Now for some news which appears in favour of game ownership and ownership rights.
Following a GoG announcement that Epic Games is officially integrated into GoG, Tim Sweeney advocated on Twitter for "universal ownership" of digital items - referring to games people purchase. By "universal ownership", he means that when someone buys a game or DLC on one platform, they receive access to their purchase on all participating platforms.
Tim Sweeney's larger commentary is this:
QuoteUltimately, ownership of digital items should be a universal notion, independent of stores and platforms. So much of the digital world today is frustrated by powerful intermediaries whose toll booths obstruct open commerce to keep customers and their purchases locked in.
Epic’s committed to working with all willing ecosystems to connect our stores and recognize universal ownership. Early bits include purchase integration with Humble and others, and library visibility to GOG. A lot more will be coming over time.
Possible implementation strategies: federated (each store maintains its own ownership records, but can communicate with other stores and recognize theirs too); clearinghouse (stores agree on a common ownership database); decentralized (a blockchain type leger tracks ownership).
There's no question this thing will start with federated ownership, because it's easy to adopt incrementally without disrupting existing stores. But that's doesn't scale well, so it's probably not the ultimate solution.
Tim also made some replies in response to people commenting on his statements:
"If ownership of games is universal, then you don’t need every store or platform to operate forever, you just need some that do continue on."
"Epic's aim is to bring players in, not lock players in. Free games, exclusives, and free Epic Online Services for developers of other games are all part of this effort to bring players in. Interconnection of stores and accounts avoids lock-in."
"Each company is advancing in different areas, GOG with a universal launcher, Epic with account and purchasing integration. Epic Online Services (cross-platform friends, matchmaking, accounts, etc) support all platforms and stores!"
"Wouldn’t it be purely better for everyone if Steam purchases were available on other stores and platforms that hosted the game, and if Steam hosted the PC version of games you’ve bought on other stores and platforms?"
"The cost of download bandwidth is sooo small. Any store should be easily able to pay bandwidth costs for third party games from the money they do make by selling games, and any reasonable store would love to have customers frequently visiting."
This comment in particular ("possession!=ownership"), looked-at in the context of his emphasis on "universal ownership" seems to show that Tim Sweeney is actually on the side of game ownership. In acknowledging the difference between mere possession and actual ownership, he is saying that his statements of "universal ownership" take, as granted, that people own their purchased games.
Tim's expressed position on the matter is in agreement with GoG's own, as GoG openly supports the fact that people own their purchased games:
Related to the topic of game ownership, further down in the comments replying to Tim's posts, a lengthy debate took place between someone who claims to be a lawyer and another poster regarding the topic of game ownership. The lawyer argued that EULAs are enforceable in the US and that people don't own their games. The other person told them that's not so.
In the course of the debate the lawyer continually used false arguments including misrepresentations, inapplicable conflations between topics courts have ruled on, appeals to authority, and dishonest tricks in general to try to simply have their argument accepted as fact.
A more detailed look at the tricks they employed is here:
- They appealed many times to a Wikipedia list of court cases regarding use of online services where the verdict was in favour of the "clickwrap" user agreements. They claimed those verdicts in-favour of the clickwrap agreements show that EULAs are considered binding under law. However, all those cases were about the rights of a user of an online service who had to agree to a Terms of Service to use somebody-else's service, and not about the rights a person receives when they purchase a good. Their argument here was false and disingenuously tried to conflate the rulings regarding services to what the law is for goods, when the rules for services (which involves using somebody-else's property) are different than the rules for your purchased goods (which are your own property): You indeed have to agree to the terms of another person in order to use their property (such as their offered service), but, outside of the law, someone else can't dictate terms on how you may use your own property (which are your purchased goods).
- They repeatedly pretended that a lower court's older ruling on a matter (ToS agreement validity) which is irrelevant to the topic of purchased game ownership supercedes the higher Supreme Court's newer ruling on the exact matter of purchased good ownership. But when it comes to rulings, newer takes precedent over older, and higher court rulings overrule lower court rulings - and the Supreme Court is the US' highest court and its decisions apply to all of the US and take precedence over all the rest of the US' courts and overrule any prior ruling that is in contradiction to the Supreme Court's rulings.
- They claimed that the US Supreme Court's ruling which literally addressed and encompassed all goods was being interpreted too broadly when used to claim the first-sale doctrine applies to all goods, while simultaneously claiming that the Feldman v. Google ruling, which didn't at-all relate to the topic at-hand and was about a online user ToS agreement for a service, meant that EULAs are binding on purchasers of software goods - while also ignoring that even if that verdict had meant what they claimed (and it didn't), it would have still been superceded anyway by the newer Supreme Court ruling that the first-sale doctrine applies to all goods (with software being specifically mentioned by the Supreme Court as subject to the first-sale doctrine).
- They did the former while claiming that the Feldman v. Google verdict included mention of the decision applying to goods, when the Feldman v. Google court order only mentions the word "good" twice and neither time supports their claim. The two uses of the word "good" in the Feldman v. Google order are these:
"Plaintiff filed an Amended Complaint, which eliminated the express contract claim and asserted instead claims styled as (1) breach of implied contract, (2) breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing"
“Standardization of agreements serves many of the same functions as standardization of goods and services; both are essential to a system of mass production and distribution."
Heck, that even shows the opposite of what the lawyer claimed: The court order states that 'goods vs services' is standardized, and essentially so, and so not open to interpretation based on the type of good or service it is or exemption based on a seller writing an EULA.
- They argued that a brief Wikipedia summation about the 2013 US Supreme Court ruling was evidence that the 2013 Supreme Court ruling only applies to foreign copyrighted works rather than all goods, while ignoring that the court explicitly explained in its ruling that the very reason why the first-sale doctrine must apply to foreign copyrighted works is because there can be no exception or exemption to the type of good which the first-sale doctrine applies to, with the judge specifically mentioning software as an example of a good which the first-sale doctrine applies to.
- They used ostentatious phrasing and repeated appeals to the authority of being a lawyer to try to suggest their argument wins by default on those grounds, despite that being a lawyer isn't a badge of credibility for a vested-interest legal argument because a lawyer is an advocate for hire and will argue and pull every trick they can to secure benefit and a win for their client's interests.
Their tactic, not as an internet troll but as a lawyer protecting their clients' interests and also their personal reputation as a paid-proponent of a certain line of argument which serves their clients' interests, was to keep making false claims about things, hoping that the other person wouldn't know the information which invalidated their claims and so would just accept the arguments as true and authoritative coming from a lawyer, so that people reading them would believe those arguments had been conceded to, and so they would be inclined to assume those arguments had validity and those people would be influenced by that going forward, effectively biasing public perception in favour of those who oppose game ownership.
Their many wilful disingenuous arguments shows what to be on guard for with a lawyer, and I think is a lesson to remember that a lawyer is not a purveyor of truth unless the topic they're speaking on is of no consequence to their personal practice, or if the truth is what they are being paid to argue in a particular case. A lawyer is an advocate for hire and they will bend every which way, as the one in this debate did, to argue and defend the interest of their employer. And even if they don't have a current client in the related field, if they are a lawyer who has a history of advocating for copyright holders or software publishers, or who has, themself, earned money writing EULAs, then they will consider it in their personal best interest to protect the interests of copyright holders and software publishers to the exclusion of others.
Related thread (updated February 2020): You own the software that you purchase, and any claims otherwise are urban myth or corporate propaganda