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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

Can you give an example?

To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is determined based on your actions and the state at the moment they happen. If I say something potentially defamatory about you, it’s judged based on what I knew at the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by a reasonable person at that time.

You can’t rock up later and say “well looking back at this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was false” or that a reasonable person today would think differently about it.

By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally significant games are due some set of societal protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game would meet that threshold when they release the game.

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I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.

Your example seems to agree with me?

Applying different rules based on how many of a physical object a manufacturer produces is 100% something the manufacturer knows at the time they take the action.

If the regulation says "manufacturers have a higher standard for logging safety data for cars where more than 10,000 were produced", the manufacturer knows the new rule applies to them when they choose to build the 10,000th car. They can opt to do or not do that.

The equivalent here would be if we said something like: there are different regulations that apply to car manufacturers if somebody drives one of their cars for more than 10,000 miles. Because in this case, the person making the car has absolutely no clue if or when that will happen.

Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.

>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.

Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.

Having a rule that applies to game developers after they’ve done something, entirely unrelated to anything in their control, is frankly horrifying. “Sorry, you can’t ship any more breaking changes, your game hit a popularity threshold yesterday”.

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