One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
not that has stopped the US doing something.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
We already have reverse engineering tools, and the vast majority of 20 year old media isn't producing new revenue.
Will never ever happen. Disney alone would spend billions to stop any meaningful copyright reforms
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
Problem is with “purchase” imho.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.
We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.
Don't they understand e-waste and how is it piling up?
And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point
This is a common excuse publishers use to yank games, so if you do this the bill would be crippled.
We have a right to own our videogame, there is absolutely no necessity to have an exclusion, make the server open source if you want to shutdown the server
if people can buy the game with ownership, then how does subscription like software adobe is exist ?????
along with everything else introduced that doesn’t go up for vote yet
Either way: even if it's never put to a vote, having the bill as a basis to build on for the next House will be something, at least. Better than nothing (which we are increasingly getting used to).
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.
Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.