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Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

What exactly are they stealing from you? If you bought a car in the 1970's and the company doesn't make parts for it anymore is that theft? What obligation do they have to maintain?

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That is a poor analogy as you could still pull parts from other cars and repair and continue to use the car after the manufacturer stops creating replacements.

A better analogy would be: If you bought a car in 1970 and the company stopped making the super special fuel blend that they have a patent on and no one else is allowed to produce, making your car unusable. Is that theft?

>you could still pull parts from other cars and repair and continue to use the car after the manufacturer stops creating replacements.

Same can be said about software. People create aftermarket parts just the same as they create third party server implementations.

And then people who create third party server implementations get sued into oblivion. https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

I think yours is a good analogy. Original creators have no obligations whatsoever, they have to maintain the server part for a time, and that's it. People might be up about it, but they should realize that this is part of the original deal. Closed source and software as service models naturally work like this, and it's not entirely the manufacturer's fault that people get the short end like this. They had the short end to begin with. And it's not like it's unreasonable to sunset a game from the early 2000s, with server and other features right in the open. People can and do run the stuff themselves just fine.

Nobody's forcing them to maintain anything. They're the ones keeping it hostage and stopping others from maintaining it.

physical analogies make absolutely no sense in the digital space.

They do make sense as almost all laws are written with physical things in mind.

IP laws address non-physical things.

Consumer Rights Act (UK, 2015) has specific inclusion of digital goods. We can't be the only country doing that.

They make perfect sense in this scenario. A game company is paying for physical hardware, electricity, bandwidth, etc. to run the game server(s). Hardware fails and older OS may not work on new HW. Or the game server software may not work on newer OS, especially if there is custom C++/networking code that was compiled against an older OS version. Maybe they are looking at very long list of security vulnerabilities that are un-patched because shit is old.

Its irrational to think a company is going to keep game servers running forever and that somehow they are "stealing" from you because you purchased something nearly 20 years ago.

More like, they decide to stop supporting the car, so they come to your house and take the distributor cap (ECU would be a better analogy) and there response is "well you should have known we only license the distributor cap".

You buy a car in the '70 and when they stop making parts, they come to your house and crush your perfectly working car.

Yes, doesn't make sense, then again not less than your analogy.

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