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> Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democracies. Kings were the ultimate rent-seekers: every citizen was the product.

It's really not. Opposing rent-seeking in a general sense isn't what motivated the American revolution; and the King of England in the 18th century wasn't primarily a rent-seeker. The royal family did and does own a great deal of land in Britain which they collect rents on, but this is true of a lot of the historic and current British nobility; and the institution of the British monarchy was and is doing a lot of other things socially that just have no relationship to rent-seeking one way or the other. Ruling monarchs aren't "rent-seekers" where their citizens are "products", except insofar as any government of any group of people is; and I think that's way too reductive a way to explain why societies and governments work the way they do.

Rent-seeking is a temptation that all sorts of people under all sorts of political and economic systems are prone to. Democracy is no particular guard against it, because people who benefit from rent-seeking in some particular set of circumstances can vote too.

This isn't to say that rent-seeking is good, but it's also a pretty hard thing to regulate. It's really hard to codify in law which economic activities are rent-seeking and which ones are people buying a product or service that someone else thinks is a bad deal for them.

Members of parliament who owned stock in the East India company bailing it out by allowing it to sell tea directly to the American colonies?

No taxation without representation?

Also: Those ownership/privacy obligations to customers should come first in bankruptcy proceedings, ahead of other debts.

IANABankrupcyLawyer, but I believe the status-quo is that various promises like "we'll open-source the server in the end" or "we'll never sell your data" can become voided in the name of making a buck to repay the landlord or business-partner.

Reasonable compromise: do this or your copyright is voided.

I think the obligation should be transfer to the copyright holder in the case of bankruptcy. They can then choose to either make individual buyers whole or give up copyright protection.

That might work for static videos and music where the thing isn't interactive, but I don't think it maps cleanly to things like games with an online component, or "we won't sell your private data" SaaS promises.

For example, imagine an MMO, where the buyer says: "I want the trademark and the copyright to all textures and 3D models, but I am not buying the copyright to the source code because I'm going to make a sequel."

>>I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for.

This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).

(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)

a) no one said it was easy. I'd just like some progress on it instead of another 30 years of slowly losing rights to things I buy.

b) yes, there are more important regulations to take into account. But governments also deal with hundreds of proposals. I can want proper digital ownership and still care about building more housing, creating stronger labor protections, and overhaulijg urban development.

A simple law: everything the customer buys must always behave *in favor of the customer over anything else*. If the product/service contradicts this, it must be fully stated before the purchase and cannot be updated. <= This would be a sane balance.

Depending on how you (you specifically) are defining "fully stated":

1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.

2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.

> This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA. Yes, but they "reserve the right" to update whenever, making it pointless

> "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause. I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way. What's lacking is the will.

> I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way.

That's precisely the problem here. You're "sure" that a problem you don't actually fully understand is trivially solved in a simple manner, when the reality is that this sort of thing is incredibly complicated, and there's a multitude of reasons and competing interests that have resulted in the current equilibrium.

This is the sort of change that requires a country's laws to have to be rewritten from the ground-up, because it invalidates so many assumptions. It's the sort of thing you typically need a constitutional amendment (or at least, a novel interpretation of the existing text) for.

So, yeah, they're lacking the political will for that.

It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that it is distinguishable from a perpetual lease with a cancellation clause _to buyers_, without also disallowing a lot of actually useful leasing agreements.

The thing is, you never did _buy_ that Steam game. And you never bought the software on the TV, which you did buy the hardware of, you bought a software lease along with the hardware.

The latter case I can see something to do about - define the software and its functionality as an "essential component" of the hardware, and require companies to not break essential components of hardware they sell. They can stop offering online services, but the rest of the device should keep working.

For pure software leases, I don't see a good way to not have them be whatever the contract say they are, not without reclassifying them as something else than a copyrighted work. (But then "sellers" should be very clear what you're "buying".)

A lease should have a clear timetable. How long am I leasing this thing for? 1 year? 3 years?

I'm fine with companies leasing software. I don't like it, and I much prefer buying, but that's fine. That is what software subscriptions are, the terms and conditions are clear.

"Buying" something where access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, needs to become illegal.

> It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that

One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.

I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.

> it should not be legal to redefine "buy"

Your post made me go on a thought exercise: imagine a world where you could either own or lease software products. Game developers could decide whether their customers can actually buy the product (which involves ownership) or just the traditional licensing/leasing, which is the prevailing model today.

How would ownership actually work? What does ownership of digital goods mean? Can they even be owned? You get 1 copy of the bytes? How is this enforced? What's to stop you from just selling it multiple times?

If you can't resell it, then what do you actually own? The right to use the product in perpetuity? But that's just another form of lease, no?

Am I getting bogged down in semantics?

Just get the crypto bros involved. Track the license using blockchain. Should allow transferal of the license without allowing endless duplication.

“distinguishable from a perpetual lease with a cancellation clause”

Perpetual lease is not a valid concept. I mean it is, just like perpetual employment is - we call it serfdom or slavery.

Iy serves no legitimate purpose. It’s just a workaround.

If you cannot define meaning of “Buy” then you cannot govern at all.

You never bought the movie on a DVD either or the text in a book. Yet everyone understands what is meant. This isn't really something that needs complex legislation.

>but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy"

Why would they ask me? I'm a nobody.

Now, I'm sure some disciplined software lobbyist have spent a very long time and can answer such questions in legslese that protects the customers. Let's find them.

Slave owners, such as all of the so-called founding fathers, were as much rent seekers as any king

not all of them, as 15 of the 56 signers of the Declaration did not own slaves.

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_the_United_States_...

Of those 15, it might be illuminating to know how many did not on grounds of principle versus merely that the cost/benefit didn't favour it for them at that time?

Slavery was a controversy from the beginning that finally bubbled over into the Civil War. It was not, as this question seems to imply, a near universally approved of practice where a few just didn't happen to need slaves.

That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.

I don't think the above commenter disagreed with the need for regulation and the justification for it in this context. But that regulation isn't just for the things you think should be regulated and everything else shouldn't be.

>’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc

I think the apple sympathizers are a great case on some of the hypocrisy, actually. Seeing people condemn the DMA definitely shows some people will play favorites when push comes to shove.

Hear, hear! One of the best comments I've read in over a decade on this site