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m000today at 9:04 AM2 repliesview on HN

> I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.


Replies

Schlagbohrertoday at 10:38 AM

Loopholes like this can be closed with government regulation.

show 1 reply
account42today at 11:46 AM

Government-mandated source code escrow is certainly a reasonable requirement for copyright protection but you could also just legislate that "licensing" a work for resale also means being ultimately liable to make third party buyers whole if they have not received a local copy before - at the threat of loosing copyright protection for the work entirely.