alt Hacker NewsGeez, people have no idea how licenses work...
License is not an ownership - It's limited right to use something. Any action anyone does that isn't covered by license (in software) is called "piracy".
Games were never sold. Mediums were sold with attached licenses. And most of the licenses as early as 2000 contained something like:
"This license is personal to you and may not be assigned, sublicensed, or transferred."
The only difference today is that licenses are enforced better. They can be held on license-server and new user can be denied usage after transfering was detected.
But it doesn't matter if it's downloaded, on disc, or embedded on a spoon.
Don't make people believe they ever owned a game. They didn't. You don't own games as well. Never owned them. You rented them.
The only way to get out of it with winning hand is to side with reputable vendor that didn't cheat people out of licenses. Reason why I side with Steam is because I have my licenses intact even though they have 25 years, I know big corps that just make licenses go poof and pretended in never happened.
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For most games sold on physical media I was under the strong impression that selling/trading the physical media would automatically transfer the license, as the licensee was the owner of the physical media.
Basically one would by a CD-ROM containing a licensed copy of a game, and would then be the owner of the CD-ROM but only a licensee for the game. Selling/trading the CD-ROM would transfer the licensee status to the new CD-ROM owner.
I mean yes, you never “owned” the IP, but this doesn’t change anything. You also never owned any movie on a DVD, song on a vinyl, or text in a book. Software is a strange beast in the world of copyright law, but, at least in my lay understanding, video game discs still have had protection under the first-sale doctrine, which means you were always allowed to resell, rent, give away, or destroy your copy. Ownership of the medium is still something.
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I don't think people not understanding licenses are the problem. Licenses are.
It's just that for the longest time people didn't have to think about them, because if you had a license to consume a game/movie/album and also had a copy of it on physical media it was basically impossible for the media owner to take it away from you. But when everything is digital only, doing exactly that is easy as pie.
This feels like how sometimes laws from the 1800s are used to convict people of computer-related crimes. Maybe that was always possible, but it still seems unfair.