California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that will force storefronts to admit that you don't actually own your digitally purchased games, films, and TV shows - you're just licensing them.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that won’t stop companies from taking away your digitally purchased video games, movies, and TV shows, but it’ll at least force them to be a little more transparent about it.

As spotted by The Verge, the law, AB 2426, will prohibit storefronts from using the words “buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good or alongside an option for a time-limited rental.” The law won’t apply to storefronts which state in “plain language” that you’re actually just licensing the digital content and that license could expire at any time, or to products that can be permanently downloaded.

The law will go into effect next year, and companies who violate the terms could be hit with a false advertising fine. It also applies to e-books, music, and other forms of digital media.

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 month ago

    I wish this were true, but unless companies were forced to stop licensing then they’ll never do that. And even then, if the company decided to not sell smth anymore or stop supporting it or they went out of business you still wouldn’t be able to get things legally a lot of the time.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 month ago

      And even then, if the company decided to not sell smth anymore or stop supporting it or they went out of business you still wouldn’t be able to get things legally a lot of the time.

      I don’t think that’s an issue unless it’s an online service that they host the servers on, but for something like a book, even if they decided to stop selling it (aka minting new NFT tokens to access it) all the existing tokens would still work and trading would work.

      We can’t really do anything about online services though unless a law requires a company to allow self hosting if they close down, which would be a great law to have.

      Edit: just to clarify further, the token is the ownership at this point. Having the protected content anywhere on the internet and downloading it without a token isn’t theft, it’s just there and legal, inaccessible without the token. It could just be on a public torrent for download from day 1 for anyone to download with or without a token. Also the content could even link to the smart contract to purchase a token to unlock it. So a movie player would see a unauthorized movie with a buy now button. It could even be a token that unlocks it for a 24h rental. Unless the media owner kills the contract intentionally, it’ll be purchasable as long as the blockchain it’s on exists.

      I wish this were true, but unless companies were forced to stop licensing then they’ll never do that

      I think we’ll see someone experiment with this eventually even without a law. There’s a lot of upset out there about not being able to resell digital content and it suddenly being taken away.