Juries are very unpredictable in such cases. And that’s what they are playing on.

This is in the UK, except in very rare exceptions, we don't have juries for civil matters.

Theres also the factor of suing steam is like getting to sue all the ofenders at once without actually putting in the work to sue each individual studio that used the music.

I'd like to say highly likely but upon reading a bit on what they are, it's highly unlikely. They're a union focusing on publishing right of music, so they definitely represent the owner of the music. But still insane.

They do.

If a supermarket cooperates with a local farmer to sell their produce directly without middle men, it's partly their responsible if the produce is made using illegal pesticides.

No that's of how it works...well, anywhere. In your analogy, the supermarket relies on the supplier being truthful with their documentation for their production. That's as far as their responsibility goes legally, they have no obligation to investigate the suppliers claims any further.

That's the point though, the content IS legal. The game devs paid for the licence. PRS are trying to double dip saying you need a separate licence to distribute it too.

... but that only makes sense if you genuienly believe that Rockstar and/or EA have less cash than Valve, and/or Rockstar and EA never had their own relevant liscensing agreements.

I may be wrong, but as best I can tell, there is no precedent in UK law for a platform/retailer being found liable under the cited Section 20, unless the content being distributed/retransmitted/sold itself did not have proper liscensing arrangements, and it can be proven that the platform/retailer/retransmitter knew that to be the case.

I kind of find it unlikely that Rockstar and EA did/do not have liscensing agreements in place.

My theory?

The entire Publically Traded gaming world seems to be mobilizing and coordinating efforts to get every kind of secondary organization they are connected to, to sue Valve, right now.

Because they are all financially imploding, and they're trying to do as much damage as possible to Valve, who isn't a part of their club, as a means of trying to level the playing field.

All these people on the boards of top gaming companies... are also on the boards of other top gaming companies, they know each other, they have people and contacts who sit in all the gaming industry lobbying groups, and the astroturf fake 'gamer advocacy' groups, in the IP rights groups, etc etc.

Identifying the audio out of an excutable would be hard to enforce. YouTube only has to do the ID. I guess a DMCA system should help but my guess it's that it is already there.

Microsoft had a game store for a long time and they utterly failed to do anything meaningful with it. I can't imagine this new attempt is going to be any different.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't microsoft angry at valve for pivoting to linux. Gaming is the last major stronghold for home computing dominated by microsoft, it's all been replaced by platform agnostic web apps and mobile devices for 90% of non-gaming use cases

Or the dastardly USB Implementers Forum, who not only creates devices that allows those keyboards to function but a storage protocol commonly used by pirates!

What fuck that company lost their goddamn minds. Wonder they are fucking stupid enough to sue YouTube for something similar. Maybe because Google billion dollar corporation that would bankrupt them.

Lets hope judge smart enough to throw this lawsuit out, and they have to go bankrupt due to a counter suit.

From what I understand, the music was used under licence by the game developers. The plaintiffs want Steam to also pay them for a licence to offer the game, which is already legally using the music, on their store, which is absurd.

From what I've read elsewhere, precedent is already set. Other game storefronts providers, including Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, do make such payments to PRS. Valve is the odd one. I'd love it if someone here could confirm or deny this.

Oh yeah M$ is definitely behind this

yes, when the a company that pretty much popularized loot boxes, skins and trading is the good one you know things are bad

Steam has by far the best user experience of any onljne game store and just softwarr store in general, with refunds, a good and accurate category system, accurate reviews, per game forums, a place to share community mods, achivements, cross platform support, a friends system, group system, cloud sync, a way to devs make availible private and public beta builds, good and granular regional pricing and many more

so many features, yet tim sweeny could never understand why people believe epic store is inferior

Love this. If the dev needs a license to play it, Steam needs a license to sell it, is it really much different for them to then sue owners for not purchasing a license to listen?

You joke, but this is actually how it works in places. As recently as 2015 we paid some % of all storage media sales (think HDDs, nvmes, flash drives, anything that can hold data really) to our RIAA equivalent to ”compensate for private copying”. Now it’s no longer baked into the prices, but they are paid directly by the government, as in through taxation.

PRS vs Testes

That's because your Stream/Video on Youtube/Twitch/Whatever will be deleted and your account flagged if the algorithm detects copyright protected audio in it.

IIRC it's because the streamer can't play the music to people, since they don't have the license for that, the game has the license to play the music, not the streamer.