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Dead Game News: Response from the European Commission
(www.youtube.com)
… any text form?
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.
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.
Thank you
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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