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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Is it within the rights of a company to dictate what software I have installed on my personal machine? If Facebook wants to ban every account using the software that is within their rights, but they don't get a say in what I have installed.

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Different field, but GeForce Now received a lot of cease-and-desist letters from a bunch of game publishers for allowing people to run games on their platform.

For context, GFN lets you essentially rent a virtual machine in the cloud, where you can log in with your own Steam account and play the games that you've already purchased. For whatever reason, game publishers saw it appropriate to demand GFN to stop offering this service. And, more baffling, some users actually suported the publisher's actions. Just to make it clear, GFN is not letting you play games you do not own, they're simply letting you rent hardware on which to play games you've already purchased on Steam.

Here is one of the game devs explaining why they asked GFN to remove the game from their platform (and subsequently getting slammed by gamers): https://mobile.twitter.com/RaphLife/status/12341813158402293...

This is no different than cd.com back in the day. You could rip and upload CDs so you could play your own songs anywhere, and it was immediately shut down by the RIAA. The argument is that streaming doesn't have a doctrine of first sale, even for items you have supposedly "bought" at full price, so publishers get total control over anything that is streamed. The government and the courts have agreed.

In this case though, the license on Steam follows your account on the platform and not a single time downloaded digital or physical copy.

So the lack of license argument doesn't make sense. At best they can put an explicit term in the license that the game can't run from servers you rent access to, or equivalent. But then that has to already be in the license.

I don't remember the name of the company but there was a video streaming service that worked similarly a decade or so ago with remotely playing DVDs. They were sued out of business despite going to extreme lengths to follow copyright laws. That legal precedent was probably used here to block GFN.

The one I recall was about streaming OTA transmissions captured from individual antennas, one per user, essentially renting remote access to the antennas. The court essentially said relaying the stream is a new broadcast and needs its own broadcast license.

"Devs should control where their games exist."

That seems rather questionable. It is probably the snarkiest tweet I have ever read.

Not too long ago I remember people on this exact site making the argument that Slack had a right to determine what browser extensions I ran. Slack also tried to make this argument in the name of "security" when I wrote to them about it. But yes to your point, NO they do not get a say in what users install.

  Thank you for taking the time to write in and share 
  your concerns.
  We hear you and understand how important this issue is 
  to developers. As a communication company we want to 
  make sure we don't put our customers and their data at 
  risk, and it's something we take very seriously. We 
  provide a full-featured platform with many avenues for 
  improving user experience while working with Slack, but 
  we need to also provide the security and privacy 
  controls business owners, IT administrators, and users 
  expect. We're happy to continue the conversation about 
  UX improvements and future extensions to the platform. 
  This is something we'll keep working on as we listen to 
  feedback from the developer community.


  That is a cop out and you know it. An it administrator 
  or corporate is not using this extension and they would 
  lock down their users from installing BROWSER 
  extensions if they thought that was a security risk. 


  Thanks for getting back to me. I appreciate your 
  thoughts on this matter.
  I'd like to pose a hypothetical to you if you don't 
  mind! Bearing in mind Slack is a product designed to 
  help teams work together and is geared towards business 
  and enterprises — imagine for a second we're working 
  with an enterprise considering adopting Slack and their 
  security team comes across this extension (or something 
  like it) — and identifies it as a 
  security/privacy/reliability concern. Our job is to 
  alleviate these concerns. They expect better from us 
  and we're doing our best to meet and even exceed those 
  expectations. We're certainly not perfect and we can 
  always do better — for businesses big and small and for 
  developers.
  It is important to note here, we're learning from this 
  experience. We're working with the developer to find a 
  middle-ground which is beneficial to everyone involved. 
  We're reevaluating our processes for these situations. 
  We're listening to feedback from users such as yourself 
  and identifying areas we could improve.
  I understand this has been a disappointing and 
  frustrating situation and I do apologise for any 
  difficulty it has caused you. I promise you, we're 
  working on it. I for one am very excited to see what 
  comes from this. It's been a learning opportunity for 
  us all.
  Let me know if you have any questions, or suggestions. 
  I'm here to help!

No it's not. However, they didn't send a cease-and-desist letter to the users that installed the plugin. They sent the letter to the researchers that built the plugin that uses the service Facebook offers in a way that is against Facebook's wishes. Therefore, technically, the letter is going to the correct party and for the right reasons.

Mind, I'm saying 'technically'. Ethically, I think Facebook (and other big social tech) should be researched more. In legal ways, this is how they should handle this.

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