Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales

This is excellent news! Remember, if you buy a copy of a good, you’re entitled to enjoy it as long as you wish to. If the seller steals it back from you, it’s ethical to acquire a replacement copy.<p>The law may say differently, but you cannot convince me that I don’t own something I bought through a “buy” button. I’ve never seen a book or movie or game or album where the button says “License” instead of “Buy”.

Extremely welcome legislation, especially since it has an exception for &quot;permanent download that can be accessed offline&quot;, ie. DRM-free downloads. It&#x27;s about time someone actually calls out Big Media on their deceptive practices. As I&#x27;ve been saying for years, it&#x27;s not &quot;buying&quot; with DRM-encumbered media, merely &quot;renting for an undefined time period&quot;.<p>In fact, it&#x27;d be even nicer if the legislation explicitly required rental terminology to be used for anything DRM-encumbered, but well, even as-is, this is an extremely welcome development and I hope legislators worldwide are taking note and plan to follow suit as soon as possible. This kind of victory for digital consumer rights has been long overdue!

Hm, wonder if the Stop Killing Games campaign (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stopkillinggames.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stopkillinggames.com&#x2F;</a>) will be able to make use of this, like they&#x27;re trying to make use of consumer protection law in France...

Maybe I have misunderstood the article, but for me it looks like another „cookies” law.<p>They are not proposing to force media companies to make sure you have access to your media forever. Or force them to give you a downloadable copy when they remove media from store. They’ll just replace „Buy” button with „Get Access” or whatever and add some lawyer mumbo-jumbo above it.<p>Looks like a smokescreen to me.

Ownership always had a meaning. Selling things for purchase and then treating it as a limited license is fraud. Even under existing law. How about we hold all these companies accountable for the rug pull?

If I&#x27;m reading the text of the law correctly [0], this does not go nearly far enough.<p>(b)(2)(A) seems to say that all an entity needs to do to comply with the law is to add a checkbox associated with some text that links to the EULA for the software, and also says &quot;By checking this box, you acknowledge that you have read the EULA and know that access to the software will be revoked if you no longer hold a right to the software&quot;.<p>Most folks are never going to read the EULA, and no reasonable person would expect that a button that says &quot;BUY&quot; would seal a deal that permits the &quot;seller&quot; to unilaterally revoke the customer&#x27;s right to the &quot;sold&quot; software.<p>[0] &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legiscan.com&#x2F;CA&#x2F;text&#x2F;AB2426&#x2F;id&#x2F;2966792" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legiscan.com&#x2F;CA&#x2F;text&#x2F;AB2426&#x2F;id&#x2F;2966792</a>&gt;

It does feel like a lot of this enforcement will need to be in the spirit of the law and&#x2F;or general deterrence. I would assume any sufficiently specific law in this space would be fairly easy to find a loophole or workaround for in your UI.

I wonder if Steam and GOG will become different.<p>Also kindle.<p><i>&quot;Additionally, it&#x27;s OK to advertise a digital good if access isn&#x27;t ever revoked, such as when users purchase a permanent download that can be accessed offline, regardless of a seller&#x27;s rights to license the content.&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;ve played steam games offline, only to have something expire at some point, preventing the games from launching.<p>No such issue with GOG.<p>This might even differentiate individual games.<p>For kindle, some books (tor?) have a paragraph &quot;this bookis distributed without digital rights management&quot;<p>Could a download of this book differentiate buy vs license?

This is amazing, thank god people are fighting for my rights.

I think eventually the games industry will settle on something like music royalties. Game companies will get some amount of money per-play.

Great, hope this extends elsewhere.

Imagine writing so awful and unethical software that it triggers law to be created to ban it.

Do they charge &#x2F; pay sales tax on in-game purchases?

When you see FUD, you see FUD, but you chose to ignore it, i can&#x27;t be the only one to see it, it&#x27;s in plain text, in the title

Did they have to add a label that the goods may give them cancer?