The End of Copyright

Gamasutra has an article from the ever-interesting Ernest Adams on the future of copyright as regards creative works. From the article: "If we're going to go on making video games, the publishers have to find a way to make them pay for themselves. One approach is an advertising model, although I'm reluctant to say it because I hate the idea of ads in games. Another is to treat games as a service rather than a product. With broadband distribution, I think this is increasingly likely: you won't ever have a durable copy of a game, you'll download it every time you play it. Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."

Comments

I'm done

[hawkbug]

"Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."

And that will be the official end of me every buying a game again as long as I live. Under no circumstances will I pay for software usuage with that type of model. I simply won't do it. That also goes for things like MS Office 12, Windows, whatever. If I can't purchase a disc/drive/etc that contains a copy of the software that I'm free to use OFFLINE, then I'm done with non-free, non-opensource software. Windows XP is hard enough to deal with, having to activate it over the net or phone - but if I had to do that everytime I used the damn thing...

Real piracy is not stopped by stupid protections.

[WidescreenFreak]

Absolutely correct. One of the great things about having a disc, even one that has copy protection on it, is that when you want to play the game, you throw the disc in and let it start. Okay, it has to search for the copy protection, but at least it doesn't require a mandatory connection to the Internet to do it.

Looking at it from a legal perspective, if you buy the game and then are not allowed to play it, doesn't that constitute grounds for a lawsuit? Here in the States there are clauses in most state/commonwealth laws that make illegal any actions that constitute "services unrendered" when the purchaser has continually acted in good faith. So, you - for whatever reason - lose your Internet connection or you're somewhere (such as with a laptop on international travel) where Internet access is not easy to get. Ooops! Sorry! You have to download a new, encrypted version in order to play! You pay, but you don't play! Why would "services unrendered" not apply? Ah, yes, such terms could be hidden in an EULA. Well, as Sony recently found out EULAs are not necessarily enough to cover deceptive or nefarious practices.

I'm not a lawyer, so what I've said might be baseless. Even if it is, I really despise anyone who thinks that it's fair game to potentially deny someone the ability to use a piece of software that is legally purchased and legally used in good faith. This is as despicable as when UbiSoft required all "Ghost Recon 2" users to "phone home" for authentication even for a LAN game that had no Internet traffic whatsoever. No Internet connection, no LAN game. Sorry, you lose. Once again, only the legal users were punished because the hackers knew how to get around it.

encrypted to discourage hacking

Oh, puh-lease! Good hackers will have decrypted code available in no time with any copy protection completely stripped off and available on Usenet. What's sad is that the game companies still persist on thinking that copy protection works.

Why don't they do something more practical -- like include value add items like the old "Ultima" series used to do? I remember that some of the things that always made people want to buy the game besides loyalty and just about everything about the game* were the cloth map of Britannia and the trinket relative to that particular chapter of the game. Granted, we don't all want t-shirts, but certainly there could be more tangible incentives to make people want to buy the game.

My idyllic world, I suppose.

* This does not necessarily include "Ultima 8: The Arcade Game" or "Ultima: Ascension - The Bug Ridden Piece of Sh!t With The Pathetic Storyline And Even Worse Ending That Insults The Ultima Franchise".