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.