The Disc as Dongle | Hacker News Reader

The Disc as Dongle

interuserface.net

8 pointsmortenjorck3 comments

"Why does it have to be a disc? Why does a console need a noisy, mechanically complex, and expensive optical drive just to read a license? Professional software has long used USB peripherals, or dongles as they are semi-affectionately known, as the physical manifestation of licenses. The disc has become a dongle, so why not just use a dongle?"

Why not take it a step further and use a digital licensing scheme which achieves the same purpose without the inconvenience of a dongle? There can be an industry-wide standard that aims to replicate the benefits of physical disc ownership (loaning out/renting the disc, selling/buying used, etc...), but in digital form. If you don't trust companies to do it right, get the government involved.

Microsoft said this very thing at the launch of the Xbox One and got murdered by industry press (and the Pawn Shop syndicate that should just die already). Steam stole some of the ideas from that and got huge accolades (in part because Steam already fought the Pawn Shop syndicate and was already seen to be outside their grasp, whereas consoles are not).

Maybe it would take government involvement to straighten out this mess of moneyed interests, make an equitable "digital buyers rights" standard. It's too bad most governments don't seem interested in getting in the way of the current moneyed interests here. The GDPR had the opportunity to address some of it and intentionally kicked the can down the road.

(My personal hobby horse here is to remind people that we desperately need "digital estate planning" and to consider inheritance/trust/benefactor rights for digital ownership. Right now most digital account systems in their Terms of Service agreements explicitly expire with the death of the account owner, and there's going to be a lot of ugly battles over "dad's Steam account", "grandma's Movies Anywhere library", "sister's Kindle library" etc in the coming future, and none of the current laws are prepared to handle that.)

One can imagine a future where small, solid-state dongles are circulated with software licenses - such as, as discussed in the article, for games, and the software itself is downloaded separately. But for that matter, why not have those licenses be electronic cryptographic tokens, which could be freely transferred between users as gift or sale? (Doesn't need to be blockchain, just centrally-administered infrastructure). Here's why: the software companies are doing just fine selling revokable, non-transferrable electronic software licenses that users can't trade freely.

I'd love to see that change, maybe through legislation. But hardware dongles, while maybe more secure, aren't needed to make it happen.

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