US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership

2OEH8eoCRo0

I like this but why stop at Video Games?

sippingabonedry

I'm glad they're spending time and effort on issues important to everyday Americans' problems.

Sohcahtoa82

> Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down. For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense. In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.

wang_li

I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.

lrvick

By the time something like this passes, everyone will have the ability to convert any game to unlicensed source code in a matter of hours. Intellectual property is not going to be a thing anymore.

underlipton

This wouldn't have helped with my latest run in with artificial Product Existence failure*, but I'm glad to see it anyhow. *Hey, remember how Neal Stephenson's last project was writing for a nascent shared sci-fi universe? Did you get a chance to play the visual novel that was its first entry, which was hosted on a crypto project's website? Well, I sure hope you did, because the crypto project rugpulled and took the VN down with it, effectively turning a Neal Stephenson novella into lost media less than a year after its initial release.

yahthatsart

Good, now make games transferable on death. My kid should be able to inherit my Steam library.

JumpCrisscross

…why wouldn’t he release the bill text? I’d want a revenue floor before this took effect. An indie developer should not have to worry about getting sued because they didn’t properly turn off a hobby project.

Animats

"Will introduce?" Not even in the hopper yet? If it's not in the hopper and doesn't have a few co-sponsors, it's just a PR stunt.

Thegn

I am a gamer who has played around with private servers and emulators to revisit my gaming past - one thing I wonder about is how laws would handle game-changing updates? World of Warcraft famously does major renovations to game mechanics each expansion and minor changes each patch. What is to prevent a company from releasing an “update patch” that essentially cripples the game, then shutting down the game at that point and releasing the crippled code as the only available version?