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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of reclaiming the word "buy" to only be the traditional type of ownership transfer (first sale doctrine or whatever if it's a copyrighted thing). Mandate the use of the word "license" or "rent" if it's something else

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Exactly. Conflating buying with renting indefinitely, without resale ability, is a deliberate way of confusing people for profit. My younger, more naive self, might have been surprised at just how long society has allowed this to slide.

Mark Lemley's Terms of Use paper (2006) outlines how property law/right (rights of us citizens) have been eroded steadily by contract law (what other people say they can do to us). It's so sad for technology to be so very strongly affiliated with such a critical defilement of the human spirit as this. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926

It's so sad that there have been so very few legal efforts to bolster property rights, to reassert some sovereign claim over the things we have about us & that fill our homes. In fact, the opposite keeps happening: anti-circumvention laws spread like the plague they are, making any attempt to exercise one's property right a felony offense.

This is murdering the human spirit. Man the toolmaker's god-granted rare ability to understand the world about us, to model & learn, and then to adapt & alter is trapped in an infernal legal hell. What's happening is against my spiritual beliefs & is so terrible to suffer, is such high tragedy.

Good point. It really flies in the face of the First Sale Doctrine when a game company says "you buy the game" when it's just a license, because if you had bought the game, then the FSD would apply (gloriously) in so many ways.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Is there a better word for this sort of transaction (non-resellable, arbitrary cancellation of service at some unknown point in time by some entities)?

“License” seems too legal, and implies either a lifetime license or fixed term license, which is different than a “we’ll shut down game servers whenever we feel like it”

“Rent” already has a different meaning that is commonly understood.

Is there any suitable existing word? Maybe the awkward phrase “revocable at any time license”?

"Lease" perhaps?

> lease - a contract renting land, buildings, etc., to another; a contract or instrument conveying property to another for a specified period or for a period determinable at the will of either lessor or lessee in consideration of rent or other compensation.

Lease is pretty similar to rent in my mind — you're getting a product for either a fixed period or for as long as you keep making regular payments, neither of which applies here.

I don't think there'd be consumer confusion if they sold it as an 80 year lease for $60. Maybe backlash.

Leases come in all different shapes, forms and conditions. To replace what the companies misleadingly call "Buy" today, they terms would just be "Pay X up front and get access until we cannot provide the service anymore for X,Y,Z reasons".

In many places, ground/land is leased that way, where you pay a sum up-front and are allowed full ownership for 99 years or something like that.

"Pay upfront, lease product X and purchase accompanying recurring services provided for product X", maybe?

> you're getting a product for either a fixed period [...] neither of which applies here.

Typically, as a practical matter, the license ends with your death. You can't pass your kindle ebooks and steam games as inheritance like you can with physical books and game discs.

It will be interesting to see this challenged in court, because it's a clear violation of the first sale doctrine.

In any event you are within both your moral and legal rights, in the USA at least, to backup any software you have purchased and you should do so if you care about it.

And nobody is going to be able to stop you from leaving those backups to your kids.

It is interesting though how the software business has managed to, via the courts, meme software licenses into existence. The simple fact is that under written US law no license is required to run software you have acquired a lawful copy of. The law explicitly gives you the right to make additional copies as necessary to execute the program. Case law of course is another matter. And lawfare is another matter on top of that. Who wants to spend the rest of their life being sued by Adobe because they want to sell a copy of photoshop they no longer use?

Ah, true!

I think lease actually applies as the fixed period of supported ownership is until they take the servers down or they drop support which could happen before you even unwrap.

I think they should also remove “buy“ from any software requiring external servers.

I think they'd just switch from Buy to Pay. For what? For whatever ... so you can play now.

Revocable license, temporary use, indefinite borrow?

There’s no good word because it’s not a reasonable position.

Apple uses “Get”.

I would also endorse glittering animated buttons labeled "I CAN HAZ ?"

Maybe a "conditional allowance" (noting that the conditions may be vague, and likely vary among products/companies) would be more in line with what's happening?

Doesn't really roll off the tongue though.

Privilege

> I like the idea of reclaiming the word "buy"

Yes. Now let's do "steal."

I feel like a related motion could have a transformative effect on how individuals approach and societies react to "ownership" of financed things (e.g., cars and homes).

Keep it simple and just use the word rent. No need to complicate it.

“Rent until we choose to not allow you to access it for a one time payment of $x”.

Idk, I think "rent" and "license" have different meanings. Modern definitions of "rent" include periodicity into the definition, which is at odds with the "one time until we shut off the servers" definition. I agree with the GP on the terminology for these reasons.

The whole point is to highlight, for the lay consumer, the periodicity of their purchase, regardless of the periodicity of payments. And hopefully create market pressure for sellers to sell things rather than rent them.

Fair, I can get behind that reasoning

I “rented” a movie on Apple TV last night. I’m quite confident I won’t be paying again in 30 days :)

That is good reason to not use "rent" because it is already used in industry for short fixed-term rental.

The button should say rent: 1 day or 7 days or “until we choose to no longer give you access”.

It should say "rent product and purchase accompanying one-time and recurring services".

I'm afraid that the connotations around rent (namely monthly payments) would only encourage the worst publishers to only go further.

No one is renting a game for $70/month.

Not sure of the cost of MMORPG, but at one stage they were like $12-$14, and Everquest even had a server that was lived for a couple of years, legend, where it was like $40/month, a bit pay-to-win server...I mean with a better CS support.

> but at one stage they were like $12-$14

they (the ones that are subscription) still are.

And most of them have micro-transactions on top of that as well. Some will give you a (very) limited number of micro-transaction currency-units per month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_pass_(video_games)

Not yet!

Absolutely! Markets evolve, see, for example, nobody was willing to pay on things like Siri, and now millions of folks are spending 25 USD/month on Siri+.

EDIT: sorry, just came from the future.

$50 up front and $10/month...

Sellers are smarter than that, they already go as far as they think buyers will let them. It is the buyers who need elucidation.

If you solution involves getting the general population to do something or "be better" somehow, it's not a practical solution.

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