No, that was John McAffee.

Thank you, dear madam or sir!

If they call it a “sale” rather than a “licensing” then I consider myself entitled to remove the DRM (which I do to all my Kindle ebooks, for example) or to download a cracked copy for archiving (which I do to some games I wish to keep, if I haven’t bought them on GOG or another DRM-free platform). Common sense and ethics dictate that I am in my right to do this.

If companies are relying on a technicality - an obscure one to the general public, even though techies have been aware of this issue for over a decade - to hoodwink people and charge actual-purchase prices for mere licensing, then I am relying on the implicit tenets of morality, good faith and common sense to bypass their malicious and bad faith distortions. Artificial scarcity be fucked, I paid what they claim is a fair price for what they claim is the purchase of a digital good, so I shall treat it with Animus Domini just as I do with any physical purchase. This includes lending to others as per the First Sale doctrine.

The fact that the seller consciously chose to contradict themselves, calling it a purchase out in the open and a licensing deal in the fine print, should it ever work to someone’s disadvantage, should obviously be to the disadvantage of the person who intentionally made the blunder, not to good faith third parties. This is a well-established principle of legal ethics and Civil Law which is adopted by legal scholars the world over. Whether or not they have failed to apply it to these specific cases is wholly irrelevant to its validity, and I apply it to my own dealings with a perfectly clear conscience.

I legally purchase all my media, and I will use any and all means necessary to protect my good faith acquisitions, including those which are incontroversially illegal for those who have not purchased that piece of media, such as downloading cracked software, because this is simply done to remedy an inexcusable omission on the part of those who claim to have sold me a copy of that software but don’t provide me with the possibility to archive my copy locally. So long as these transactions are referred to openly as purchases, sales, etc. I shall continue to act in this way to enforce their overt nature over the malicious mischaracterization contained in their licensing.

In other words, slimeballs, have the guts to call it licensing and renting. Until you do, I and many like me will continue to make your lies come true and there is realistically nothing you can do to stop us.

+1 for Syncthing

It’s actually a really good game, though of course it has some problems. The real issue is the fact that most people weren’t even aware that it existed.

To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.

… with blackjack and hookers.

In other words, the consent of a corporation is more important than the consent of a human being… for the public distribution of that human being’s likeness in an intimate context. Holy dystopia, conservatives are fucked in the head.

EULAs don’t have to say “you own this forever” because it’s implicit. Just like when you buy bananas at the grocer you aren’t forced to sign a EULA that says you can eat the banana or make a smoothie with it but can’t use it to make nuclear weapons or commit war crimes.

Let’s break this down: a product is an object that is delivered to a buyer. A service is an action or group of actions that is performed for the buyer. If I have to keep running my servers for your game client to connect to, push updates or offer tech support, I am providing a service because it requires me to keep doing something for the thing to work. If, on the other hand, all I do is give you some code you can run entirely on your machine - and it doesn’t matter if I give it to you on a CD, a floppy, via digital download or if I print it out as a big book for you to type yourself into a hex editor - then our transaction is finished when I deliver it to you and you pay me. There isn’t anything to license because now you own that copy of the code. My participation in what you do with it is finished, just like the grocer’s is finished when you leave his store with the bananas.

Do you understand now?

I could be wrong but it seems like before, licenses for games you owned but hadn’t downloaded were already loaded o to your account when you logged in. So in your example, if user 2 bought a game and didn’t download it on that console, then user 1 bought and downloaded it and took the PS5 offline, user 2 could still play it because his license was already there. Now, user 2 has to go online to grab the license first.

Seems like it will have a minimal impact.

What they don’t seem to understand is that Reddit employees don’t create value, the users create value. And mods are users. The more they make things shitty for users, the more quickly the company will go bankrupt. I distinctly remember stories about killing golden geese and milking cows to death but the MBA crowd must not have been told those growing up.

Most customers won’t know or care, unfortunately. People have been brainwashed into thinking that corporations have a moral right to aggressive litigation to protect their poor, fragile interests almost as if they were David and the indie studios who dare to break their totally fair patent on “having different buttons to confirm and cancel” or whatever were big bad Goliath. And many gamers, especially younger ones, who are Nintendo’s core demographic, are notoriously ready to defend their pet corporations tooth and nail against any and all criticism, almost as if they were being personally attacked.

First the water turned them gay, now this. Frogs can’t catch a break.

Yikes. At least he’s dating someone with similar interests?

You’re right about the lesson learned. A silver lining.

Damn, I’ve never thought of myself as a whale before but I guess for a while there I was. I wonder how many of the people we see in these games with all the premium characters and skins are like me, struggling. I always thought of them as having more money than sense but maybe they (we) lack both.

If it helps me to avoid something even worse later on, maybe it was even worth the 500 bucks! Hopefully I’ll never have to find out.

Better to play it safe.

Fuck, my condolences.

Thank you! I very much have that predisposition. I’ve noticed that I have addictive behavior towards sugar and caffeine as well (I’m fine as long as I don’t have any, but if I have some I’ll continue to crave more at shorter and shorter intervals until I go to sleep and it resets), and recently celebrated my third month nicotine free after about four years total smoking and then vaping.

Addictive proclivities are a personal defect normally. But when you exist in a context where there are people whose job it is to get you hooked on things, they become a handicap.

I was a young idiot making minimum wage and I spent 500 dollars in a gacha game over a three month period. It’s been years and I still wake up at night, remember this and feel the strongest remorse.