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California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If you don't retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like "buy" or "purchase" on the store page button. I hope there aren't huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there's no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not really.

EDIT: On re-reading it, there may be huge holes in it. Like if they just "clearly tell you" how little you're getting when you buy it, they can still say "buy" and "purchase".

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.

Yeah, that's because you own the property, not the intellectual property. This is copyright law, not an affront to your ownership. When you "buy" a movie digitally on Amazon, you're only buying access to their copy of the movie. Amazon bought the right to distribute it to you. When that contract expires, they can't distribute it to you anymore. That's why it's not ownership. When you buy a game on GOG, you download the installer, and they cannot take it away from you, no matter how hard they try; that's their whole shtick.

But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.

Someone has probably explained the above to you before.

[–] bitfucker 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

On the basis of technicality, it will depend very wildly on the ToC of said intellectual property. As you said, GOG just distributes the installer and that is it, the IP holder can technically revoke your/GOG license if that is in the ToC somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So what if they did? Are they going to give me a court summons to destroy my copy and all of my backups of the game? I don't think so.

[–] bitfucker 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, hence why I said that technically the license can be revoked. Enforcing that is another matter. Without going into the weeds, we need to rethink how to handle it. At minimum, we need to make sure that if the license is revoked not from breaking ToS, the Copyright/IP holder must refund the purchase too. The copyright/ip holder still has the right to their creation but the consumer is also protected via those refund. It is indeed not bulletproof but whether you like it or not, copyright/ip protection is needed to some extent.