On the subject of ownership, Peacock claimed that video games being licensed to consumers, rather than sold, was not a new phenomenon, and that “in the 1980s, tearing the wrapping on a box to a games cartridge was the way that gamers agreed to licensing terms.”
This is absolute bullshit and not at all how it works. For someone who is supposed to write laws, she should be removed from office for showing such incompetence.
This is absolute bullshit and not at all how it works, now or back in the 1980s.
Nah, it’s absolutely how it has worked since the 1980s. You’ve never owned the game, just the physical hardware it’s on and a license to use the game. Go read any manual or back of the box or actual cartridge or disc.
That’s not the point I was making. She argued that opening the box was tantamount to agreeing to the terms, but the full terms aren’t on the box. You can’t access the full terms until after you’ve opened it, thus you haven’t agreed to them yet as you haven’t had the opportunity to read them. And, even then, the agreement is far from iron clad.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I’m pretty sure (not absolutely) this has appeared in court and even click-wrap licenses, where one clicks to agree to a license with a higher word count than King Lear are not valid due to the end user high administrative burden (reading 20K+ words in the middle of a software install).
There was a period in the 1980s where end users automatically were assumed to agree to licensing, but also licenses were extremely lenient and allowed unlimited use by the licensee without any data access rights by the providing company. 21st century licenses are much more complicated and encroach a lot more on end-user privacy.