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Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

We have this thing called a "society" which is empowered to make rules collectively. One way it is empowered to make rules.is through "laws" and "regulations". Amazingly, these things can and do work, often much better than free market capitalism.

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Ah, yes, the secret 11th commandement, "Nintendo shalt not shut down the online services of their video games."

Stepping in with regulation doesn't necessarily imply forced support. It could be more like "though shalt not claim copyright over a game thou hast ceased to support, and thou shalt remove all security barriers from thine code when thou chooseth to cease supporting it".

Every action has costs. Laws and regulations will exhibit costs, sometimes hidden costs until the law is actually in place.

And? I'm sure Right-to-repair has far more costs and that got passed.

When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves.

Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.

Concretely, I think this sounds like a combination between AGPL-like "server must have source code" and the data portability law in the GDPR.

I agree, though I don't understand what this has to do with capitalism. Copyright and DRM is supported by laws themselves. And archivist efforts are often voluntary.

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