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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything.

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?

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Most of the World understands the difference between buying a product and buying a service.

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?

An online server is a service. People don't lose access to offline games, generally speaking.

> 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

Then they can stop pretending and actually sell it as a service. What they're doing now is doing one thing (selling it as a product), while getting the benefits of the other (selling it as a service).

That is what I suggested. The other poster said what you are suggesting shouldn't be allowed, not me.

That's not how I read your suggestions. Your suggestion to just rename the action, which isn't helpful. You're still buying a licence, one that is nominally permanent, meaning it's a product, on the same level as a CD or whatever.

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.

Evergreen licenses are incredibly common when selling software, not just games.

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?

With renewal comes repayment, and there's still a set date when you renew. WoW is a service that works like that. The vast majority of games don't use evergreen licences, nor should they, since they usually aren't a service.

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.

> Publishers can sell whatever they want.

Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.

Using the word "Buy" to mean buy a license, then having an agreement where the details of the license are explained isn't fraud lol

That agreement can be filled with unfair terms, and often is. I'd call that fraud.

Organize a class action then if you believe so. Fraud is illegal

I would if I had money.

Instead of a class action after the fact, what if we tried prevention... say, some form of regulation?

Class actions are often barred by EULAs in favor of arbitration. Even if they're allowed, they are prohibitively expensive because courts aren't growing to meet demand, meaning justice is largely pay-to-play.

> Class actions are often barred by EULAs in favor of arbitration.

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.

But the issue is those terms are laid out in the agreement, and you willingly agreed to those terms, so what are arguing for is to welch on the deal you accepted?

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.

> so what are arguing for is to welch on the deal you accepted?

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.

If the terms are unfair, then don't agree to them, that is a consumer choice, don't agree to agreements you disagree with!

People agree to fraud all the time. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get their money back.

No not really.

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.

You can pay for services and you may use the term “buy”, but it is clear you’re receiving a service, and a service in its nature is temporary.

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.

Access to an online server is clearly a service, hence the word "server"

The discussion is not just about online multiplayer games though, it’s about games in general. There is no good reason why buying a singleplayer offline game need be a “service”.

There IS a reason they don't make it possible to download the game copies directly, which is it becomes trivially easy to perfectly replicate and distribute new copies online, which is not true of any physical good.

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.

Yeah, I can’t actually think of any contracts besides media licenses that are fixed payment for access to a resource for an indeterminate length of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it.

> I can dig out my dad’s old records and play them and pass them onto my children.

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?

I think that's on you. I'd expect it to be on me. If I bought another physical product (a bike, football, scissors, knives), I'd expect to buy a replacement if I couldn't fix it.

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.

> This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

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