California will force companies to admit you don't own digital content
California will force companies to admit you don't own digital content
A new California law will require digital stores to acknowledge that you're licensing content, not buying it
Good. This should have been clarified years ago, and not just in California. I've bought too much content that is no longer accessible. For instance, from the Wii store...
The Wii store remains my go-to example when talking to people who actually believe they own their digital purchases.
Like, Nah fam.
Which is why I will never buy a modern console. Once the company making them shutdowns the servers, the hardware will be useless. Unlike retro consoles that use physical media, which are highly sought after today.
Nintendo usually doesn't do the right thing, but they kept the wii shop working for around 15 years after the console released, which seems reasonable enough, though for how much hosting costs they should still be offering downloads. IIRC you could store downloaded games on an SD cars so you could make a backup. Now the WiiU and 3DS, their online stuff shuttered too early. If I had bought Mariokart 8 digitally for my WiiU and wanted to redownload it, I would be unable, yet Nindendo still sells the same game on their newer switch store. The only Nintendo games I can say I own are the ones decrypted on my NAS that work with FOSS emulators.
tl;dr
California's new law will require digital storefronts to clarify that consumers are buying licenses, not outright ownership of digital goods.
The law forces companies to use distinct language when selling digital media to specify license terms to avoid false advertising fines.
The law goes into effect next yea, but won't apply to companies that offer “permanent offline downloads” of digital goods.
“permanent offline downloads”
How can anyone offer that?
It shouldn't be that hard, gog.com manages to do it
- GoG
- Itch.io
- BandCamp
- iTunes Music Store (it’s still around but can be hard to find because of Apple Music streaming service)
- Amazon’s music store (but it’s crap quality and they put audio watermarks in it - don’t use them while the two above options exist)
- Comixology before Amazon bought and deleted them
- Occasionally there are websites where you can purchase video content for download, but it’s quite rare. I remember buying anime from such a site before.
Google play music used to offer it as well.
“If buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing”
Which is why this will be fleeting if it ever gets implemented at all. Companies won't allow it until they can spin it to their satisfaction. For now if it's just CA, they can say "oh crazy CA and their crazy regulations" just like they say about the cancer warnings which actually are quite useful in reducing your lifetime cumulative exposure even if the chemicals from a single product won't kill you immediately.
I remember buying fallout 4 and when the dlc came out I bought those digitally. My PS4 died so I bought another, linked my accounts etc.. two years later I decided I wanted to play fallout again, so I load it up and go to download the dlc and it's asking me to purchase them again. I check my library and they're gone. I check my game and the files won't load because I'm missing the dlc files.
Anyways I contacted PlayStation who said that because they have no record of me owning these on their end they can't help. I have even the purchase emails but because they lost all the data on their end they refuse to give me my money or dlc. So yeah that's when I realized that a digital library can just be pulled out from under you, no matter how much you spent on it.
What country are you in? You may be entitled to a refund/replacement since you have the receipts
Sucker.
Sail the high seas for life
Yeah but this isn't as big a deal as the clickbait headline.
How is it clickbait?
The headline is extremely optimistic, but it's not clickbait.
This is actually the very first non-clickbait title I have seen all week.