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Stop Killing Games delivers 'absolutely incredible' hearing in European Parliament: 'There was no [parliament member] that wasn't responding positively' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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It's amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they're no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.

Official Stream: https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/webstreaming/committee-on-internal-market-and-consumer-protection-ordinary-meeting-committee-on-legal-affairs-com_20260416-1100-COMMITTEE-IMCO-JURI-PETI

Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en

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[–] 254 points 5 months ago* (79 children)

Games should be required to have reproducible source for all components (client and server) sent to whatever the European equivalent of the Library of Congress is, to be made available in the Public Domain whenever the publisher stops publishing them.

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  • [–] 240 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (27 children)

    Not only games. Goes for all electronics as well.

    Sick of supporting your 'old phones'? You're required by law to disclose all binary blobs as source code to let somebody else pick it up the slack.

    Feeling like bricking old Kindles? Fine, but users must be able to install alternative OS on your old device.

    Not providing software updates for your TV anymore after you removed features? That's your right, but so is the right of the effing device owner to install something else on it.

    And it's not just consumer electronics. (caugh John Deere caugh).

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    And the private encryption keys they use for DRM and bootloader locking too. I doubt that would go over well, but it needs to fucking happen. It is the only way to truly have right to repair and digital device ownership.

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  • [–] 51 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    I like it. If the publisher no longer sells/supports the full game as purchased, then they no longer to get to complain about people pirating it.

    I don't like instantly throwing it public domain, that's the wrong license to use. I think Creative Common CC BY-NC-SA would be more appropriate. (Credit the original, no commercial use, and any modified/redistributed version must follow same license).

    This will prevent xbox from taking all the old PlayStation games, stealing an emulator, and selling them under game pass to people that don't know those games are freely available.

    I'd also add the game must be available as an individual 1-time purchase. If it's only available as a bundle or subscription service (like game pass), that doesn't count.

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  • [–] 22 points 5 months ago

    The Public Domain isn't a "license." It's simply the default state of a work when copyright is no longer being enforced for it. I'm saying that copyright should immediately expire for any published work that is no longer being made available by some entity with the right to do so (phrased carefully so as not to break copyleft licenses, BTW) and that anyone should be able to get it directly from a government archive of all Public Domain works.

    As for selling Public Domain works, that's always been allowed and I don't see any particular reason to change it, provided that regulatory capture doesn't result in the public archive being the digital equivalent of hidden away in a disused lavatory in a locked basement with a sign saying "beware of the leopard." If the free option is prominent and well-known but you want to pay money for some reason anyway (in theory, because the person selling it added value in some way), that's your business.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I'm going to hard disagree on NC.

    If the original publisher decided to dump their IP, and someone else has a good enough idea to make money off of it, they absolutely should.

    BY-SA gets you the same vibe and encourages the new IP to keep making new content and allows others to do the same.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I agree, if an IP is abandoned then someone else should be allowed to do something with it.

    For this post I was talking about the game that was already made and distributed, not just the idea or characters.

    I'll use Mario Kart 1 for example, if Nintendo doesn't sell that game anymore, then the game is made publicly available.

    If the IP is still in use that A) doesn't exclude Mario Kart 1 form becoming available, B) doesn't allow competitors to sell modern Mario Kart games (trademark) and C) prevents someone from taking a 30 year old game and just reselling it on their store.

    IPs are much more messy to handle, as it's less a final product and more of a concept. Creative rights should stay with the creative people not a publisher.

    If Nintendo decides to drop Mario, but the actual creator of Mario still wants to work with a different publisher, they should be able to do that before the IP becomes freely available for anyone to take over.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    This is one of the points that a French MEP brought up during the meeting. If this is pursued it could as a side effect open up space for digital "orphaned works" which would be fantastic.

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  • [–] 30 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    It's not even an issue of "orphaned works." Every work becomes Public Domain eventually; that's the point of it.

    In fact (according to originalist American sensibilities, at least) the entire point of copyright law is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" (i.e., to enrich the Public Domain) to begin with! Allowing works to be copyrighted (essentially, borrowed back from the Public Domain temporarily so the creator can profit, thus incentivizing the creation of works) is merely a means to that end, not some sort of moral entitlement.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Copyright and patent are a compromise.

    Society is iterative. Every work of art or technology is significantly based on prior work. So if you go to the extremes, where "I intented it, it is mine forever and passed to my children" society stalls as technoligarchs never license their patents. If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don't.

    Give us a full copy of your work, enough information to make a full copy of it. This will be held in trust by the government. We will give you full, exclusive right to monetize your invention for a couple decades, and the copy stored with the government is the stake in your claim, the proof you need to win your lawsuit. After those couple decades are over, the idea becomes public property. Our inventors get to make a living, society gets to progress.

    Copyright has gone cancerous, with terms lengthened far beyond a human lifetime to benefit major corporations and not individual creators. We need to fix that.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.

    To be fair, Soviet Russia probably has a bunch more stuff than that; we just don't know about it because it didn't get translated and distributed to the West. The "Dr. Livesey Walk" meme is from a Soviet cartoon, for example.

    I can only assume artists got funded by government grants or something, IDK. It probably did result in a lot less of it being created than in the West, though.

    (Also, I think the ballets and books you're alluding to might've been pre-Soviet?)

    Anyway, I completely agree that copyright and patents are a compromise, and that the pendulum has swung way too far to the side of rights-holders at the moment.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Nah, if the publisher stop selling a game, just make him to release a docker image for the server and the game patched to use such docker image. No source code needed (even if it would be nice).

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Pardon my French but would you please kindly fuck off with "container solutions"? Cheers.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Look, I don't really like container, I would not suggest they are the solution for everything, but in some cases they have their use.

    I see this as one of the cases where a container can have a use. You can also use a virtual machine if you want, the point is to have something that can be run even if the original OS or libraries needed are not available anymore because they are too old or have some incompatible changes, which in the case of old game server can happen, especially if you want to keep it running for many years after the release.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    If a studio is using the same base architecture for online services as a game that is currently active, you want developers to share their current live architecture and code?

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago* (8 children)

    Yes.

    If they don't like it, they can keep supporting their older stuff. Or better yet, rethink their decision to impose a "live service" business model now that they'd actually be held accountable for it, and consider going back to giving users the means to run their own servers.

    (Also, by the way, "security by obscurity" is bullshit. If disclosing their server-side code leads to exploits, that just means they're fucking incompetent. I have no sympathy at all.)

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