as a brand, and really brought to the forefront of my attention the limitations of digital games across the whole industry. A real “we’ve altered the terms of our agreement, pray we don’t alter them further” moment.
So, ya know, thanks for that Nintendo. Hope it was worth it.
Emulation on older consoles is pretty sweet, I’m getting my fix that way
Oh yeah, for sure. I’d been playing with emulators since I was a kid and discovered Nesticle.
I just found out about The RomM Project and really want to set it up in my homelab.
That’s a super sick project! I think my favorite part about emulation is how accessible it’s become because of projects like that
And this is why I’ve shelved my PS5 until the hacking community catches up to my firmware and lets me modify my console as I want. Please hurry guys. I’d help with the task but sadly I’m useless at coding and software.
if only one person can buy GTA 6, how can more than one person rent GTA 6?
Son it’s time we talked about fractional reserve banking
The answer is always the human centipede
Patient gaming in a nutshell.
It’s not Lupus.
So lets say one person owns it then through the magic of technology everybody else is playing their shared version
I just checked with my wife, giving her no context other than checking out, having paid for a game. She doesn’t understand and said it’s a bunch of bullshit. She doesn’t even play games, she just gets them for someone else as a gift.
Apparently you can’t gift a game because it’s never yours to give.
Oh really? Then it’s not a store, and it’s not a sale. It’s a leasing office and a lease.
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t theft.
Exactly
Piracy has never been theft
Good point. Don’t say we’re buying it. They use the terminology of ownership when you’re paying money.
Somehow, Blockbuster returned.
Actually this is an alright solution.
They should be forced to change the name of their platform if they want to keep using it. They should be barred from using the term “store”.
They can either continue their business model as is, (as “PlayStation Leasing”) or they can change their policy to include full ownership of games and the right to transfer the games they own to other accounts.
But they don’t get to call it a “store” or use words like “buy” or “sale” if that’s not what they’re actually offering.
Absolutely
They should be barred from using the term “store”.
While I agree with the intent, this would definitely be a losing legal argument, since “store” has a long and common history of usage for rental outlets (“hey, let’s go to the video store tonight and rent a movie”). I think that not allowing them to use the terms “buy” and “sale” could stand as a legal argument, since I don’t believe that there are any examples of people using them when they mean to rent something.
(“hey, let’s go to the video store tonight and rent a movie”)
Well that’s interesting. I’ve never actually heard someone call it that. I mean, I get your point, but actually, if anything I think people tended to call it the rental shop.
But then, even at video rental places they at least did also sold things, movies and candy. So even if they did call themselves a store, those rental places would actually qualify more as a store than a digital content distributor would.
I understand that it was likely not the same in every English-speaking place (rental shop makes it sound like you may be in the UK?), but it was very common usage in the US. It was also used this way even for video rental places that pretty much did nothing else other than rent videos. I don’t know what the origin of this usage was though.
The point that I’m making is that in the eyes of a theoretical jury or judge, this example would be an easy way to demonstrate that “store” didn’t imply that you were actually buying the items in it. Like I said, I agree with the intent, but just don’t think it would fly legally. But who knows, I’m not a lawyer!
I do sincerely hope that if it were to come to the point where a court agrees that consumers are not actually “buying” the items, that they will force the vendors to stop using the terms “buy”, “sale”, and “purchase”. But who am I kidding, that probably won’t happen.
Oh no, I’m from the US, East Coast. I’ve literally never heard anyone say rental store. But that’s fine, doesn’t really matter.
You could still be right, it would probably be possible to convince a judge that this is just common usage. That said, it might be worth trying anyway. You never get any change if you don’t try. And we have the slight advantage of being right.
Ah yes, because I own my pair of jeans, or my hoodie, I’m the only person in the world with a pair of jeans and a hoodie…
You are also unable to thrift them or donate them because they are licensed to you. Also we maybe take them back when we discontinue the style.
A book would be better example.
You might not own the IP, but you sure as hell own an object containing that IP, which you have an eternal, irrevocable and transferrable license to use.
A book … which you have an eternal, irrevocable and transferrable license to use.
Bezos in 1994: “And I took that personally”
This right here. The existence of carriers is what has always allowed people to own copies of things they themselves did not create.
Digital “sales” are using mediation to outright ignore that fact that ideas must be expressed in a physical manner for sale. And yes, digital files are physical as long as they continue to be written to storage media like hard drives and tape. Selling access licenses is what they are doing (and I’m okay with that when the companies doing it aren’t asshats about it.) but they also need to stop derailing the discourse with statements about how “we’ve never owned anything ever because we’re not the copyright holder!”
All of this just demonstrates how much IP law has lagged behind and how abusive corporate IP holders are when exploiting loopholes and faulty mental models.
If that’s so obvious, then why not state it clearly on the packaging?
Right, like, how “owning” a car means that you need to purchase the entire means of production required to produce said car, including all patents and trademarks.
This guy is somehow multi-rail drifting his pseudo-capitalist argument with like, a cartoon version of communism. It’s like he dropped acid and decided to become Frankenstein’s Economist.
Or if you buy a print copy of a famous art work you some how don’t own it because it’s a copy?
Or a book is a good analogue. I can own a copy of a book, a reprint. It’s mine.
sony’s even considered a game publisher… ya know, just like random house is a book publisher.
That’s not what ownership of digital copies means, fuckshits.
Do they want piracy? Because that’s how you make it morally legitimate.
Just do it.
Morally compulsory I’d say. Don’t give them a dime
With the way copywrong laws are, its always been morally legitimate.
I sure the FO that Nintendo just got happens to Sony while they’re in FA mode. There is historical data proving that what I bought is mine and I can sell/share/give to someone else.
Following that logic, pirating software is quite all right, no one is stupid enough to believe someone loses if they make a copy.
Not just software. Anything digital that is protected by copyright. Sony has massive media holdings in the television, movie, and music industries. Here’s Wikipedia’s list of assets owned by Sony.
Sony can’t speak for everybody who owns a copyright, but it does seem like they’re making the sort of argument where the logical end result is that they’re giving everybody permission to copy any Sony media without paying.
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open vs code: my_hello_world.py
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ctrl+a, ctrl+c
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ctrl+n, ctrl+v, ctrl+shift+s: your_hello_world.py
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???
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mop up lawyer brains from the floor bc their heads would explode 🤯
You lost me at “open vs code”
Fair
He meant vim
In case you’re not joking or for others who don’t know:
“vs code” is “Visual Studio Code”, which is a common code editor many use to program.
In case you are joking.
Why the hell is everything such a pain to do in vs code? You have to know the magic commands to type for everything it’s insane
I write in Ruby and VS Code is incredibly annoying to work with. It always assumes I want some ugly language’s formatting; no thank you.
Seriously. I write in c# mostly these days and I’m like, screw your conventions. I want my snake case and non capitalized variable names. It makes sense to me. And vs code tries to push var/new so you can’t tell what a variable is typed as easily. It’s so annoying.
I was joking; I actually quite like it in the form of codium (fuck Microsoft). I do appreciate the response.
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This makes my choice to stop at the ps3 a very good choice.
