"Sony Rolls Out 30-Day Online DRM Check-In For PlayStation Digital Games"
"No matter what, any game you download from now on will feature this new requirement, effectively eliminating the concept of offline play for even single-player titles. "
And yet... people will continue putting up with this crap. If only there was this thing called the free market and people voted with their fiat (dirty money, ie government money). Then companies wouldn't pull this shit.
I long ago refused to lay my hands on any game console. However my sole voice alone does not impact change. Only people spending their money on products from companies that refuse to pull this bullshit will have any genuine positive impact.
Unfortunately there is no free market with copyright. Copyright is a literal monopoly on distribution. There was for a while some level of limited reprieve with VHS, DVD, blu-ray, and at one time game rentals.
Back in the day the court ruled that companies could rent out the tapes they *BOUGHT*. This created some resemblance of a free market as you could obtain entertainment for some years without there being a single source. However that didn't apply to broadcast and so later when the internet era came to be no one other than major major major tech and entertainment companies (think Netflix and Disney) could enter the online rental (or streaming) market. As a consequence we went from 10s of thousands of rental shops across just the United States to a ~handful. It is also well known these handful will eventually consolidate and we'll be left with ~1-2 options in the coming years.
You can thank your government education system for failing us here. They did education about the dangers of cpyright, monopolies, or the supposedly "free" market.
@mr_penguin Rental shops may be gone, but you can still find used game stores and they often sell second hand movies and music too, so you still have that as a secondary source.
@xianc78 True, though I'd still argue that this isn't the equivalent and the copyright owner still maintains and even more so today a monopoly on distribution which is a detriment of ones (or the population as a whole) interests and wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else. Could you imagine if CVS could dictate that Walgreens not open up across the street? CVS should not have a monopoly on building in town x, nor should copyright holders have a monopoly on distribution. To whatever degree a concept of copyright exists it should require the licensing occur similar to patents and general purpose technologies/standards licensing under RAND terms.
Basically companies are often obliged to license their patents under RAND terms (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory). Basically anyone can license the patents for use in their products mitigating some of the danger of what is otherwise a monopoly too.
The obligation arises voluntarily when a company participates in a standard-setting organization (SSO) and agrees to the SSO's intellectual property rights (IPR) policy, which typically includes a RAND or FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) licensing commitment for any patents that become essential to the adopted standard.
This voluntary agreement creates a legally binding contract between the patent holder and the SSO. Crucially, U.S. courts have recognized that companies implementing the standard (e.g., manufacturers) are third-party beneficiaries of this contract. This means an implementer can sue the patent holder for breach of the RAND commitment if the terms offered are not reasonable or non-discriminatory.
To whatever degree copyright exists an obligation to license to all under the same or similar terms should exist. This = competition.