I hope property rights are accepted as basic human right. No law or contract should deprive a person rights to posess,use, modify and share something they own. If a person comes into lawful posession of any item, unless a lease or rental agreement is in place, that item is fully theirs forever. When someone gives you something and tells you what you can or cannot do with it,they are treating you bound as their sibject,inflicting their will over you. This isn't equal treatment under the law. If you own something, the item no longer bears any relation to the seller, the seller has no authority by whih they can claim rights to that item. The whole point of ownership is that it is full,final and permanent.
This is a main reason why I refuse to use apple products. If I pay $700 for a device without agreeing before hand the terms of posession is confined to renting or lessing a device, if I have a lawful exchange where ownership of the device is transfered to me, then how dare they even think to tell me what to do with it? Regardless of quality,how dare they consider their customers as lesser subjects who pay to be told what do and not do? My breaking point was when the legally restricted what programming language can be used to write code code for the device.
Imagine a cookware company making it illegal to cook a certain food on their line of pans. No amount legal polishing will make this right.
Login to Steam. Go to your profile page, look for "Games Owned"
That is a lie. What it should say is "Licenses Owned".
Their EULA, and any additional you agree to as part of the purchase process make it clear (some do it better than others) that you do NOT own the game. You have a license to play it, and that license can be revoked.
I truly believe in the power of ownership, and have been working very hard to build a service that honors this with respect to media.
14 years ago I started working on it, and have experienced many ups and downs along the way.
Last December I read here about a company called Murfie shutting it's service down and I flew to Wisconsin to save it. I bought the company, aquired all the customers and assets, rebuilt much of their website and saved the million CDs that were in danger.
Now I'm in Arkansas getting a 220,000 sqft warehouse ready to take Murfie to the next level.
It is based on true ownership of physical media, and I'm doing everything possible to truly protect the rights of the owners of these assets.
Perhaps its just semantics, but can you truly "own" a copyrighted work, unless you are the copyright holder?
In the US, first sale doctrine and decades of case law says I can re-sell the spinny plastic disc I get when I buy a movie on DVD, but I'm greatly restricted in what else I can do with it. I cant make copies, I cant show the content publicly, I cant sublicence access to the disc remotely - these are all things the actual owner of the content can do.
I'm very sympathetic to people losing access to digital content, but it seems its fairly clear that wording aside, all copyrighted content is licensed, not sold. The only difference here is that you can use physical media until it wears out, where as digital content can only be used as long as it is made available to you (which in some cases, may be much less than an equivalent physical copy).
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadThis is a main reason why I refuse to use apple products. If I pay $700 for a device without agreeing before hand the terms of posession is confined to renting or lessing a device, if I have a lawful exchange where ownership of the device is transfered to me, then how dare they even think to tell me what to do with it? Regardless of quality,how dare they consider their customers as lesser subjects who pay to be told what do and not do? My breaking point was when the legally restricted what programming language can be used to write code code for the device.
Imagine a cookware company making it illegal to cook a certain food on their line of pans. No amount legal polishing will make this right.
That is a lie. What it should say is "Licenses Owned".
Their EULA, and any additional you agree to as part of the purchase process make it clear (some do it better than others) that you do NOT own the game. You have a license to play it, and that license can be revoked.
Battle.net, Origin and others have the same.
They can take anything away.
14 years ago I started working on it, and have experienced many ups and downs along the way.
Last December I read here about a company called Murfie shutting it's service down and I flew to Wisconsin to save it. I bought the company, aquired all the customers and assets, rebuilt much of their website and saved the million CDs that were in danger.
Now I'm in Arkansas getting a 220,000 sqft warehouse ready to take Murfie to the next level.
It is based on true ownership of physical media, and I'm doing everything possible to truly protect the rights of the owners of these assets.
Related from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250659
In the US, first sale doctrine and decades of case law says I can re-sell the spinny plastic disc I get when I buy a movie on DVD, but I'm greatly restricted in what else I can do with it. I cant make copies, I cant show the content publicly, I cant sublicence access to the disc remotely - these are all things the actual owner of the content can do.
I'm very sympathetic to people losing access to digital content, but it seems its fairly clear that wording aside, all copyrighted content is licensed, not sold. The only difference here is that you can use physical media until it wears out, where as digital content can only be used as long as it is made available to you (which in some cases, may be much less than an equivalent physical copy).