A laid back community for good news, pictures and general discussions among people living in Europe.
Other European communities
Other casual communities:
Language communities
Cities
Countries
geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/1854600
I'm not going to post an update every time a (small) milestone is reached, but i felt this time it was warranted.
Sweden and Poland both passed their respective thresholds. That brings us to 3 out of 7 countries where we need to pass the threshold. We are also past 25% of the one million signatures needed continent-wide.
Thank you to everyone who already signed.
Relevant links:
Don't wanna jinx it but this is going way better than I expected!
This Initiative is taking of like a space rocket. I actually like how much Attention it gets with several news outlets writing about it.
Denmark, Netherlands and Germany all reasonably close.
Here's a pic of the full list of countries and their completion levels for anyone else curious:
edit: Not sure why that's showing up so small for me. You may need to right click -> open image in new tab.
Denmark Germany and Netherlands are all above 75% already
Can a US citizen sign? I'd love to see this pass.
Sorry this one is EU citizen only
No but there's still things you can do. Watch the video explainiing it or visit the link in the OP.
I love the wealth of updates without context.
If no one will leave one intro sentence, I don't need to go look it up.
here is the one sentence summery: It's a European citizens initiative aiming to ensure legal access to video games you've purchased, even after official support has ended.
So currently, when support for various games end, that's it, you can't play them anymore. This practice is not just limited to online games, but has infected offline games too.
It's basically as if Renault sold you a car as a regular full price car,, and on the day they stopped making spare parts, they broke in, stole your car, and scrapped it.
Oh shit! We're a quarter to a million already!
That hard part is gonna be hitting that minimum in each country.
We don't actually need to hit the minimum in all countries. We only need 7 (and a million signatures total) and we are already halfway there. 3 countries have reached the minimum and an additional 3 are past 70%
Noice
Also this thing is open until next year, so a lot of signatures incoming
Cool!
A few days ago I saw a thing from Thor (Pirate Software) about how this initiative is pretty half baked. Has that chagned or other people with a horse in the race voiced their opinions? Ive only seen the two. (The initiatives sumbitters video and Thors)
Dumb american here, trying to wrap my head around this because it sounds good on paper, and if it suceedes it may be good to do on this side of the pond, but im still trying to form an imformed opinion.
I'm not sure which of the videos of Ross (the initiator of the initiative) you have seen, but in the FAQ video linked above he addresses the half baked complaint. An EU citizens initiative is not the equivalent of a ballot initiative in the USA. It's not actual proposed law, not even a first draft of a law. A citizens initiative only describes a problem and why the EU is the right institution to solve the problem (rather than the individual member states). And it does all of that while meeting a strict word count limit. So it kind of has to be vague to give the European politicians some space to do their job. They are going to consult relevant parties (including representatives of the industry) and then draft the actual legal text.
I therefore find Thors argument of "it starts the wrong discussion" pretty disingenuous because he argues for weakening the initiatives initial position before negotiations with the opposing side have even begun.
His videos are also full of frankly baffling arguments. At one point he argues for example that the initiatives goals would make DDOSing legal.
Since Thors original video a couple of people in the games industry have come forward in support of the initiative. Indie dev and unity tutorial YouTuber codemonkey for example made a video to that effect. But the highest profile supporter from within the industry so far is probably Running With Scissors, the studio behind the Postal games. Also high profile, but not actually a game dev, is Louis Rossman, who also endorsed the effort.
There have been some people, who support Thors line of arguments, but those tend as far as I can tell to be mostly friends and acquaintances of Thor. Generally speaking i have yet to see a European content creator critical of the initiative (not saying there aren't any, just that they don't seem high profile enough to come to my attention).
Thanks for the clairifcation on the EU ballot initiative thing, that clears that up pretty well. The US sorta just threw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of departmental regulation but thats an entirely other can of worms.
Your second point about DDOSing, Thor comes from a cyber security background and the legality isnt as much of a factor, nor is he stating stating that this would make it legal. Security people have to treat it like "defense against the dark arts", if its possible to do someone will, therefore you have to be able to do it too to prevent it. He is stating that actors would DDOS things because they can, and potentially do so smartly to secretly ruin others enterprises by abusing the regulations if the get made poorly.
But your point clears that up a bit, the initiative has to be vague by design so that lawmakers/regulators can do their job should it pass its initial poll. I think Thor also has a point in that it if the final rulings are made poorly it opens the industry up to abuse. (see amazons patent issues as an example of companies and agencies not thinking things through)
Thor isn't as much of an authority as he preaches. There is very little at risk from a cybersec pov that wouldn't already be at risk weather it's explicitly given to users or kept within the game company.
He's just another grifter that doesn't want his game as a service to be impacted.
https://medium.com/illumination-gaming/ludwig-thor-team-up-to-launch-offbrand-games-42ee230d7cb1
Otherwise his Dev credits is what, an undertale clone in the works for 7 yeas that uses steam achievements to gate progression and whatever he was doing at blizzard? Nothing about this dude makes me think he has the consumer in mind ever and I'm bummed he ended up with the name pirate software.
