Your entire premise is based upon on a couple of misunderstandings.
First, on a technical note regardless if you have bought a physical disk or downloaded a digital copy you are still bound by an end user licensing agreement. The real historical difference amounts to a right to resale. There is no reason why, other than corporate greed, that we cannot resale our digital copies. Ideally this right should be restored by clarifying you own a single transferable copy of the code.
Second, I think you make some important points that deserve to be discussed. You pack a lot of information in a very small amount of space which is very impressive. I am concerned that your points may be missing some important context. Also, when you bring morality into the discussion it makes me want to climb up on a metaphorical soap box because I see things very differently from a moral perspective.
For thousands of years there was no Intellectual Property (IP). Artist copied each other as they always did and still do to this day. No ownership was needed or expected because all art and science is inherently iterative. What you accept as reality is really the modern “fluke” only existing in the last few hundred years.
On a minor point, you also seem to confuse art and science with commerce. The majority of art is never intended for commercial sale. It is actually a very small amount that is created solely for commercial sale, yet we spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing it. It is important to point out this distinction otherwise we reduce all art to monetary value when in reality that is not the reason it is created.
Science cannot exist without iteration. Our current system simply transfers science developed by individuals, often with public funding, to corporations. We will also see this theme in IP where corporations take their employee’s work for their benefit and even worse, non-employee’s work as well.
Every once in awhile we will hear about an artist or scientist suing and winning against a major corporation, thus reinforcing the IP propaganda that it defends the little guy. The reality is these are the exceptions not the rule. It is not surprising though, by granting such an insane right of artificial scarcity that it would be abused by capital. This reality taints all IP and not bringing it up is a disservice to the discussion.
From patent trolls to copyright scammers the reality is the little guy is the one who gets continuously screwed. So many people’s life works have been stolen from them by corporations. This realization should make anyone skeptical of these rights when they are continuously abused by corporations.
Due to these capilitistic designs the small percentage of commercial creator’s rights are usually taken by corporations. This system is highlighted by the reality seen in the record industry and the fact that very few preformers own their own works. This shows us it is about protecting corporations and not non-wealthy individuals like you or I.
Most people don’t realize that defending copyright or patents take years and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This system is extremely inaccessible to individuals unless they are wealthy and can hire proxies to litigate and disseminate their lies for them. This creates perverse incentives that allow corporations to take other’s rights.
The very foundation of the US was based on intellectual piracy with the founding fathers encouraging it to build American industry. This can be seen in modern day with countries like China (although I feel they are no longer borrowing as much because of their amazing innovations). Thomas Jefferson is a famous inventor who basically paid other people to do all the work, remind you of Musk much. We must recognize that we have always ignored IP when it suits us. This can be seen with AI right now.
Back to morality and IP. The concept that a creator gets to benefit from the same labour over and over again through artificially scarcity enforced by the state is pretty ridiculous honestly. It is absurd on it face and an affront to how most people earn a living. People may deserve compensation, but not an endless revenue stream.
Once again, this is rarely about the individual as corporations and the wealthy are the primary beneficiaries of these legal rights that they have spent hundreds of years lobbying the state and the court systems for.
Indeed the origin of copyright was about control and censorship and not protect individuals rights. I will admit that when it comes to IP, patents did have slightly more honest beginnings by forcing the grantee to expose how their inventions works as an actual public good. Regardless of this one benefit to the public, the patent is inherently a tool of control as well.
We can see how modern day industry has been shaped by abusing and misusing the right of patent. Creating an impossible barrier to entry, blocking competition, effectively endlessly renewing patents as seen in the pharmaceutical industry, re-patenting previous concept because of first to file rights, patenting concepts that do not meet the the proper standards by regulatory capture, etc all show the system is broken and is merely a tool for the wealthy to manipulate the market
Capturing art on physical media is not new as evidenced by as far back as cave art and countless other examples throughout human history. Technology certainly changes the equation, but your argument that this has lead to consumer entitlement is bizarre. I suppose your trying to say by owning a copy of the movie the consumer also feels they “own” the movie itself. I won’t discount some people may believe this, but I also don’t think this is a realistic assessment of the situation.
There is a major problem when you lump code in with other creative works. I won’t spend too much time on this because it is a rather large topic. What I will say is the creator doesn’t own the code because just like math there is often an obvious way to the solution. You should never be able to own a solution under system of enforced artificial scarcity. Software patents are absolute garbage that stifle creativity.
I am glad you recognize the difference between digital goods and physical goods. I think you come to very contradictory and dystopian conclusions then I would though.
In your world no one owns anything digitally because “creator” aka the corporation needs mosr money. You pay to be able to grace yourself with their amazing talent for but a brief moment.Your digital media is not yours and can be taken away at any time. Your game can charge you every time you play it, you operating system is spyware because the owner of the software wants it to be.
In my world I pay for my hardware. Keeping those zeros and ones alive is something I pay for not them. I pay for the hardware, electricity, and connection to the Internet. I pay to upgrade and maintain it. I have invested interest and a right to my property. I am not paying for an experience. I am paying for a file and once I have possession of the file it is mine to do with what I want. This is digital reality.
Your argument seems to be copyright maximalist crossed with corporate shill. I also find your argument devolves into almost a moral panic of technology. A lot of what you criticize is similar to what people said about records and photography. Interestingly these arguments are currently being used against AI. I think you may enjoy this link.
medium.com/…/photography-was-historically-conside…
Equating labor to copying ones and zeros is pretty comical. The reason an artist is paid is they perform. Insane copyright laws have lead to bizarre situations like car mechanics in England getting sued for listen to music while they work on cars because customers might hear it and they don’t have the performance rights.
I will leave you with this conodorun.
There is only one way to truly protect your art. Never share it with anyone. There is only one way to prove your work is truly original. Be raised by wolves never interacting with humans and produce great works of art without using any frame of reference other than the ones you invented yourself in a vacuum. Only then is your art truly original and protected.
The problem is when you add the context of reality to your argument it just falls apart.
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
You have written a sprawling critique of the pharmaceutical industry, patent law, and the modern record label, none of which changes the mechanical reality of how software operates. You are fighting a phantom of corporate capitalism to justify why you shouldn’t have to abide by a software license.
You argue that digital copies should have a right of resale. What is incredibly ironic about this demand is that the gaming industry actually built this exact system, and it was destroyed by the very same misdirected moral outrage you are peddling right now. Prior to the launch of the Xbox One and PS4, both Microsoft and Sony had the infrastructure built and ready to go for a fully digital marketplace that would allow digital entitlement sales and the ability to loan digital games to friends for set periods of time. To make that work, it required digital check-ins to verify the license transfers. When Microsoft announced this plan at E3 in 2013, a vocal minority of gamers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical ownership that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure already baked into their dev kits and system software, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to look like the hero. Both companies had to scramble to completely reengineer their hardware and system software before launch. Consumers could have had a digital resale market a decade ago, but they killed it themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function.
You state that because you pay for your PC, your hard drive, and your electricity, the files on it belong to you. That is identical to arguing that because you bought a television and pay your own electric bill, you own the broadcasting rights to the shows you watch. You own the storage medium. You do not own the proprietary architecture temporarily housed on it.
You claim code is just obvious math and shouldn’t be owned. A mathematical formula is a universal truth. A modern video game or digital platform is millions of lines of highly specific, creative architecture designed to interface with servers, databases, and rendering pipelines. Claiming a software platform is just math is like claiming a skyscraper is just physics, therefore you should be legally entitled to own a room in it for free.
Most importantly, you are still deliberately ignoring the reality of ongoing labor. You claim that paying for a digital service is an absurd endless revenue stream for a single creation, and you compare it to cave art. Cave art does not have a monthly server hosting bill. A digital ecosystem is not a static painting on a wall; it requires continuous database management, network hosting, and security patching to remain functional. You claim that equating labor to copying ones and zeros is comical, yet you demand permanent access to these systems while conveniently leaving out who is supposed to pay the engineers to do the daily maintenance that keeps your ones and zeros alive.
You can wax poetic about how art should be free from commerce and how society should iterate without intellectual property. But the moment you demand that a developer hand over a functioning, patched, lifetime supported software file for a single upfront fee, you aren’t fighting against a dystopia. You are just demanding that someone else perform ongoing labor for you for free.
The ultimate irony of your manifesto against corporate greed is that you are deploying the exact same economic logic as the nineteenth century industrial capitalists you claim to despise. By demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a live digital service for a single upfront fee, you are completely alienating the software from the daily human labor required to sustain it. You view the ongoing work of engineers, database managers, and server technicians not as a continuous, mutual exchange of value, but as an endlessly extractable resource that you are inherently owed. You are utilizing the rhetoric of the working class while making the exact demands of a robber baron: insisting that the labor of others must be cheap, permanent, and placed entirely at your absolute disposal.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I wrote the context of IP which you hand wave all of history and reality away to double down on your point that software is somehow different. To be blunt, it isn’t.
I am not fighting anything, just giving an obvious critique of a broken system. The only person defending anything is you.
You deny the right of resale and can’t even state a real reason for this and instead blame it on the consumer. This is because only someone acting like a bootlicking corporate loser would think people don’t have the right to resale their property and that they don’t actually own anything. This is what is counterintuitive to everyone. You want to destroy ownership because it serves your masters. That is all that is going on here.
Neither Sony nor Xbox ever seriously contemplated a digital resale system. You can’t just make up facts. Xbox did propose a system that would heavily restrict game sharing and allow retailers to conduct digital and physical transfers. The problem is you could no longer share a disk with a friend without a 3rd party being involved.
You place all the onus on their infrastructure but with a distributed system not bent solely on corporate control, everything you describe is simply not necessary. Also, I have been in the server space so I know you could run an authorization server for less that $100 a year. I am am sure Sony and Xbox couldn’t afford this enormous burdensome cost.
Comparing a dumb receiver like a TV to a computer is silly. Furthermore it ignores that people did record the information they received with the advent of the VHS. I find it ironic that you are taking corporations side in this argument and that you would have been up against Mr. Rogers when they tried to ban VHS.
youtu.be/fKy7ljRr0AA?is=zKKOPioX98SbG7IE
You know you have a bad argument if you are against Mr. Rogers. This also highlights your profound ignorance of history and technology. It makes your argument very weak in my opinion.
You clearly don’t understand the IP system in regards to software. You make so many obviously silly arguments and ignore the evidence. While code is copyrightable, ideas, algorithms, and functionality is not. You entire argument is based on misunderstanding as I said in the beginning. You are probably thinking of software patents which I personally find extremely distasteful for the reason I have already mentioned.
I said that IP itself is an absurd principle because it relies on creating artificial scarcity. You say cave art isn’t the same because it has no monthly bill. This highlights how much less digital content is worth. You can’t even access it without expensive hardware and Internet. Cave art is actually worth much more because of its tangible non-connected nature. This reality teaches us purely digital products should be much much cheaper than their physical counterparts.
You have constructed quite the strawman saying gamers are demanding a single purchase and indefinite support. The problem is, you are the only one saying this. I would recommend looking up Stop Killing Games movement to understand what people are actually asking for.
www.stopkillinggames.com/en
They aren’t asking for companies to indefinitely host content. What they are asking for is for companies to stop killing games when they can easily turn off server checks once they have decided to stop supporting a game. Essentially corporations want their cake and to eat it to thus destroying art in the name of commerce.
You make lots of other insane claims that I am not going to bother shooting down because frankly, it is not worth it. Thanks for talking with me.
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
When the ad hominem attacks and “bootlicker” insults come out, it is usually because the technical and legal arguments have run dry. Let’s bypass the emotional outbursts and look directly at the staggering technical inaccuracies in your response.
$100 Enterprise Server Myth You claim an authorization server costs $100 a year. Let’s look at the actual math for enterprise infrastructure. Amazon’s enterprise DDoS protection (AWS Shield Advanced) costs a flat $3,000 a month before you even factor in data transfer fees. aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing Enterprise-grade Multi-AZ databases run thousands of dollars a month depending on IOPS and storage scale. Maintaining standard SOC 2 Type II security compliance to handle user data costs between $30,000 and $150,000+ a year. drata.com/learn/soc-2/cost All this infrastructure requires a 24/7 rotation of Site Reliability Engineers, who average over $130,000 a year in base salary. www.kore1.com/sre-salary-guide-2026
You are off by a factor of about ten thousand
“Stop Killing Games” You claim companies can “easily turn off server checks” once they drop support for a game. This betrays a complete absence of experience with modern captive console infrastructure and server-authoritative game loops.
For a live-service game, the server is not a DRM tollbooth checking an ID at the door. The client on your machine is largely a dumb terminal. The server actively runs the critical game logic: authoritative physics, AI behavioral trees, secure state management, and proprietary matchmaking APIs. You cannot “just turn off the check.”
To make a live-service game function offline, a studio has to completely re-engineer the backend architecture to compile and run locally on the client’s hardware. They have to strip out licensed third-party middleware and completely rewrite the game to bypass the strict Technical Requirement Checklists (TRCs) and Xbox Requirements (XRs) mandated by Sony and Microsoft. You are demanding that a studio spend months of uncompensated engineering and QA labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp for a deprecated product. It is a fundamental rewrite of the game’s spine, not a flipped switch.
Historical Revisionism of 2013 You are actively rewriting history regarding the digital resale market, likely because you were only experiencing it from the consumer side of the screen. Having been deeply embedded in the development and publishing pipeline during the transition to the eighth-generation consoles, I find the historical revisionism around what happened in 2013 baffling.
The digital resale and loaning mechanics were not theoretical whiteboard concepts or corporate propaganda. They were fully functional APIs baked directly into the Durango (Xbox One) and Orbis (PS4) DevKits. The hardware and the SDKs were entirely engineered around digital entitlement transfers. Xbox explicitly outlined the infrastructure to allow digital trade-ins at participating retailers and a “Family Sharing” plan that allowed a digital library to be shared across ten different accounts. news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/license/
We were on the verge of a true digital secondary market. It was killed because a vocal minority of consumers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical plastic that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure functioning in their dev kits, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to play the hero. Both companies then scrambled to re-engineer their system software prior to launch. Consumers killed the digital resale market themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function. news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/19/update/
Misunderstanding of Mr. Rogers and VHS Bringing up Mr. Rogers testifying in the Betamax case is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, but you completely misunderstand the legal ruling. Mr. Rogers testified in favor of time-shifting, the ability for families to record a broadcast to watch it at a more convenient time.
The Supreme Court ruled that time-shifting was a “fair use” exemption of copyright. They did not rule that the consumer suddenly gained ownership of the intellectual property, nor did they grant consumers the right to dictate how the studio distributed future media. Fair use is a legal defense for how you interact with a medium; it is not a transfer of ownership. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/464/417/ cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/…/09-35969.pdf
You can label the legal realities of software licensing as “corporate propaganda” all you want. But your entire worldview relies on pretending that complex, server-authoritative digital ecosystems are equivalent to static cave paintings, that global enterprise server architecture costs less than a Netflix subscription, and that re-engineering a live game for offline use requires zero human labor.
You are demanding permanent, absolute dominion over the ongoing intellectual labor of development teams and operations engineers, and you want it all for a one-time fee of $60. That is not a defense of consumer rights. It is a fundamental denial of how modern technology actually operates.
As with several commenters before you, you have brought a lot of emotional outrage to this discussion, but absolutely zero factual evidence to back up your legal or ethical claims. Your stance on the ethical capitalization of intellectual labor does not liberate anyone. By demanding, uncompensated access to a team’s ongoing maintenance and server labor for a single upfront fee, you are echoing the exact rhetoric used by robber barons to justify indentured servitude and union busting. You have simply replaced the 19th-century factory floor with a digital storefront, demanding the exact same permanent exploitation of the workers who keep it running.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I am just explaining to you how you act. If you don’t want people to treat you like a bootlicker then don’t act like one. It is rather simple honestly.
Oh look, you make up a bunch of additional costs that are not related to running the authorization server at all. You don’t have to use anything you are describing unless you want to. You don’t have to store personal information, you don’t have to have expensive DDOS protection which has turned into quite the racket for companies like cloud flare. You don’t have to have engineers on staff at all times.
You once again construct a strawman to satisfy your insatiable desire to be correct. No one said they expect a live service game to be run indefinitely. I find it amazing how quickly you construct lies. If you are not going to bother to read and understand then don’t be surprised when people dismiss the AI slop you spew.
I am so sorry that the last console push towards digitization didn’t work out because people didn’t like the restrictive systems being proposed. That they didn’t want to run down to GameStop to be able to trade a game with a friend. It was a ridiculous idea and blaming the consumer for what they want is both ham fisted and disingenuous to the situation.
I never said anything you claim. It is pretty bizarre how you just lie continuously and rely on AI to make your arguments. You have basically just argued with yourself the entire time. To each his own.