Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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