Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone
Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital.
Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you)
Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
The current outrage over the shift from physical media to streaming and digital licenses is based on a massive historical misunderstanding. People treat the twentieth century as the absolute baseline for how media should work, but the era of the DVD and the cartridge was actually a historical fluke.
For thousands of years, you could not buy or own a performance. You bought a ticket to experience a play or a symphony, and the creator maintained total control over their work. John Locke argued that individuals own themselves and therefore own the labor of their bodies and minds. When a creator invests their intellect into developing software or art, it is an extension of that labor, and they possess the highest moral claim to it.
Capturing art on physical media was a technological anomaly that broke this rule and created a false sense of consumer entitlement. It birthed legal loopholes that allowed massive secondary markets to profit endlessly off a creator’s intellectual labor without compensating them beyond the very first sale. It tricked the public into confusing the ownership of a piece of plastic with the ownership of the art itself.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did. Furthermore, modern software and digital media are not static objects like a wooden chair. They are living ecosystems that require ongoing server maintenance, security patches, and active development. Demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront fee is essentially demanding forced, uncompensated ongoing labor from the development team.
The transition away from physical media is not a corporate theft of consumer rights. It is a necessary course correction back to the historical norm of the amphitheater. A digital subscription or end user license is simply a modern theater ticket. You are paying for the right to occupy the creator’s digital venue for a set period of time. The architect of the work is just finally reclaiming the moral authority to decide exactly how and when their intellectual labor is consumed.
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 its 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, patenting concepts others have developed 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 moar 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.
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 conundrum.
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.
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.
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 their designated 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.
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 reasons 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.
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.
I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.
When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.
Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.
This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.
I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.
Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.
I think we’ve drifted away from your original argument.
Your original comment was making a philosophical case. It appealed to history, Locke’s labor theory, and the moral authority of creators. My response addressed those claims directly.
Your latest reply, however, isn’t really defending that philosophical position. It’s explaining how software licensing currently works under copyright law and why software is treated differently from books or paintings.
I don’t disagree with most of that. Software has long occupied a unique legal category, and EULAs have existed for decades.
But that’s a different argument from the one you originally made. We’ve shifted from “this is the morally correct understanding of ownership” to “this is the current legal framework for software.”
If your point is simply that software has historically been licensed rather than sold outright, then I don’t think we’re actually in much disagreement anymore.
You make a fair observation, and I appreciate the level-headed read of the thread. However, I would argue that the argument hasn’t drifted; it has just moved from the philosophical foundation to its practical application.
The legal framework of software licensing does not exist in a vacuum. EULAs, copyright law, and the strict legal distinction between software and physical media are the mechanisms society built to enforce the exact moral philosophy I outlined at the start.
When John Locke argued that a creator owns the fruits of their intellectual labor, he established the moral baseline. When a modern developer writes a EULA stating you are only buying a temporary license to execute their code, they are simply legally codifying that Lockean principle. The law treats software differently than a physical painting or a book precisely because the law recognizes the philosophical difference between a static object and a living digital ecosystem that requires ongoing human labor.
So, we haven’t abandoned the moral argument for a legal one. The current legal framework is just the practical enforcement of the creator’s moral authority. If we agree on the legal reality of how software is licensed, then we fundamentally agree on the ultimate conclusion: the consumer does not possess the moral right to demand permanent ownership of another person’s ongoing intellectual labor.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.
Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.
Whenever people make claims like “You have no natural right to intellectual property”, I’m very curious A) what is the fullest extent of the amount of IP they, as an individual, have worked to create, and B) how secure their living situation and finances are.
I find a lot of people shift their opinion after they’ve worked for years on something under genuine risk of it not doing well.
I’ve been arguing with people about this stuff for 20 years online and can count on one hand the number of other industry professionals that I have come across. As I mentioned in another comment; the tone, and tenor of these debates says far more about the type of people who like talking about video games online then it does about the state of the industry, or quality of products and services…
Most people have a very hard time grasping the reality that if they are here, talking about video games on the internet, they represent less than 1% of the consumer base. Some manage to walk right up to the line, acknowledging that “most gamers don’t care about digital-only/DRM/MTX/subscriptions”… yet somehow still come to the conclusion that their opinion and resistance is the “correct” perspective and they know better than the 99%.
It’s a perennial example of false consensus and naive realism cognitive biases.
The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit.
Strawman. What I said is that the creator of art has full moral authority over when and how it is consumed, if at all. If you have a private sketchbook in your room right now, are we all entitled to its contents as the common property of the human race simply because it exists?
…artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
False equivalency. What you are describing would be a unique performance and a completely new creative expression. A fairer question would be whether some hypothetical historical musician would agree with your suggestion that if they had 10 songs written down in a journal somewhere, that the rest of humanity was entitled to read, or hear them performed at their leisure and demand.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is…
Another false equivalency. You are confusing private property and personal property. Intellectual property (which would be a form of private property) does not exist; all ideas which benefit humanity should be shared freely. What we are discussing is the capitalization of intellectual labor, and the moral authority over all labor belongs to the individual who executed said labor. The knowledge required to write a song, or make a clay pot has utility to humanity and should be shared freely. If I use that knowledge to actually MAKE a clay pot you are not entitled to its use simply because you also exist.
It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made.
I disagree 100%. Copyright should have only ever been used to prevent anyone other than a living creator from profiting off a unique creative work. This is why we have fair-use, and time bound public domain exceptions. Fundamentally I disagree with capitalism and commerce more broadly, but that is outside the scope of this conversation. As long as we are operating under those models, then copyright should protect commercial use of original works until the original creator is dead, then the work should enter the public domain.
One last question looking at you profile: do you have all your woodworking plans available for free online?
Well said. I only take issue with your assertion that it is a useful legal compromise. It being useful is entirely dependent upon who you are.
For someone who partakes in the shared cultural tapestry it could come to be that the legal compromise ends up an oppressive force.
For instance, if you went to clubs in your youth, that music became part of your shared culture. When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.
When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.
Again, you are fully entitled and within you legal right to sing those songs to your heart’s content to relive the glory days; that does not mean that you are entitled to a high fidelity recording of the original work in perpetuity simply because you paid to listen to it once at a club…
For thousands of years back you could trade people for cows, owning your life is a massive historical misunderstanding.
You could own the Mona Lisa. You could own the original Dante’s inferno. For thousands of years there wasn’t the technology to have a copy of the Iliad, then there was and you could have a copy that wasn’t man-made, the press was born. You couldn’t have a copy of a painting without a massive spending on a replica, then in 1600 in Japan with wooden blocks they mass distributed art of Hokusai. You couldn’t own music until you could. You couldn’t own performances until you could.
Those were never moral or logical reasons not to, the technology just didn’t exists. Now the technology does exist and you say that because it didn’t before, then it’s a fluke?
For most of human history people died at early ages, we should go back to that and ditch all antibiotics I guess then, if “history” is the bar you’re measuring “moral”.
Also, guess what, the architect of the work was never in control of their art nor had the “moral authority” of how their work is consumed. Do you really thing that Homer personally went and trained everyone who wanted to interpret the Iliad? Your whole argument is based in something that didn’t even existed in the first place with tons of examples of the contrary that the only thing I can think is that you’re trolling or severely brainwashed.
They sold a product, not an “experience”. Without massive access and preservation of art in all forms civilization couldn’t even begin to grow as fast as it did in the last thousand years.
And before anything else, the mere concept of “owning” is the single most important part of capitalism, if they want to play the “owning” game then we should all be able to play the game. Also historically “owning” didn’t exist. We should course correct to the one true way of tribadism and nomads. I guess.
You are making a massive leap in logic by equating the development of human rights and medicine with the legal mechanics of creative ownership. No one is arguing we should go back to the dark ages just for the sake of tradition. The point is that the fundamental nature of intellectual labor did not change just because we invented a way to print it on plastic.
You claim that we could not own music or performances until the technology existed, and then suddenly we could. But that is legally and factually false. Even after the printing press was invented, or the phonograph, or the Hokusai woodblocks, the consumer still did not own the art. You owned the paper. You owned the wax cylinder. You owned the block of wood. The rights to the creation itself always remained with the creator or their publisher. You are still confusing the physical container with the intellectual labor itself.
But the biggest hole in your argument is that you are still completely ignoring the reality of the medium. You bring up Homer and the Iliad. The Iliad is an ancient oral tradition and a piece of public domain folklore. It is a completely irrelevant comparison to the modern reality of proprietary software and closed digital ecosystems. You’re comparing living, breathing digital infrastructure to static objects. The Mona Lisa, Dante’s Inferno, and woodblock prints. Those are static, finished products. Once Dante finished writing, his labor was done. You can read his book for a century and it requires zero additional effort from him.
Modern software and video games are not static objects. They require active, daily labor to function. They need continuous server hosting, security patches, database management, and network infrastructure. Hokusai did not have to pay a monthly server bill to keep his woodblock visible in your house.
If you buy a copy of a modern digital service and demand the right to own and access it forever for a single upfront fee, you are demanding that the developers provide uncompensated labor and pay for your server access out of their own pockets for the rest of your life.
You can champion the preservation of art all you want, and on that front, almost everyone agrees with you. Archives and historians need legal pathways to preserve digital history. But archival preservation is not the same thing as consumer entitlement. You bought a license to access a digital venue. You did not buy the right to force engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity.
When you buy a painting, a book, or a horseshoe, the creator’s labor ends the second you buy it. The object just sits there, existing on its own. Software doesn’t do that.
Because of the reality of how technology works, code doesn’t just sit in a vacuum forever. Operating systems update, hardware architectures change, server protocols shift, and security certificates expire. If software is left completely alone, it eventually breaks (a concept known in IT as “software rot”).
To keep a game, especially a modern one, functional and playable for a decade or more, engineers have to actively maintain it. They have to patch it for new operating systems, migrate server infrastructure, and update APIs.
So, when someone pays a one-time fee of $60 and demands that their software remain perfectly functional until the end of time, they aren’t just demanding ownership of a static object. They are demanding that a team of engineers continuously update, patch, and maintain the infrastructure for that code indefinitely, without ever being paid for that ongoing labor.
That is what “engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity” means. Pretending that software is a static object like a book ignores the reality that demanding permanent functionality from code requires perpetual, unpaid maintenance from its creators.
What the hell are you talking about. John Nintendo himself didn’t had to pay anyone to make Mupen64. I assure you that Michael Sony didn’t had to pay to his engineer so Bloodborne could be played outside a PS4.
No one. Absolutely no one is asking that Sony or any other company release patches forever and that I could play Crash Bash in a PS5 or boicot. My PS4 broke years ago, I dumped my Bloodborne copy and play it again on my PC. Sony didn’t had to pay anyone a single cent for that to happen.
I’m really curious of who are you listening that made you think that the issue with killing physical media is “I want support forever”…
Have you heard about GoG?
Just to be clear, not being able to access a game in any way after the publisher decides it’s not worth it is indeed the core of all of these.
No one is arguing they have to keep their servers and games running forever. It has never been a part of the conversation.
There’s much more than “you support it forever or don’t support it at all”. GoG allows you to download the game installer and do with it whatever you want. Buying a physical copy means you can play the 1.0.0 Cyberpunk in you PS3 even after the store closes. Even if your PS3 completely breaks, you can emulate it because you have access to the game no matter what happens in the future.
Reducing games access to one singular source that no one can have access is what is happening. There will be not offline installer, no game to emulate or preserve, no mods, no local play, nothing, and literally, the only thing they have to do is nothing.
You mention bards adding their own twists. That actually proves my point. The audience didn’t “own” the bard’s unique performance or get to take it home; they just experienced the bard’s specific intellectual labor for the evening. A video game or software platform isn’t a public myth; it’s a highly specific, unique execution of labor.
Furthermore, you’re right that books and paintings have been sold for centuries, but those are static objects. When a painting is sold, the artist’s work is done. Modern digital ecosystems are living things that require active servers, database management, and ongoing engineering. If you demand perpetual ownership for a single $60 payment, who is morally obligated to provide the uncompensated labor to keep those servers running for the next twenty years?
Maybe stop treating private server owners like criminals, and get back to releasing server binaries like we used to?
The original developers of these games aren’t the only ones capable of hosting them.
I cut my teeth hosting by hosting game servers for me and my friends, and now work in the tech industry using those skills to pay rent.
Developers who gatekeep server binaries aren’t just doing a disservice to players, but to the future generation of IT workers, and those who will depend on them.
Furthermore, for many games, these are tacked on features to an already competent single player that doesn’t need online support.
This argument falls apart for anything that isn’t live service, which is basically everything I play…
You are conflating predatory always online DRM with actual live-service architecture. You are entirely right that tacking forced online requirements onto a single-player game is a terrible product choice, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality of ownership.
If a classical painter decides to hang their masterpiece in a pitch-black room, or a sculptor insists their work only be viewed through frosted glass, it makes for a miserable audience experience. But it is undeniably their right to do so. The creator always dictates the terms of engagement. Even if you are playing a completely offline game, you still do not own the code. You only bought a license to execute it. Feel free to go look at the EULA from ANY video game you’ve EVER purchased; you never owned the game, only a license.
Furthermore, demanding that developers just release server binaries treats backend architecture as if it is public property. Backend infrastructure is full of proprietary code, licensed third-party middleware, and security architecture that a studio cannot legally or safely hand over to the public. When a developer chooses to release server tools, that is a generous decision they made regarding their own intellectual labor. You do not have a moral or legal right to demand the keys to a developer’s proprietary backend just because you want to host it yourself. Whether it is a live-service giant or an offline indie game, the creator still gets to choose how their work is distributed.
Anyone who puts their own art on a pedastol deserves the anguish that comes from people enjoying it the “wrong” way.
I say this as someone who’s been making games since their early teens.
Furthermore, as much as they are the norm in gaming, proprietary software licenses where a fucking mistake, and I’d staple my ballsack to the ceiling before I’d license any code I care about with one.
Like fuck Richard Stallman for being a creep, but everything that man has ever said about copyright is completely accurate.
Even if that means not getting cutting edge toolkits.
While I don’t necessarily agree with your POV here, I can at least say it’s more interesting than people realize to look at the growth of the VHS player and how this ownership debacle played out in the video world when it first came around. There were big lawsuits around whether people were allowed to record a movie or show, and then play it in a living room of 4-5 people.
The opinions of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are not absolutel nor ubiquitous. They may have said things that are no longer, or never were accurate and almost certainly should never be held to be inviolate/permanent.
You’re absolutely right that Locke isn’t gospel, so let’s strip the 17th century philosophy away entirely and look at the modern reality. You don’t need Locke to tell you that server hosting, database management, and daily security patching require ongoing human labor and cost money every single month.
You also make a great point about historical patrons owning the art they funded. In modern digital media, the publisher or the studio IS that patron. They funded the millions of dollars to build it, so as you pointed out, they own it. The consumer paying a $60 entry fee isn’t the patron; they are just buying a ticket to access the patron’s digital venue.
If you demand perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront payment, you are demanding that the patron provide uncompensated server space and engineering labor for you for the rest of time. That isn’t consumer rights; that’s just entitlement.
The fact that you bought a ticket to watch a movie in a movie theater does not entitle you to watch that movie whenever and however often you want.
I need to preface that I don’t know how to say this any better and I’m also short on time so I’m going to ask your forgiveness for my bluntness and any offence this may come across as. I promise you im not attacking you and you are just going to have to accept it. Again my apologies but here we go…
Your logic is screwed up and I’m having a hard time trying to sort out where your flawed logic is, so I’m gonna need some grace and more self reflection from you than is probably expected, I hope you can accomodate my shortcomings in this.
It’s not an attack, you seem to make a well thought out argument, which is more than I usually see. Credit to you and I do respect you for it.
All work created by a creator CAN be owned by someone else.
A horseshoe is no different from movie on DVD or SD card from an ownership standpoint.
I disagree that recording performances is a technological anomaly. Because it requires entirely too narrow a perspective.
The only different between someone writing a book describing a play and a recording is the medium used to record it. That medium is a physical thing.
We can’t literally record thoughts, not in any meaningful or useful ways at the moment but we ARE close to that. There is a research experiment where they recorded someone’s brain activity while they dreamt and were able to play that recording back to some degree of success.
In a hobbesian sense (as you described it, I’m not claiming mastery on the mans philosophy just trying to meet you where you are) you cannot own someones thoughts that use used to make a creation, whether it be a performance or a recording of the performance. The only difference between a horseshoe and a performance of a okay or music, is that not many people cared to bottle up the performance of a blacksmith making the horseshoe. Until YouTube.
Owning the horseshoe doesn’t give you rights to the performance of its creation, neither does owning a copy of the recording of the performance grant you ownership of the horseshoe.
There are different things at play from start to finish. And they are treated differently. I don’t think anyone is making the same arguments that you are claiming and refuting, and that’s why I think there is a flaw in your arguments logic.
Owning a game on a disc or cartridge is not equivalent to owning the right to a performance. It doesn’t give you ownership of anything other than what you purchased. In this case that we are discussing owning a game IS owning the code that exists on the physical medium, be it a hardrive, a paper printout, a disc. Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code is what ownership of a digital creation is. It’s an ordered number of 1s and 0s. It’s a copy of a pattern that is absolutely useless to anyone who can’t read binary on the medium purchases. Ownership does not require usability, but it MUST provide a product that is tangible, regardless of its usability to the owner.
Im not understanding why you are using the examples of right to a performance the way you are using them and I think what I’ve written here should be enough to explain what I understand about the situation. My ability to communicate my thoughts clearly and precisely to you, anyone else reading this and also to myself are perhaps insufficient, but that doesn’t automatically invalidate my understanding just because I can’t explain it well, or that I’ve made errors in my attempt to communicate them in this medium
I see what you’re getting at, but your argument is built on an illusion of ownership that has never actually existed in the video game space.
You claimed that “owning a game IS owning the code… Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code.” That is fundamentally false. In the software industry, end-users have never owned the code, the pattern of 1s and 0s, or the game itself. You only ever purchased a non-exclusive, revocable license to execute that software.
The physical disc or cartridge was never the game, it was just a plastic delivery vehicle that doubled as a physical DRM key. The First Sale Doctrine gave you the right to resell that piece of plastic, but it never gave you ownership of the intellectual property printed on it. EULAs have made this explicit since the 1980s.
If you acknowledge that gamers only ever purchased a license to play, then the shift to digital-only isn’t some grand moral failing or a theft of consumer rights. It is strictly a logistical shift in distribution. The transaction hasn’t changed, you are still just buying a license to execute code. The only difference is that studios are delivering that license over a network instead of burning it onto a piece of plastic.
You can certainly argue that losing the ability to trade in used plastic discs is inconvenient or annoying. But calling an operational shift in supply chain logistics “immoral” is applying heavy ethical weight to a simple reality: you can’t lose ownership rights you never possessed in the first place.
It absolutely did give me ownership of the software on everysingle NES game I bought. NO ONE can tell me I don’t own that plastic and can use it in anyway I want so long as I do not distribute copies or derivatives works of it. But I can create and make as many copies of it as I want as long as I keep them to myself and I can make whatever changes I want to it assuming I have the skillset to do so. They do not have to provide me any assistance, nor am I entitled to assistance to do these things, but as the owner I certainly can do these things
Owning something doesn’t mean there aren’t conditions, but I absolutely own those 1s and 0s on that piece of plastic. No one can delete them or take them or prevent me from using them in anyway.
This ISNT a 1980s thing either. Copying what’s on my Plastic NES cartridges is no different than is no different than forging a copy of the Mona Lisa if I owned it. Distributing that copy in any way is currently prohibited, but I can paint it as long as I don’t try to claim it’s the original.
Owning a NES cartridge might also give me a limited license to certain things but I OWN that copy of 1s and 0s even if I can’t copy it and sell it or give them away. I didn’t sign a EULA when I bought Chrono trigger. YOU may have, but I didn’t
You are confusing physical possession with intellectual ownership. You absolutely own the plastic cartridge, the silicon board, and the physical state of the ROM chip. Because it is an offline, physical object, no one can remotely delete it. But you do not own the code, and you never did.
Under copyright law, ownership of a copyright is strictly separate from ownership of the material object the work is stored on. You own the material object. Nintendo and Square own the 1s and 0s.
You claim you never agreed to a EULA for Chrono Trigger. You didn’t have to click an “Accept” button on a screen because the 1990s operated on shrink-wrap licenses. If you look at the back of the original Chrono Trigger box and inside the manual, the publishers explicitly laid out the terms of your limited license to use their intellectual property. The law didn’t require your signature; breaking the shrink-wrap seal on the box or booting up the cartridge was legally recognized as accepting those terms of use.
Your house metaphor actually proves this point perfectly. If you buy a house, you own the wood, the drywall, and the land. But you do not own the architect’s copyrighted blueprints. You can paint the walls inside your house, but you cannot legally take the architect’s design and build an identical replica of that house on another lot.
You possess a physical artifact that grants you perpetual, offline access to execute a licensed piece of software. That is a great feature of the physical media era, and it is exactly why no one can take it away from you. But claiming you own the actual 1s and 0s because you hold the plastic is like claiming you own a novel’s copyright because you bought a hardcover at the bookstore.
Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
The current outrage over the shift from physical media to streaming and digital licenses is based on a massive historical misunderstanding. People treat the twentieth century as the absolute baseline for how media should work, but the era of the DVD and the cartridge was actually a historical fluke.
For thousands of years, you could not buy or own a performance. You bought a ticket to experience a play or a symphony, and the creator maintained total control over their work. John Locke argued that individuals own themselves and therefore own the labor of their bodies and minds. When a creator invests their intellect into developing software or art, it is an extension of that labor, and they possess the highest moral claim to it.
Capturing art on physical media was a technological anomaly that broke this rule and created a false sense of consumer entitlement. It birthed legal loopholes that allowed massive secondary markets to profit endlessly off a creator’s intellectual labor without compensating them beyond the very first sale. It tricked the public into confusing the ownership of a piece of plastic with the ownership of the art itself.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did. Furthermore, modern software and digital media are not static objects like a wooden chair. They are living ecosystems that require ongoing server maintenance, security patches, and active development. Demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront fee is essentially demanding forced, uncompensated ongoing labor from the development team.
The transition away from physical media is not a corporate theft of consumer rights. It is a necessary course correction back to the historical norm of the amphitheater. A digital subscription or end user license is simply a modern theater ticket. You are paying for the right to occupy the creator’s digital venue for a set period of time. The architect of the work is just finally reclaiming the moral authority to decide exactly how and when their intellectual labor is consumed.
Why is it necessary?
Who cares? It doesn’t need to be for any reason at all, it is the creators prerogative; that is the entire point of the debate.
Why was John Cage’s “4’33"” “necessary”?
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 its 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, patenting concepts others have developed 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 moar 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.
https://medium.com/@elarson39/photography-was-historically-considered-arts-most-mortal-enemy-is-ai-69a2dc2f43ef
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 conundrum.
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.
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.
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 their designated 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.
https://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 reasons 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.
https://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.
I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.
When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.
Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.
This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.
I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.
Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.
I think we’ve drifted away from your original argument.
Your original comment was making a philosophical case. It appealed to history, Locke’s labor theory, and the moral authority of creators. My response addressed those claims directly.
Your latest reply, however, isn’t really defending that philosophical position. It’s explaining how software licensing currently works under copyright law and why software is treated differently from books or paintings.
I don’t disagree with most of that. Software has long occupied a unique legal category, and EULAs have existed for decades.
But that’s a different argument from the one you originally made. We’ve shifted from “this is the morally correct understanding of ownership” to “this is the current legal framework for software.”
If your point is simply that software has historically been licensed rather than sold outright, then I don’t think we’re actually in much disagreement anymore.
You make a fair observation, and I appreciate the level-headed read of the thread. However, I would argue that the argument hasn’t drifted; it has just moved from the philosophical foundation to its practical application. The legal framework of software licensing does not exist in a vacuum. EULAs, copyright law, and the strict legal distinction between software and physical media are the mechanisms society built to enforce the exact moral philosophy I outlined at the start.
When John Locke argued that a creator owns the fruits of their intellectual labor, he established the moral baseline. When a modern developer writes a EULA stating you are only buying a temporary license to execute their code, they are simply legally codifying that Lockean principle. The law treats software differently than a physical painting or a book precisely because the law recognizes the philosophical difference between a static object and a living digital ecosystem that requires ongoing human labor.
So, we haven’t abandoned the moral argument for a legal one. The current legal framework is just the practical enforcement of the creator’s moral authority. If we agree on the legal reality of how software is licensed, then we fundamentally agree on the ultimate conclusion: the consumer does not possess the moral right to demand permanent ownership of another person’s ongoing intellectual labor.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.
Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.
Whenever people make claims like “You have no natural right to intellectual property”, I’m very curious A) what is the fullest extent of the amount of IP they, as an individual, have worked to create, and B) how secure their living situation and finances are.
I find a lot of people shift their opinion after they’ve worked for years on something under genuine risk of it not doing well.
I’ve been arguing with people about this stuff for 20 years online and can count on one hand the number of other industry professionals that I have come across. As I mentioned in another comment; the tone, and tenor of these debates says far more about the type of people who like talking about video games online then it does about the state of the industry, or quality of products and services…
Most people have a very hard time grasping the reality that if they are here, talking about video games on the internet, they represent less than 1% of the consumer base. Some manage to walk right up to the line, acknowledging that “most gamers don’t care about digital-only/DRM/MTX/subscriptions”… yet somehow still come to the conclusion that their opinion and resistance is the “correct” perspective and they know better than the 99%.
It’s a perennial example of false consensus and naive realism cognitive biases.
Strawman. What I said is that the creator of art has full moral authority over when and how it is consumed, if at all. If you have a private sketchbook in your room right now, are we all entitled to its contents as the common property of the human race simply because it exists?
False equivalency. What you are describing would be a unique performance and a completely new creative expression. A fairer question would be whether some hypothetical historical musician would agree with your suggestion that if they had 10 songs written down in a journal somewhere, that the rest of humanity was entitled to read, or hear them performed at their leisure and demand.
Another false equivalency. You are confusing private property and personal property. Intellectual property (which would be a form of private property) does not exist; all ideas which benefit humanity should be shared freely. What we are discussing is the capitalization of intellectual labor, and the moral authority over all labor belongs to the individual who executed said labor. The knowledge required to write a song, or make a clay pot has utility to humanity and should be shared freely. If I use that knowledge to actually MAKE a clay pot you are not entitled to its use simply because you also exist.
I disagree 100%. Copyright should have only ever been used to prevent anyone other than a living creator from profiting off a unique creative work. This is why we have fair-use, and time bound public domain exceptions. Fundamentally I disagree with capitalism and commerce more broadly, but that is outside the scope of this conversation. As long as we are operating under those models, then copyright should protect commercial use of original works until the original creator is dead, then the work should enter the public domain.
One last question looking at you profile: do you have all your woodworking plans available for free online?
Well said. I only take issue with your assertion that it is a useful legal compromise. It being useful is entirely dependent upon who you are.
For someone who partakes in the shared cultural tapestry it could come to be that the legal compromise ends up an oppressive force.
For instance, if you went to clubs in your youth, that music became part of your shared culture. When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.
Again, you are fully entitled and within you legal right to sing those songs to your heart’s content to relive the glory days; that does not mean that you are entitled to a high fidelity recording of the original work in perpetuity simply because you paid to listen to it once at a club…
So… We should go backwards instead of forward?
For thousands of years back you could trade people for cows, owning your life is a massive historical misunderstanding.
You could own the Mona Lisa. You could own the original Dante’s inferno. For thousands of years there wasn’t the technology to have a copy of the Iliad, then there was and you could have a copy that wasn’t man-made, the press was born. You couldn’t have a copy of a painting without a massive spending on a replica, then in 1600 in Japan with wooden blocks they mass distributed art of Hokusai. You couldn’t own music until you could. You couldn’t own performances until you could.
Those were never moral or logical reasons not to, the technology just didn’t exists. Now the technology does exist and you say that because it didn’t before, then it’s a fluke?
For most of human history people died at early ages, we should go back to that and ditch all antibiotics I guess then, if “history” is the bar you’re measuring “moral”.
Also, guess what, the architect of the work was never in control of their art nor had the “moral authority” of how their work is consumed. Do you really thing that Homer personally went and trained everyone who wanted to interpret the Iliad? Your whole argument is based in something that didn’t even existed in the first place with tons of examples of the contrary that the only thing I can think is that you’re trolling or severely brainwashed.
They sold a product, not an “experience”. Without massive access and preservation of art in all forms civilization couldn’t even begin to grow as fast as it did in the last thousand years.
And before anything else, the mere concept of “owning” is the single most important part of capitalism, if they want to play the “owning” game then we should all be able to play the game. Also historically “owning” didn’t exist. We should course correct to the one true way of tribadism and nomads. I guess.
You are making a massive leap in logic by equating the development of human rights and medicine with the legal mechanics of creative ownership. No one is arguing we should go back to the dark ages just for the sake of tradition. The point is that the fundamental nature of intellectual labor did not change just because we invented a way to print it on plastic.
You claim that we could not own music or performances until the technology existed, and then suddenly we could. But that is legally and factually false. Even after the printing press was invented, or the phonograph, or the Hokusai woodblocks, the consumer still did not own the art. You owned the paper. You owned the wax cylinder. You owned the block of wood. The rights to the creation itself always remained with the creator or their publisher. You are still confusing the physical container with the intellectual labor itself.
But the biggest hole in your argument is that you are still completely ignoring the reality of the medium. You bring up Homer and the Iliad. The Iliad is an ancient oral tradition and a piece of public domain folklore. It is a completely irrelevant comparison to the modern reality of proprietary software and closed digital ecosystems. You’re comparing living, breathing digital infrastructure to static objects. The Mona Lisa, Dante’s Inferno, and woodblock prints. Those are static, finished products. Once Dante finished writing, his labor was done. You can read his book for a century and it requires zero additional effort from him.
Modern software and video games are not static objects. They require active, daily labor to function. They need continuous server hosting, security patches, database management, and network infrastructure. Hokusai did not have to pay a monthly server bill to keep his woodblock visible in your house.
If you buy a copy of a modern digital service and demand the right to own and access it forever for a single upfront fee, you are demanding that the developers provide uncompensated labor and pay for your server access out of their own pockets for the rest of your life.
You can champion the preservation of art all you want, and on that front, almost everyone agrees with you. Archives and historians need legal pathways to preserve digital history. But archival preservation is not the same thing as consumer entitlement. You bought a license to access a digital venue. You did not buy the right to force engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity.
What do you mean with “engineers works for free in perpetuity”?
When you buy a painting, a book, or a horseshoe, the creator’s labor ends the second you buy it. The object just sits there, existing on its own. Software doesn’t do that.
Because of the reality of how technology works, code doesn’t just sit in a vacuum forever. Operating systems update, hardware architectures change, server protocols shift, and security certificates expire. If software is left completely alone, it eventually breaks (a concept known in IT as “software rot”).
To keep a game, especially a modern one, functional and playable for a decade or more, engineers have to actively maintain it. They have to patch it for new operating systems, migrate server infrastructure, and update APIs.
So, when someone pays a one-time fee of $60 and demands that their software remain perfectly functional until the end of time, they aren’t just demanding ownership of a static object. They are demanding that a team of engineers continuously update, patch, and maintain the infrastructure for that code indefinitely, without ever being paid for that ongoing labor.
That is what “engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity” means. Pretending that software is a static object like a book ignores the reality that demanding permanent functionality from code requires perpetual, unpaid maintenance from its creators.
What the hell are you talking about. John Nintendo himself didn’t had to pay anyone to make Mupen64. I assure you that Michael Sony didn’t had to pay to his engineer so Bloodborne could be played outside a PS4.
No one. Absolutely no one is asking that Sony or any other company release patches forever and that I could play Crash Bash in a PS5 or boicot. My PS4 broke years ago, I dumped my Bloodborne copy and play it again on my PC. Sony didn’t had to pay anyone a single cent for that to happen.
I’m really curious of who are you listening that made you think that the issue with killing physical media is “I want support forever”…
That is literally the argument. That if a developer or publisher decides to stop publishing a digital title that your license is no longer usable…
Have you heard about GoG? Just to be clear, not being able to access a game in any way after the publisher decides it’s not worth it is indeed the core of all of these.
No one is arguing they have to keep their servers and games running forever. It has never been a part of the conversation.
There’s much more than “you support it forever or don’t support it at all”. GoG allows you to download the game installer and do with it whatever you want. Buying a physical copy means you can play the 1.0.0 Cyberpunk in you PS3 even after the store closes. Even if your PS3 completely breaks, you can emulate it because you have access to the game no matter what happens in the future.
Reducing games access to one singular source that no one can have access is what is happening. There will be not offline installer, no game to emulate or preserve, no mods, no local play, nothing, and literally, the only thing they have to do is nothing.
Not sure if you are joking or not.
Do you have a compelling moral counterargument?
Stories being owned is not how things always where, not by a long shot.
Bards, actors, and other performers would re-tell them, adding their own twists and artistic choices.
Paintings and books have been being sold for centuries, which in effect, are treated the same way DVD’s are.
The corporate capture of art and , and the monopoly of ideas are newer than you let on.
Remember: the original intent of copyright was to protect the SCIENCES and ARTS, not the copyright holder.
You mention bards adding their own twists. That actually proves my point. The audience didn’t “own” the bard’s unique performance or get to take it home; they just experienced the bard’s specific intellectual labor for the evening. A video game or software platform isn’t a public myth; it’s a highly specific, unique execution of labor.
Furthermore, you’re right that books and paintings have been sold for centuries, but those are static objects. When a painting is sold, the artist’s work is done. Modern digital ecosystems are living things that require active servers, database management, and ongoing engineering. If you demand perpetual ownership for a single $60 payment, who is morally obligated to provide the uncompensated labor to keep those servers running for the next twenty years?
Maybe stop treating private server owners like criminals, and get back to releasing server binaries like we used to?
The original developers of these games aren’t the only ones capable of hosting them.
I cut my teeth hosting by hosting game servers for me and my friends, and now work in the tech industry using those skills to pay rent.
Developers who gatekeep server binaries aren’t just doing a disservice to players, but to the future generation of IT workers, and those who will depend on them.
Furthermore, for many games, these are tacked on features to an already competent single player that doesn’t need online support.
This argument falls apart for anything that isn’t live service, which is basically everything I play…
You are conflating predatory always online DRM with actual live-service architecture. You are entirely right that tacking forced online requirements onto a single-player game is a terrible product choice, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality of ownership.
If a classical painter decides to hang their masterpiece in a pitch-black room, or a sculptor insists their work only be viewed through frosted glass, it makes for a miserable audience experience. But it is undeniably their right to do so. The creator always dictates the terms of engagement. Even if you are playing a completely offline game, you still do not own the code. You only bought a license to execute it. Feel free to go look at the EULA from ANY video game you’ve EVER purchased; you never owned the game, only a license.
Furthermore, demanding that developers just release server binaries treats backend architecture as if it is public property. Backend infrastructure is full of proprietary code, licensed third-party middleware, and security architecture that a studio cannot legally or safely hand over to the public. When a developer chooses to release server tools, that is a generous decision they made regarding their own intellectual labor. You do not have a moral or legal right to demand the keys to a developer’s proprietary backend just because you want to host it yourself. Whether it is a live-service giant or an offline indie game, the creator still gets to choose how their work is distributed.
Anyone who puts their own art on a pedastol deserves the anguish that comes from people enjoying it the “wrong” way.
I say this as someone who’s been making games since their early teens.
Furthermore, as much as they are the norm in gaming, proprietary software licenses where a fucking mistake, and I’d staple my ballsack to the ceiling before I’d license any code I care about with one.
Like fuck Richard Stallman for being a creep, but everything that man has ever said about copyright is completely accurate.
Even if that means not getting cutting edge toolkits.
While I don’t necessarily agree with your POV here, I can at least say it’s more interesting than people realize to look at the growth of the VHS player and how this ownership debacle played out in the video world when it first came around. There were big lawsuits around whether people were allowed to record a movie or show, and then play it in a living room of 4-5 people.
The opinions of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are not absolutel nor ubiquitous. They may have said things that are no longer, or never were accurate and almost certainly should never be held to be inviolate/permanent.
Also the patrons of the people and organizations that produced these works have often been owned by those who funded them, stop kidding yourself
You’re absolutely right that Locke isn’t gospel, so let’s strip the 17th century philosophy away entirely and look at the modern reality. You don’t need Locke to tell you that server hosting, database management, and daily security patching require ongoing human labor and cost money every single month.
You also make a great point about historical patrons owning the art they funded. In modern digital media, the publisher or the studio IS that patron. They funded the millions of dollars to build it, so as you pointed out, they own it. The consumer paying a $60 entry fee isn’t the patron; they are just buying a ticket to access the patron’s digital venue.
If you demand perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront payment, you are demanding that the patron provide uncompensated server space and engineering labor for you for the rest of time. That isn’t consumer rights; that’s just entitlement.
The fact that you bought a ticket to watch a movie in a movie theater does not entitle you to watch that movie whenever and however often you want.
I need to preface that I don’t know how to say this any better and I’m also short on time so I’m going to ask your forgiveness for my bluntness and any offence this may come across as. I promise you im not attacking you and you are just going to have to accept it. Again my apologies but here we go…
Your logic is screwed up and I’m having a hard time trying to sort out where your flawed logic is, so I’m gonna need some grace and more self reflection from you than is probably expected, I hope you can accomodate my shortcomings in this.
It’s not an attack, you seem to make a well thought out argument, which is more than I usually see. Credit to you and I do respect you for it.
All work created by a creator CAN be owned by someone else.
A horseshoe is no different from movie on DVD or SD card from an ownership standpoint.
I disagree that recording performances is a technological anomaly. Because it requires entirely too narrow a perspective.
The only different between someone writing a book describing a play and a recording is the medium used to record it. That medium is a physical thing.
We can’t literally record thoughts, not in any meaningful or useful ways at the moment but we ARE close to that. There is a research experiment where they recorded someone’s brain activity while they dreamt and were able to play that recording back to some degree of success.
In a hobbesian sense (as you described it, I’m not claiming mastery on the mans philosophy just trying to meet you where you are) you cannot own someones thoughts that use used to make a creation, whether it be a performance or a recording of the performance. The only difference between a horseshoe and a performance of a okay or music, is that not many people cared to bottle up the performance of a blacksmith making the horseshoe. Until YouTube.
Owning the horseshoe doesn’t give you rights to the performance of its creation, neither does owning a copy of the recording of the performance grant you ownership of the horseshoe.
There are different things at play from start to finish. And they are treated differently. I don’t think anyone is making the same arguments that you are claiming and refuting, and that’s why I think there is a flaw in your arguments logic.
Owning a game on a disc or cartridge is not equivalent to owning the right to a performance. It doesn’t give you ownership of anything other than what you purchased. In this case that we are discussing owning a game IS owning the code that exists on the physical medium, be it a hardrive, a paper printout, a disc. Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code is what ownership of a digital creation is. It’s an ordered number of 1s and 0s. It’s a copy of a pattern that is absolutely useless to anyone who can’t read binary on the medium purchases. Ownership does not require usability, but it MUST provide a product that is tangible, regardless of its usability to the owner.
Im not understanding why you are using the examples of right to a performance the way you are using them and I think what I’ve written here should be enough to explain what I understand about the situation. My ability to communicate my thoughts clearly and precisely to you, anyone else reading this and also to myself are perhaps insufficient, but that doesn’t automatically invalidate my understanding just because I can’t explain it well, or that I’ve made errors in my attempt to communicate them in this medium
I see what you’re getting at, but your argument is built on an illusion of ownership that has never actually existed in the video game space.
You claimed that “owning a game IS owning the code… Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code.” That is fundamentally false. In the software industry, end-users have never owned the code, the pattern of 1s and 0s, or the game itself. You only ever purchased a non-exclusive, revocable license to execute that software.
The physical disc or cartridge was never the game, it was just a plastic delivery vehicle that doubled as a physical DRM key. The First Sale Doctrine gave you the right to resell that piece of plastic, but it never gave you ownership of the intellectual property printed on it. EULAs have made this explicit since the 1980s.
If you acknowledge that gamers only ever purchased a license to play, then the shift to digital-only isn’t some grand moral failing or a theft of consumer rights. It is strictly a logistical shift in distribution. The transaction hasn’t changed, you are still just buying a license to execute code. The only difference is that studios are delivering that license over a network instead of burning it onto a piece of plastic.
You can certainly argue that losing the ability to trade in used plastic discs is inconvenient or annoying. But calling an operational shift in supply chain logistics “immoral” is applying heavy ethical weight to a simple reality: you can’t lose ownership rights you never possessed in the first place.
It absolutely did give me ownership of the software on everysingle NES game I bought. NO ONE can tell me I don’t own that plastic and can use it in anyway I want so long as I do not distribute copies or derivatives works of it. But I can create and make as many copies of it as I want as long as I keep them to myself and I can make whatever changes I want to it assuming I have the skillset to do so. They do not have to provide me any assistance, nor am I entitled to assistance to do these things, but as the owner I certainly can do these things
Owning something doesn’t mean there aren’t conditions, but I absolutely own those 1s and 0s on that piece of plastic. No one can delete them or take them or prevent me from using them in anyway.
This ISNT a 1980s thing either. Copying what’s on my Plastic NES cartridges is no different than is no different than forging a copy of the Mona Lisa if I owned it. Distributing that copy in any way is currently prohibited, but I can paint it as long as I don’t try to claim it’s the original.
Owning a NES cartridge might also give me a limited license to certain things but I OWN that copy of 1s and 0s even if I can’t copy it and sell it or give them away. I didn’t sign a EULA when I bought Chrono trigger. YOU may have, but I didn’t
This is no different than owning a house
You are confusing physical possession with intellectual ownership. You absolutely own the plastic cartridge, the silicon board, and the physical state of the ROM chip. Because it is an offline, physical object, no one can remotely delete it. But you do not own the code, and you never did.
Under copyright law, ownership of a copyright is strictly separate from ownership of the material object the work is stored on. You own the material object. Nintendo and Square own the 1s and 0s.
You claim you never agreed to a EULA for Chrono Trigger. You didn’t have to click an “Accept” button on a screen because the 1990s operated on shrink-wrap licenses. If you look at the back of the original Chrono Trigger box and inside the manual, the publishers explicitly laid out the terms of your limited license to use their intellectual property. The law didn’t require your signature; breaking the shrink-wrap seal on the box or booting up the cartridge was legally recognized as accepting those terms of use.
Your house metaphor actually proves this point perfectly. If you buy a house, you own the wood, the drywall, and the land. But you do not own the architect’s copyrighted blueprints. You can paint the walls inside your house, but you cannot legally take the architect’s design and build an identical replica of that house on another lot.
You possess a physical artifact that grants you perpetual, offline access to execute a licensed piece of software. That is a great feature of the physical media era, and it is exactly why no one can take it away from you. But claiming you own the actual 1s and 0s because you hold the plastic is like claiming you own a novel’s copyright because you bought a hardcover at the bookstore.
I very much am not confused about this, you just aren’t willing to consider other view points and keep shifting the goal posts.
I thought this was an interesting conversation. You have shown me that I was wrong about this conversation.
You aren’t worth any more of my time.
And that’s sad