Babysteps? Maybe if it is about video games, the old people won't know enough about it and pass it, which would make it easier to expand to any digital software.

Scoped in a way to get press and hopefully positive attention before voting starts in a week or so.

Agreed, but if passed it would set a significant precedent that would surely have to flow onto all/other digital media.

Knockout City handled their closure wonderfully releasing a final version that would let players run their own servers. Removed some licensed cosmetics to make it possible.

The Crew 2 after backlash from Crew 1 released an offline mode.

Those two games are great examples of the bare minimum that leaves people happy without needing to support a game indefinitely.

Server code should come with the game from day 1, like it used to back in the '90s.

The timing and the rest of the guy's record seem to confirm your cynicism.

Also, once again, this is a whack-a-mole approach, trying to legislate every individual symptom caused by the lack of consumer protections against rent-seeking, rather than regulating industries to forbid their cause. In a world where bad-faith action is a standard business procedure, we have to explicitly legally define words like "own" and "purchase", because they'll say they mean something else if we don't.

If a bad person supports a good cause, that doesn't make the cause bad.

Consider ebooks. Amazon has revoked and deleted ebooks that people paid for. They've ironically done it to 1984. And I think even to people living in countries where 1984 is public domain.

It's not that they can't treat games like books, it's that they don't want to. And they don't want to treat books like books either; they just don't have any control over the physical object once it leaves their hands. And before everything became downloads, games used to come on a CD, cartridge or cassette, and you could sell that just like you could sell a book, and they were powerless to prevent it. But with everything being downloads and always online, they have that power, so they use it.

It's not that games can't work as books, it's that books can't work like games.

Trust me, if book publishers could keep you from actually owning a physical book, from reselling it, from photocopying it, from lending it to a friend, they would. And with ebooks they do.

The fact that games are software gives publishers additional capabilities and control over the product, and they take advantage of that control to limit user control whenever possible. You just can't do that with a pile of paper bound together, otherwise they would.

This is where legislation can come in though. We need to make it legally clear that when you buy something you really own it. Renting, leasing, licensing, these ideas aren't bad on their own, but you can't call that "buying" and the venue offering these services shouldn't be called a "store". If it's called a store, it needs to be actually selling things, otherwise the entire business is disingenuous and deceptive.

You do own the game, for most games sold on GoG. (Not the copyright assignment. The "game", or "copy of the game", however you want to refer to it.) If you buy a game as a disc, in a store, you own it until you take it home and find an EULA contract that takes away that ownership. I don't believe a clickwrap contract has any legitimate effect, but I don't think the courts would be on my side.

dunno. the only people i've met who like Anything-as-a-Service don't exist. i've never met anyone who likes that shit.

You are right, but also fuck them. They didn't invent the code or the concepts. They paid for other's works and pretend it is theirs. Software is an amalgamation of so much before it. Pretending you own it when it really is the work of tens of thousands of people is silly in a way.

How would you fix it?