News going over responses from the EU Commission on the issue of destroying games from members of European Parliament. Also some updates on the campaign tow...
    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      20·
      6 days ago

      This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

      TL;DW:

      • Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
      • EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
      • EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
      • Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
      • Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
      • Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
      • UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
      • Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
      • No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
      • Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

      This is a simplified version of simplified version.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        13·
        6 days ago

        EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.

        I think I’d have a category for both.

        You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.

        I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).

        I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.