> music I've purchased

They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends up on account termination." If they simply used a word better suited to the reality of the situation, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for. Maybe something like "micro-upgrade [my account]."

Obviously eliminating that dependency is even better, but baby steps.

The bigger issue is that because of the market power of these digital storefronts, it doesn't matter what your mental model of the transaction is, you don't have a choice in the matter. Yes, online stores with better terms exist, but they don't tend to have the games that you'd want to buy.

I always get a warm feeling when a game I'm interested in has an itch.io link, but I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking it'll ever replace Steam, even if Steam had to stop calling itself a store. Steam is just far too established, and the network effect is just way too strong.

I think a lot of platforms would change the terms of their digital products if they could not use the term "Buy" otherwise.

> > music I've purchased

> They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination."

That doesn't really apply to buying music though, does it? If Amazon banned my account, that wouldn't prevent me from listening to the MP3s I've bought from them. It would only prevent me from re-downloading them from their servers if I somehow lost all of my local copies.

But if I buy a CD from a physical store, they also don't give a me another copy for free if I lose it (even without account termination entering into it), so I'm not really any worse off with the digital download.

> But if I buy a CD from a physical store ...

This is literally the nature of physical vs digital goods.

We can, and should, do better for customers than the current systems allow.

Which current systems?

For games on Steam and movies basically anywhere, the current system is that after I buy the game/movie, I can watch/play it for as long as I have access to the account. If I lose the account or the service shuts down, I'm fucked. That sucks.

For games on GOG or MP3s basically anywhere, the current system is that I buy it and then I can play the game/music forever as long as I don't lose the downloaded files. If I do lose the files, I can still redownload them as long as the service is still operating and I still have access to the account.

The second system seems fine to me.

Good point, I've specifically mentioned Steam and Amazon.

Yes and buying music on Amazon (which is what the comment I originally responded to was about), you get system number 2, i.e. a DRM-free MP3 download.

Buying movies on Amazon is a different matter entirely, but the comment and my reply were specifically about music.

Nah. Being able to download a digital purchase at one point, but potentially being unable to download it again later on is a crap system.

> For games on Steam and movies basically anywhere, the current system is that after I buy the game/movie, I can watch/play it for as long as I have access to the account. If I lose the account or the service shuts down, I'm fucked. That sucks.

Slight pedantic nit, some games on Steam are DRM-free (though this is in no way indicated, you can find a list online, though*), those you can back up and keep using even if your account gets banned.

* https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...

I don't see why this is being downvoted. Music is the one digital good I feel the most confident purchasing because I know I'm getting a drm-unencumbered standard format like MP3 or AAC. I have all my music purchases backed up like I do my family photos. Yes, I also listen to my purchases on cloud services like YouTube Music, but if YouTube banned me tomorrow I would lose zero songs.

Didn't they use to let users download mp3s when they bought an album? Did that change?

Ah, you're behind the times. You may be remembering 2008 when Amazon had those big "DRM Free" messages and t-shirts and talked a lot about how music wanted to be free. It was a big part of their sales pitch. That faded away, and then some music started using DRM. However, if you purchase a music song or album, you can still mostly download MP3s, as far as I know.

On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM.

> On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM.

This seems entirely reasonable: No one thinks that by subscribing to Unlimited that they're actually purchasing a copy of every single song forever. It's very much known that it's a subscription.

That's still there although they emphasise it less and less (they want you on the monthly "unlimited" subscription instead). But only for music; their video offering is locked streams only, for example.

Does anybody know how to do this? I'm trying to download some albums I bought back in 2010, but I can't see anywhere to download the MP3s. It will only let me play it through the web player.

> the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for

The moment you made the account a pre-requisite to use something I have already paid for - whether it's software, music, or an internet connected lightbult, is the moment the account stopped being a privilidge.

Do you see where it is headed next? We have internet connected cars and door locks. There are subscribtions for a butt-heater in a car.

Withing the next 5 years someone will freeze to death because a company has pulled or made a mess of their account.

There is no other line of business where you can unilaterally revoke a service that the customer has already paid for. Where continous service requires some conditions or behaviour, this is spelled out in a contract - these companies change their terms on a whim.

You purchased _access_ to the media for as long as the company decides to host it. You don't physically own the media. Think of it as renting or a lease.

But they don't advertise our relationship in that way.

They say, "Buy for kindle" or "Buy in iTunes"

The contract they advertise doesn't match the fine-print in their clickwrap contract

That may be true, but the EU can simply outlaw those types of contractual arrangements going forward, and require that prior purchases be either defaulted into the new purchase arrangement or refunded.

Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens. It doesn't have to be the way it is in the US with corporations holding all the cards, that's just regulatory capture in action.

That's how the EU works in general, the balance is shifted way towards consumer protections - even if companies don't like it, tough. You get a default 2 year warranty on everything, no questions asked, and if the items fails past that due to an inherent defect in design or manufacture, they have to replace it even if it's outside the warranty window. And that's just normal, that's how everything is expected to run. USB cables, charges, all that crap, the EU does what it thinks is best for its citizens' lives, and while specific things sometimes do go wrong, on net it's a massive benefit to everyone's quality of life.

Companies exist to serve us, folks, not the other way around. It doesn't have to be this way. "Oh we put something in the terms of service"? Yeah bullshit. Mandatory binding arbitration in your contract of adhesion? Arbitrate on deez nuts.

The US is completely obscene by the standards of the rest of the developed world.

It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.

They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.

What are you talking about? Do you mean send out games on DVD?

There are these thingswe wused to put on DVDs, we call them install files. You can find them on like every torrent tracker these days.

In the case of games, anything that doesn't mean losing access to an account stops you from being able to play games you already bought. So, GOG wouldn't need to change much, but Steam might. Wouldn't have to mean shipping physical media.

Or they can just stop using terms like "buy" and otherwise implying ownership, instead making it clear you're just leasing the game.

It doesn't have to be quite as simplistic. You can give them choices. There could be IP escrow companies you could pay. You can give them the choice of hosting in perpetuity or releasing something on some date. You can tie all these choices to a tax structure, progressive charges, etc. You could make the cheapest thing to simply sell the product outright. In theory you could even tie these additional protections to the a condition of making the release public at some point as a way of incentivizing companies not to use copyright protection on something that is not likely to be that valuable in 95 years, though that's unrealistically utopian of me to suggest.

My main point is that it doesn't have to be that simplistic.

Companies going out of business is a different thing but Amazon, Google, and Epic are not in any risk of going out of business.

If you're worried about shell-company games, well, that can be legislated against too. So far the EU hasn't, as far as I'm aware, let any companies out of any previously-mandated penalties for violating consumer protection with "That was google, this is ABC" bullshit.

EU isn’t that unfair for companies, it is more likely that they would allow revoking of access rights, but require companies to compensate for thr damages (e.g. issue a refund for the full or partial purchase amount)

I forced a book publisher to re-host videos on a particular CDN using the exact same URL’s because they advertised that the book came with videos, but the QR codes stopped working. Can’t imagine that was fun or cheap to fix.

I made a complaint to the advertising standards authority in the UK. They agreed with my complaint and forced the publisher to get the URL’s working again. I’m not sure how long they will keep working, but I imagine they have to at least for as long as the book is in print.

Not the EU, but I imagine the EU has a lot more clout than the ASA does.

That's actually really good, I am sure I came across a similar problem but never thought of where to make a proper complaint

This experience taught me that sometimes making a complaint to the correct organisation is worth the minor effort. Most people (and me in the past too) would probably just be annoyed but ignore it.

It also emboldened me to make complaints about other things, for example I complained that a local internet provider was advertising having the fastest internet in my country, even though I had internet from another provider that was 3x the speed. They did eventually change their advertising and the funny thing is that I received update letters from my local advertising authority for about two years, addressed to sone bigwig executives at Sky (who had also complained) and… me, a random nobody.

I had zero skin in that one, but felt that advertisements should have to be accurate.

As for not knowing where to send the complaints, yeah, I get it, it was something I wondered about for a while too before I decided the advertising standards authority. My reasoning was: the book was still listed on their website and on Amazon, and the blurb clearly stated that it comes with videos, so it’s part of the purchasing decision. So since it was advertised that way, it’s clearly false advertising. I took a chance and it turned out correct.

Of course not all agencies are quite so receptive or active regarding complaints so it’s hit and miss, but since you can usually do it online in a few minutes I felt it was worth five minutes of my time to try anyway. If I’d had to send a physics letter, for example, I wouldn’t have done it. My experience dealing with the advertising standards authority from the UK, though, was a very good one. They were quick and communicative.

Bravo!

I've often been off put by books that advertise that they link to some sort of digital content because I can't trust that said content will be around when I want to actually access it. It never occurred to me they could be forced to host it, and I'm glad someone did that to at least one publisher once

Easy- revoke copyright protection.

Your "software X" is not worth hosting any more? Fine, then someone else can host it, maybe they will find it profitable.

Maybe even it could be a former employee.

Just keeping it online wouldn't be hard for most companies and most items sold.

If something is under pretty active use, that should have been in the original budget, but also you can put it on cloudflare R2.

For the long tail of perpetuity, you can pay Hetzner $1200 a year for a server with 45TB (plus parity) and a gigabit port.

>Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens

Thank you, I appreciate your welcome. Can you point me to the EU law around this that you're welcoming me to?

Or did you literally just try to make up something that the EU can do then use it to praise the EU and bash the US?

> Or did you literally just try to make up something that the EU can do then use it to praise the EU and bash the US?

The flamebait tone is unnecessary and is against the spirit of discussion here at HN as well as the rules, I'd kindly ask you to chill it a bit here.

This isn't legislation that exists, this is me suggesting they should pass legislation, which is obvious from the ordinary context of my comment.

Feels bad-faith but to give you the benefit of the doubt, if you are asking me to provide a track record of the EU's previous pro-consumer legislation, some examples would be phone connector/cable standardization, charger standardization, mandatory warranties, etc.

> Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens.

Same?

I don't disagree, but this is as much flamebait as the response you're complaining about...

> The flamebait tone is unnecessary and is against the spirit of discussion here at HN as well as the rules, I'd kindly ask you to chill it a bit here.

Not OP, but I imagine your tone was likely a contributing factor to their response.

>> Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens.

..

>> Yeah bullshit. Mandatory binding arbitration in your contract of adhesion? Arbitrate on deez nuts.

>> The US is completely obscene by the standards of the rest of the developed world.

Consumer protection is similar in Australia, we have the ACL and it's great. I got my 4 year old, out of warranty macbook pro replaced for free because the screen backlight was having problems and the keyboard was not working properly.

Having it physically isn't relevant. Plenty of people still buy games as physical media, and those games, including single player, all stop functioning the moment the company turns off the DRM - errr, "advanced feature" -- servers.

Having something physical is meaningless when every piece of software comes with T&Cs that say it's dependent on server support.

What happens legally if I buy a CD/DVD in a store, without signing a contract, with software, but the software doesn't work because servers don't?

If you buy a modern game on CD or DVD, then yes most modern software will not work. If you buy a modern DRM'd piece of software, the DRM approach that has been unified on is online activation (if not online-all-the-time).

Ostensibly you could return it, but then I've seen many things that say "opening this container means you have accepted the terms", but even if not subsequent installation comes with mandatory T&Cs to use the product. You're meant to be able to return the product for a refund if you don't agree to the terms, but my recollection is that companies are terrible and fight you on it.

The button needs to say "rent" or "lease". A "buy" button should not result in a rental.

You're not doing that either. You're buying a revocable license to access. That's actually worse than renting or leasing.

In the case of Amazon Music, if you haven't fallen for the subscription nonsense, you actually are buying the MP3 files. You can download them and then it's on you to move them around as you need. Amazon will also "keep a copy in the cloud for you, and let you play it wherever." You lose that when you lose your account, but if you went to the trouble to download your MP3, that's yours.

Then the button should say ‘license’. Lying to buyers is simply not right.

We shouldn't think of it as renting or a lease, companies should call it renting or leasing. Otherwise, they're pissing on my leg and telling me that it's raining.

Well after _years_ of getting pissed on most people move their leg instead of complaining about it. :)

Do they? Seems to me most people just put up with the piss because the spot is convenient.

Right, most consumers accept it because it's complicated for the average person to set up a NAS box with sonarr/radarr/automagic torrenting. They don't move their leg because they don't really have other options.

> Think of it as renting or a lease.

Then they should be forced to clearly explain that and not be allowed to put words like "buy" and "purchase" in their advertising because those words have very specific meanings. That they've been allowed to basically get around deceptive advertising laws by inserting some legalese into their TOS, which are deliberately written in the most inaccessible way as possible, is repugnant.

> Think of it as renting or a lease.

> as long as the company decides to host it

If you put a clause like that into a rental agreement for a house, and try to collect, it would be thrown out as soon the judge stops laughing.

If I rent a house, and have already paid a year of rent, my landlord can't just wake up one day and kick me out in the middle of the year. These companies can just remove you on a whim.

Furthermore, landlord has obligations towards me: he must fix the house if it is leaking, and if the house is rendered unlivable (i.e. the roof caves in) and it's his fault, he has to provide me with alternative accomodation.

For a contract to be valid, it must have duraton. If it's a lease that says '9999 years', then the landlord/freeholder can't just sneak in at night and demolish the building.

I could see these being difficult logistical problems for companies but that gives them no right to socialize the problem by playing hardball and holding accounts hostage. That problem is in their domain to solve, and sorry that being a profitable business is tough but, again, solving this is not on the customer.

How is it "socializing the problem" other than being a buzzword phrase that's been thrown around lately in other contexts that feels like it fits?

Yeah that phrase doesn't really apply here. They're not pushing the solution onto any portion of the population - they're just straight up blackballing users.

I imagine the solution will simply be to charge higher prices across the board. We will all pay for the ability to charge back and not lose account access, including subsidizing the most flagrant abusers of such a policy. This could be a good trade off, but I think it's important to highlight that there is definitely no free lunch here and that legislating this problem away will have some downstream effects.

What’s the actual cost for chargebacks here? Presumably they are quite capable of revoking licenses to the purchased item. This is slightly hairier for in app purchases laundered through a game currency run by a third party, but still seems doable. Is there a reason the cost isn’t asymptotically close to 0 here?

In the worst case they stop allowing an account to make new purchases while keeping what they’ve bought. Is that an objectionable outcome?

Chargeback fees from processors are pretty steep -- $10+ per transaction. It's not simply the cost of the refund itself. The purpose of those fees is to incentivize merchants to be honest and good to their customers, although in the case of larger players those incentives can become perverse.

This assumes that current prices at all related to cost, which they are not for non-scarce goods like games and other digital content. Prices are set to maximize sales * revenue and adding a minor cost for Steam doesn't really factor into that.

They are related to cost on some level. This type of legislation would introduce some costs for merchants, even digital ones, because of chargeback fees charged by processors. That would be passed on to the customer in addition to whatever profit calculation those merchants are making.

Most use case are not hacks aren't they? If you charge back because not happy for example? Every time you charge back Steam or Epic has to pay $10 or so to the bank if I recall.

There are other reasons to use a chargeback than just fraud.

Which is?

Other examples would be the goods or services paid for never being actually delivered or being significantly differently that what was promised.

- Deceptive advertising

- Removal of advertised features

- Broken UX / Failure to deliver purchase successfully

(I think that last one is going to be increasingly common as people spin up a bunch of thin-clients over GPT-4 and other AI tools - I've already tried buying an AI art thing and it was just completely broken and had to do a refund through googlepay).

There are many acceptable (to the financial institution) reasons to perform a chargeback.

Treating them all in the same manner is a business problem on the merchant's end.

> effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks

This behavior for smaller companies will likely result in fines from Visa, MasterCard and other cards. You really are supposed to treat charge-backs like you would losing an arbitration if you are a merchant. I've watched many a merchant do shady things around charge-backs and find out the hard way (I used to own an MSP, was enlightening). Most of the time it was trying to sue someone after losing, and then getting their case tossed because the judge treated the suit like they were reviewing an arbitration... and most of the time the merchants were actually in the wrong (as in selling defective goods, not delivering services or over-charging).

I agree, the protections is meaningful for small/medium vendors of physical goods. The problem is the balance of power shifts when you have oligopolistic "platform" vendors where the stake of the user is not just that one transaction but the sum of all previous transactions, and that is something that is really only possible in digital transactions. Wal-Mart cannot come into my house and take back the lamps off my table and the food off my shelves. Effectively, Steam and Amazon and Apple can do that - because, as others note, it's not a purchase, it's a revocable license and the ToS includes a "whenever we want" clause.

Requiring that all licenses be refunded at the face value in the event of cancellation would be one relatively equitable outcome. Or you can simply prohibit revocation - refuse to allow companies to ever invoke those terms except after a legal proceeding or similar oddball circumstances.

There is a similar effect around provision of services really. Once you reach the oligopolistic level of market consolidation (and there are services like Steam or Google where that's practically inevitable) then different rules really ought to apply. Which is a problem in a lot of areas, not just revocable licenses.

> Steam and Amazon do the same thing - get hacked and get charged for some items, if you dispute the Steam charge you lose your $5000 account, that's not a fair playing field and effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks.

As far as I know, you won't actually lose your account if you perform a chargeback against Steam, but the account does get restricted in a number of ways, preventing further purchases, access to community features (including trading), multiplayer on VAT enabled serves, and more. The official documentation does not list the specific restrictions [0], but the (fairly old) screenshot in this thread does [1]. Moreover, the restrictions seem to temporary in some cases, even without the account holder reverting the charge-back [2]. Both sources are old, but I don't recall hearing of any changes in this regard, nor could I find anything in that vein.

[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_char...

I think ultimately the only way to solve this is to legislate some notion of digital "ownership."

Steam SOLD me a game. Amazon SOLD me an e-book. Shut down my account or refuse to do further business with me as you like, that's your right, but if you SOLD me something, you can't have it back. You need to either make it available to me or return my money. If Amazon wants to put the word "buy" on a button, then something needs to be sold. Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something.

And, of course, this leads to the reason it'll never happen: first sale doctrine. If I own something, I need to be able to transfer it to someone else.

Isn't a big blocker in this space the fact that when you can hide behind a digital license to use a copy of the game the potential that you may, at some point in the future, be unable to deliver a copy of that game to the consumer isn't a big issue?

I had thought that electronic goods dealers (e-books, steam, whatever) had some issues with actually selling goods because of the fact that a sold good needs to continue to be accessible even if their platform becomes too expensive to operate at some point.

I wonder if we could shift the definition of sale to something more reasonable access-wise in the long term and come up with a reasonable path for resale since, with a third party host like steam, infinite transferability isn't really feasible - there are technicalities around account registration and the like that would need to place some limits on your right to resell the item.

While not realistic to get the world to move to this there is a simple test - if you're still selling it and/or still protecting it with DRM then you have capability to distribute. If the answer to both is no then accessing the content where you originally bought it isn't a big issue anymore. What's a reasonable amount of access (e.g. "can I just redownload the game 24/7 for 8 years") would need to be defined but that's a much easier problem.

With the current model you run into an inherent conflict between protecting content you aren't truly relying on the monetization of anymore and what's fair to users because it requires putting the publisher/publisher's agent in front of the access.

Or you may not be licensed to deliver a copy of that game.

This has already happened with e-books, the rights are negotiated for a term and then when they're not renewed the copy is deleted off the consumer's device.

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

Another odd place this might crop up is music licensing... if the license for some music expires, often the show will be re-mastered with a different track instead. But that could be viewed as a different "edition" of the work, and if you aren't allowed to yoink the user's purchased copy (or simply stream the newer edition) then you have a problem.

Frankly these issues have already gotten out of hand and forcing producers/authors to reach less predatory agreements may be a good thing. I'm not thinking of the small author here, they're already losing, but the estate of a dead artist of some smash-hit catalog will often milk that extremely hard.

> Isn't a big blocker in this space the fact that when you can hide behind a digital license to use a copy of the game the potential that you may, at some point in the future, be unable to deliver a copy of that game to the consumer isn't a big issue?

It is for online only things, but if you buy a game and download it that shouldn't come with some assumption or requirement that I can forever re-download a copy. If I buy a download, it's fair to expect me to backup the thing I purchased. That works for music, movies, and ebooks - any DRM that requires a connection to some server, or an account should allow for transfers and companies who use that kind of DRM should be required to notify owners and patch the DRM out of products if the company no longer wants to maintain the servers and accounts provide that protection.

MMOs are still a problem since you aren't selling the game, just access to the systems that run it, but I think most people understand that.

> Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something.

Somebody get the EU on that, stat.

The GDPR flagged this as a "TODO" item and left it explicitly there, so someone was at least already thinking about it.

I sometimes wonder if it is going to take a massive Estate Law court case to push the needle on this. We're about to the point where "Grandma's Steam Library" is going to be big enough in expected cash value that descendants would meaningfully fight over it, and open up the can of worms that is current digital goods laws. (Including the fact that technically Grandma's Steam Library has *no* survivorship guarantees and Steam's TOS, like most TOS agreements in current digital services, terminates along with the person it was contracted with.)

Totally agree. Either that or they should be forced to change the wording from "buy" to "conditionally gain access subject to revocation at any time for any reason without recourse".

> only way to solve this

I dunno, I've had a solution on hand that has consistently provided high-quality, seaworthy FLAC, MP3, MKV, MP4, etc... of all of my favorite media content. Since around maybe 2003, 2004.

Alternately (or additionally), I'd love for regulatory prohibition of implied ownership of these sorts of items.

Ex. if access is revokable, it's illegal to use the word "Buy" alone - have to use "Rent" or "License" or "Buy License" or something that doesn't imply ownership (because ownership is not being offered)

I don't feel like this is a meaningful change.

If steam changed all the "Buy" to "Rent" on it's website, nothing would actually change.

Customers would be informed. Many would leave for GOG.com

I do not think customer behaviour would change that much.

Then Amazon has no reason to resist this change!

Words are powerful. See how hard they fight the legislation.

I think it would change, but Rent is also not the right word.

I'm familiar with Rent and I intuit what it means. I have access to an asset for a limited time, and then I can choose to continue renting it, or not. The decision is in my hands.

License might be a better word. Because what they're selling is a "one time payment for use of this asset for an undetermined amount of time" - that's not "buy" but it's also not "rent".

When my license ends it's likely I can't get another. Certainly its not my decision to make.

The period of the license us unknown - till you block my account, till you go under, till you decide this service is no longer available, till _your_ license-to-license expires, and so on.

So yeah, I don't think it's Rent.

> then I can choose to continue renting it, or not. The decision is in my hands.

That is not implied by the term rent. Very often rentals are for a fixed amount of time. Especially for video game rentals, back when they were common.

I think rent implies you have limited control better than license does.

Its funny how Buy is actually Rent, like how Steal is actually Copy.