You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.

I am not sure how long this stays a joke

>One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock

My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?

People can just break the law though

All the relevant treaty clauses were strong-armed into those treaties by the US - no other country gives a shit about DMCA 1201 except insofar as the US forced them to.

If the government banned fracking it wouldn't need to compensate owners of oil rich land when it becomes worthless. Devaluing property is not the same as taking it.

And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.

> violate treaties the US has signed.

not that has stopped the US doing something.

The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.

Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.

> It would run into Takings Clause challenges

The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?

If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?

What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?

> violate treaties the US has signed.

This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.

Then get rid of the treaty.

This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.

It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.

You only would license something that’s already successful.

How much money does George Lucas need, I guess he’d only have a networth of a few hundred million vs a few billion.

I make music and buy tons of it. I’ve never been like, yo Nas is coming out with a new project, I’ll just wait 20 years to buy it on sale.

Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.

Most of the money goes to some massive label.

Likewise, I don’t think Nas would struggle if his older albums were made public domain.

He’s still the only one who can perform the tracks live. He can still make new music, like the 6 projects he made in the last few years.

Sony/Columbia would only stop profiting off the deal they had an 18 year old sign decades ago.

> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.

“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?

Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.

I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.

This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.

WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.

This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.

Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).

[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.

Technically legally no.

"Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else."

A rental has a defined time or use limit. If you want to call a game a rental, they must at least charge a monthly or yearly or per login fee.

This sounds counter intuitive, but the added friction is THE WHY they don't want to call it a rental on paper, only on appeals.

The same applies to concerts and weekend club: This is an event with a defined time limit.

You call a car leasing a leasing, you don't call it a sale with a small print.

When a contract clause conflicts with the law, you have to follow the law, not the contract.

Force them to release it anyway. By law.

make it legal

Once again, we're overthinking the problem.

All that needs to be done is to produce a game that will remain playable if the company shuts down. Simple as that. It doesn't need to phone home anywhere, it doesn't require an internet connection, it just... turns on and plays.

At that point, any company can just fold whenever they'd like without having to do anything in this area, and everyone who bought the game can breathe easily, double-click their icon and start playing while the publisher's employees go look for other jobs.

Reverse engineering the protocol is not the same as reverse engineering the entire server, though. That would be very hard in most cases, especially when you don't have access to the server binary.

It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.

And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.

This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?

"Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down."

Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance.

Don't forget to pay your subscription for the product you've already paid for :)

Most Steam games are DRM-free in the sense that if you copy the game folder to another computer and add a stub steamapi.dll they'll run. Some of them will run even without steamapi.dll as they load it dynamically.

Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.

Securom? StarForce?

On the other hand it’s not sure that is a good model in the long term.

Like how can the game industry thrive by turning AAA dollars into GAME PASS dimes? Netflix and Spotify make money at the top but not for artists. Netflix was part of a ‘golden age’ when there was fierce competition to make prestige TV at the expense of investors but that party is over.

I can believe subscriptions are win win for adobe and some of its customers, I mean adobe does get to fund continuous improvements in their products and it is certainly cheaper to keep up with the latest CC than it was before though some might want the option of paying a fortune for just one version once.

I think they are fashionable because investors like ‘seeing like a bank’ and it is so easy to put a valuation on a steady cash stream from a customer.

The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.

I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.

All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.

Physical vs digital ownership, as I went at lengths to distinguish between.