Valve is obviously right. You don't own any games sold to you. You don't own any commercial, proprietary software sold to you. On only have ever been a license holder. You own that license but are restricted by the license. IE. the same thing that keeps from from making copies and selling them is used to let them shut down the required servers whenever it stops being profitable.

If you don't like this then stop using proprietary software.

> You don't own any games sold to you.

False. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25371427

> You don't own any commercial, proprietary software sold to you.

I do own the commodity good (here: copy of the game) that I bought.

If you consider that owning it then you must not have a problem with Assassin's Creed servers going offline. You are saying you own it even with restrictions. If you accept limited ownership of software then you don't get to decide on those limits as a consumer. There are other examples of limited ownership (eg. animals), so I'm not going to try to dispute the terminology. I personally don't consider the idea of limited ownership of being of much use when dealing with copyright abuse.

> Assassin's Creed servers going offline

You were previously talking about licences and ownership of "any games". What you mentioned now is an orthogonal concept, and affects a subset of all games sold.

Depriving me of the use of my purchased good that way is fraud, of course. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348526>

Some aspects of the license covers "any games"... like not being able to sell copies. Some only impact games with an online component, like AC here. All these restrictions come from the license agreement you buy.

You're purchased "good" was a license to use some software. That license defines the rules for using that software. If the license says they can remotely disable your game then they can remotely disable your game without violating the license or committing fraud.

There is of course some question about the enforcement of licenses, particularly click through licenses, but the legal doubt doesn't help due to the arbitration clauses in those same licenses and/or challenging them in court being ridiculously expensive.

You completely ignored the existence of the law. It is tiresome to have to repeat myself.

Interesting. Do you view software in your car the same way? If not, how are they different?

Nope. They are the same in this regard. You don't own it. Not as obvious with most cars today but it is starting to become so with some new cars coming with software subscriptions. Though really if you think about what it takes to repair a car you already see that you don't own it. It takes tools that the manufacturer sells to interact with the software, and no specs/documents on how that works either. Black boxes all the way down.

which is why the right-to-repair laws are so crucial. may be there should also be some right-to-own software laws.

100%

>If you don't like this then stop using proprietary software.

Or, you know, change the law. It doesn't have to be this way.

That's not how it went down. The EU overruled the French law. Valve's argument was rejected by French courts and then upheld by the European courts.

>"This French ruling flies in the face of established EU law which recognises the need to protect digital downloads from the ease of reproduction allowed by the Internet," said CEO Simon Little in a statement.

its really puzzling how a technology so perfect for lowering cost of entry and promoting disintermediation has done the exact opposite.

I don't get it. Steam has a near-zero cost of entry and provides massive disintermediation. I'm a small indie dev and they gave me immense value. I'd never be able to make a living with this otherwise.

I'd love if they lowered their cut but as things are, no one even seems to be trying to seriously compete with them. All consoles and all other PC distribution platforms seem hell bent on hand curation through human intermediaries, which often comes down to rubbing elbows with the right people / impressing arbiters rather than just letting customers judge. Even itch.io does this for the promotion / discoverability part.

Mobile has a slew of its own problems but gets this basic thing right, too.

> Steam ... provides massive disintermediation. I'm a small indie dev and they gave me immense value.

the value they provide you is by being a intermediary between you and your customers; it's pure intermediation, there's no disintermediation.

There's enormous disintermediation compared to what it replaced, which is publisher deals with many more hands taking a slice along the way. It's not a direct B2C relation, but it's certainly not "the exact opposite" like GP reply stated.

If anything it promotes centralization. Steam is a one stop shop for buying games that you can access globally, for the most part.

Before if you wanted to buy games you had to show up in person, so competition between corporations and mom and pops was limited to what a corporation was willing to spend on capex and staff for a new store. The internet destroyed that need and so now the costs of corporations to compete with more efficient services due to economies of scale is very low.

The tech did its part, the costs are lower, just that the margins of profit are much bigger now.

I think that if they plan to sunset the game, that needs to be advertised from the start, or the customers should have the right of a refund.

And then they can plan for that by unlocking the games when they would sunset them.

No, France tried to require the right to resell. That’s not the exact same thing as just requiring that old DRM has to degrade gracefully. I doubt the EU would have overruled that.

France succeeded but the corporate stooges higher up in the EU overturned it on appeal.