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What's the laziest thing you have done? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 1 point 4 months ago (8 children)

In the first example, it is not fair use, because you don't buy digital copies of gamesβ€”you buy a licence to play the game. My Minecraft licence would have been revoked when I didn't create a Microsoft account. Game companies can impose whatever conditions on a game licence they like (so long as the condition is not otherwise illegal).

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    And you have case law to back this up?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (6 children)

    Case law is specific to jurisdiction. I don't know where you live, and I've not said where I live. The way buying and selling most digital copies of games is through buying and selling licences, though some software you do pay for the download itself rather than paying for a licence. That doesn't require case law; that's literally just what it is, like how if I sign a contract I don't need case law to demonstrate that what I've signed is a contract, it just is. Case law adjudicates matters of law which are in dispute, not figuring out whether a spade is a spade.

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

    Yeah just because you say "this is not in dispute," doesn't make it true. The reason there appears to be no dispute is because video game companies haven't brought a suit against anyone for this specific thing. Until then, it's nebulous and completely up for debate.

    Video game manufacturers have lost several emulation suits in the past, and I would not be one bit surprised if that's the reason why they never tried to go after this in courts.

    Bleem! successfully won their countersuit against Sony because of fair use.

    It doesn't hurt that there is this precedent regarding VHS:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.

    Until Nintendo or Sony, etc actually tries to sue someone for doing it, then it's up for dispute.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    What I'm saying is not in dispute is the fact that you buy licences to play games and that licences can be revoked. Both of those are objective fact. It's a separate question as to whether or not a given state wants to enact punishment against a former licence holder.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    It's not objective fact unless it's been tested in court. And this has not.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    That's an insane litmus test of objective fact. I'd say a significant amount of court rulings go blatantly against reality lmfao.

    You can't test things in court that aren't disputed because someone has to dispute it... Who's gonna dispute that a contract is a contract? Read the text it says when you buy a game. It says what it says. No court can say a document doesn't say the words it literally explicitly says.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Well I'm sorry that you don't understand case law, but that's exactly how it works in situations like this.

    Who's gonna dispute that a contract is a contract?

    Nobody now, because that's a precedent that's already been set. In a court.

    Something that has not happened for the situation we're talking about.

    Edit: to be clear, it's not necessarily true that nobody would dispute that actually. There are likely numerous cases regarding identifying the validity of a contract on the books, which is how we know exactly what one is.

    If someone were to come up with an interesting enough situation that warrants a new case, then that outcome would be added to the list of cases that define what a contract is (do a Google search, there are already a whole bunch like that).

    That's literally how the court system works.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    So what are you suggesting is in question then? The licences sold for games will differ from game to game; if one of then were legally unsound, that wouldn't automatically make all of them legally unsound, and obviously that's local to the legal system in which that finding was made. That selling licences to play games is categorically unlawful? I think that's not a particularly plausible outcome, and is unlikely to propagate beyond the given jurisdiction the finding happens in if such a ruling were to happen.

    the court system

    There's no "the court system". There are court systems. You've only linked to US case law, which, for instance, doesn't apply to me. This does just seem to be a legal fetish (in the anthropological sense, not the sexual sense). A court ruling something or other doesn't even have worldwide legal implications, let alone worldwide epistemological implications.

    As for what counts as piracy (a separate matter to the rabbit hole we've gone down), something being a legal term does not mean that the definition of the word matches 1:1 with its legal description. I'm sure we can both think of examples of murder which is not criminalised as murder by a given government, for example. Words are defined by their use, and people use piracy to refer to a method of obtainment.

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