Digital sales overwhelmingly use "buy" as the term in their UI, not "rent". Rental is a separate thing, and I don't think roughly anyone is saying rentals should not exist in any form.
(Not universally, but in many cases.)
Too many still think in the old days of buying physical goods, you 'buy' a tin of beans, they are now in all sense my beans.
I'm all for helping people distinguish, when something is a straight forward property transaction, or an agreement based on permisions, constraints and obligations ... a license.
Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there?
Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever. Will that relieve your sense of persecution? Or would just you find another way to cast game publishers as the conniving evil empire (market control, collusion to reduce consumer options, etc.) because they aren't giving you what you want?
Buy a night in a hotel, dinner in a restaurant, haircut, shoe shine. These are all services.
Buying of digital services like games, films, and music is an evolution of buying dvds, cds or records. There is an expectation that you now own something. I can dig out my dad’s old records and play them and pass them onto my children.
If media companies want to sell a license that has an expiry date, that’s fine, but it has to be explicitly communicated. Consumers have to be well informed about what they’re purchasing.
People who aren't overly-online forum denizens only care about this issue insofar as it affects them, and the only way it affects people in the real world is when they lose access to online games when the server shuts down. Offline games don't get access revoked in practice.
What if you lost or otherwise destroyed/damaged the record, should you still have access through some other means or be forced to buy it again?
That's definitely a perk of digital media.
And for the record, I'm not against digital media. There are a ton of benefits. I think there just needs to be better communication of the expectations between producer and consumers. Reading this thread and seeing that California requires the use of "License" instead of "Buy" is a good example of emphasising the difference between paying for digital media and physical media.
Games (and other digital media), are sold as products, not services, mostly.
TFA is arguing this should persist and not be replaced as games as (subscription/licensed rental), services. It argues the move to digital is being used by businesses to switch to a services model under the hood, and that this should be resisted and it should remain a product model.
> Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store?
Demonstrably, provably: yes.
> Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever.
Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected?
Because we have a free market not a command economy? Publishers can sell whatever they want
Games are overwhelmingly not sold as services these days (MMOs being the exception, + a few others). The sale of a game as a product is built into the model of 'give money, get permanent access to game'. If that access is not permanent, then you need to set a time limit there. Subscriptions usually do it per month, but you can do whatever you want, except leave the field blank.
Your suggestions are either:
- make publishers distribute goods without anti-piracy protection
- make buyers pay for games on an ongoing basis rather than just once
Publishers and buyers are generally happy with the current exchange as is even if you aren't. Digital games sales are increasing rapidly ever year while physical sales are declining. Why do you get to be the gaming czar?
They don't have to provide a DRM-free version on day 1 if they don't want to. But they do have to provide for a way to use the game after end of support. Doing anything else is unreasonable.
Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.
Those EULAs often get overturned because the language is often more of a scare tactic against suing them than it is an actual legally binding position.
In terms in consumer protection, at least in UK and Europe (not saying not elsewhere, just don't know much), there is an amount of regulation that tries to help consumers not get screwed in the legalese of these agreements, and some basic protections that can't override.
I'm arguing unfair terms shouldn't be upheld, or really in the agreement in the first place. This is on paper how it should work in Europe, but we (apparently) haven't quite figured that out yet.
When you bought a VHS of a movie, you purchased the video cassette hardware, but also a license which was bundled with that object.
That license explicitly had some constraints on it, such as not broadcasting the IP in a public setting, even calling out specific locations like oil rigs.
Distinguishing between products and service, isn't great, as neither are well defined, and end up back in the same debates.
At the end of the day words have to mean something. It is not pedantry to simply discuss what a word or phrase means. There are false advertising laws for a reason.
To that end, I would argue you've never bought a haircut, you've paid for a service.
The issue at hand here is exactly that the word "buy" is used when discussing the appropriation of a licence for content that in practical terms, is still controlled by someone else.
Maybe there are technical reasons for this to be the case, but then maybe the word "buy" should not be used in this instance.