Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn’t really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An “agree to this or else”. In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive “contracts” that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed
RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks agoThe thing is when you created your account you agreed to the fact that it isn’t your game. What you agreed to was a game that they own and control and you can participate in. You might not like the results when they close the game but you chose to start playing that game to begin with.
Adalast@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You can choose to accept their terms or not play the game.
You are not entitled to have everything on your terms.
samus12345@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
You can also choose to call them out on having anti-consumer practices. You are entitled to criticize shitty business practices.
RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I wouldn’t call this a shitty business practice. You agreed to a game they own and control. You went into the game knowing this. If they are losing money on the game why should they lose more just to “preserve” the game after shutting down?
Adalast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Except… For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.
Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.
40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.
Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.
I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You are acting like an EULA is going to ruin your life. Restaurants have EULAs too, like requiring shirt and shoes. Its not some crazy concept that if you want to enter someone else’s establishment (online game) they might have expectations on how you behave.
Adalast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“No shirt, no shoes, no service” is a health code, not a EULA.
Also, you are conflating social contracts with actual legally binding ones. If you had to sign a contract to eat at a resteraunt which gave them the right to photograph you and record all of your conversations while you ate then use all of it for marketing without compensating you or to sell the contents of your conversations and likeness to unknown 3rd parties without informing you of who they were sold to and what the intended use was, would you still eat there.
Your comment shows an utter lack of understanding of the issues at hand and what abuses of rights are done in digital spaces.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There are many restaurants, especially the largest fast food chains, who do have you sign an agreement to allow them to do everything you said. And no I don’t eat at those places because I don’t like the practice personally. I don’t buy games if I don’t like the game company or their actions.
But this isn’t about data collection and privacy, its about trying to prevent a game from shutting down because it feels upsetting. I’m sorry but if you are upset about it don’t support the company.
I will agree we need laws around data privacy and collection of course, but thats a different topic.
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
People aren’t used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other “as a service” models that are reliable enough that people don’t realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won’t close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.
Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
Or people are used to this concept and accept it normal instead of unethical behavior that should be illegal.
Zexks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s basically like saying g all mmo’s should illegal. Or that it is illegal to go out of business and close up shop without giving away all your code.
Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
That’s pretty much exactly what I’m saying. If you offer software that requires outside servers to run, you should be legally obligated to release the code used to run the servers if you discontinue supporting that software. That doesn’t make mmo’s any different, just a minor change to how they handle end of life.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
[deleted]RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yes, you did agree to these terms. It’s usually in the first few paragraphs. Try looking them up sometimes and look for words like “limited” and “conditional”
Ksin@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’re damn right I don’t like it, I especially don’t like how it destroys art history, which is why I’m part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Its sort of like complaining your favorite pub got shut down though, isn’t it?
Adalast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If that pub has been around long enough that it can reasonably be argued that it is part of regional heritage, then yes.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I don’t know any video game thats been around long enough to be called a historical landmark or whatever terminology.