Ubisoft responded to California gamers’ The Crew shutdown lawsuit in late February, filing to dismiss the case. The company’s lawyers argued in that filing, reviewed by Polygon, that there was no reason for players to believe they were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game.” Ubisoft has made it clear, lawyers claimed, that when you buy a copy of The Crew, you’re merely buying a limited access license.
“Frustrated with Ubisoft’s recent decision to retire the game following a notice period delineated on the product’s packaging, Plaintiffs apply a kitchen sink approach on behalf of a putative class of nationwide customers, alleging eight causes of action including violations of California’s False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumer Legal Remedies Act, as well as common law fraud and breach of warranty claims,” Ubisoft’s lawyers wrote.
Oh cool then piracy isn’t theft.
It never was.
I agree with the sentiment, but what exactly is the explanation for this? If you’re allowed to lease or rent or purchase a license, isn’t stealing that thing for free still theft?
Chill with the downvotes - I’m not disagreeing. I’m just trying to understand where the line is.
I couldn’t possibly care less about what a megacorp tries telling me what I may or may not do with information that can be copied perfectly and infinitely at 0 cost.
I 100% agree. However, this statement is a very large blanket statement. I see it repeated all over the place. It’s great to pirate from greedy megacorps. I do it. It’s great. But it’s not a great statement to repeat ad nauseam because it doesn’t apply to
- small creators
- literally anything that’s not a “pay once license” (including leasing, renting, etc) If this sentiment gets too popular it will also discourage people from paying for unrevokable copies of content like from GOG or directly from a creator (patreon, etc). It’s more like “if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft (sometimes)”
The people who argue against piracy of megacorporations’ content will bring up these points every time because this phrase makes no sense from their perspective. It prevents actual discussion from taking place. It’s not productive to our cause to use something so ambiguous and inflammatory as a catch phrase.
Grant me the serenity to pirate the things from big corpos that need pirating, the courage to pay for indie work, and the wisdom to know the difference.
literally anything that’s not a “pay once license” (including leasing, renting, etc)
You can not steal something that it is impossible to own. It is possible to purchase and own a house or a car, someone choosing to lease or rent instead does not change that. It is impossible to purchase or own a copy of The Crew, so it cannot be stolen. You also cannot steal a hotel room, trespassing is a different crime than theft.
The problem is you’re using the rational part of your brain rather than starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find justification for your actions.
For me the difference would be the pricing model.
One time purchase? It’s mine.
F2P/subscription model? I know the service will die some day.Do you feel the same way about, for example, a video rental store?
Chill with the downvotes - I’m not disagreeing. I’m just trying to understand where the line is.
You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.
‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.
Indeed. If I buy a video rental store, I expect it to be mine until it goes bankrupt.
I mean, are you taking your definition of “theft” from the law? Or from your own internal set of ethics for right and wrong? Is it theft if no one is deprived of anything, because bits copy, and because you’d never trade dollars for the privilege of maintaining an exploitative relationship with a company but that is all they’ve made available?
If you’re hung up on whether the legal system thinks it’s theft - I dunno what to tell ya, it obviously does.
Edit: uh, maybe you’re literally asking for how the logic in that statement works, which I read as just “if it can’t be owned, how can it be stolen?”
As someone else pointed out when this article was posted yesterday, the legal system doesn’t consider it theft, it’s considered copyright infringement, though I suspect this doesn’t change anyone’s opinion on it
Oh, yeah that makes sense too. Bad premise all around I guess.
Yeah, I am just confused on the logic. Like what is the relation between us not owning it (which is bad) and piracy not being theft? I wholeheartedly agree that pirating things is okay if a license gets revoked, and it is 100% okay to pirate something you bought even if you still have the license and it hasn’t been revoked. It’s yours. You paid money for it. But from my understanding, this statement doesn’t just cover people who bought it, but everyone, regardless of if they bought it.
I mean, “theft” implies depriving someone of something, to me. But I don’t want to bicker about definitions if your position is more about morality of taking something for free than about the definition of theft.
For myself, I’ll happily pay for things that provide fair value and a fair agreement / relationship. That includes donating to stuff that is offered for free - there are a handful of content creators and other services (Internet Archive, Signal, etc.) that I directly support, every month. And by the same token, I don’t feel bad at all about enjoying something, for free and against their wishes, from a company or publisher that only offers unacceptable (to me) terms.
To me those are perfectly consistent. My dollars go to individuals and publishers that produce the kind of media ecosystem I think is good for us. Because - we must be clear - it’s not a level playing field, and the shift away from consumer ownership is a plague of exploitation inflicted upon us. It’s now metastasizing away from strictly digital domains, now to physical hardware, which is outrageous. Roku, for instance, can update your streaming device overnight and force you to accept their new terms, in order to keep using your device. This is not hypothetical, it happened (may have gotten company wrong).
Do you think the companies enacting policies, particularly ones prohibiting ownership outright, are operating from an ethical or moral framework? I promise they don’t believe in anything like that. They screw us precisely as hard as the courts, and the court of public opinion, allow. And they’re always trying to move that line in their favor.
Why do you care about pirating? Who or what are you standing up for, I guess I’m asking?
It still may be. Is it theft to take a rentable car without renting it?
You are getting a good without enabling it’s production. Just because the additional cost from you doing this is extremely low does not mean it ain’t theft. Just means it ain’t such a terrible thing to do.
Does the rental company now have one less car they can rent?
Does the developer now have one less license they can lease?
No they don’t, because I returned it before a shortage occured. They just lost the profit from rent.
No he doesn’t.
In both cases the additional cost caused by your actions is very low. Damage was still fine to the provider.
If the additional cost per user is very low people should not be priced out, still.
No they don’t, because I returned it before a shortage occured. They just lost the profit from rent.
That’s strange, the goal post was right here just a minute ago…
Whatever time period you had taken the rental car for was a time period that they could not have rented it to someone else. You can’t know until after the fact if there would have been a shortage in that time frame. There’s also the extra wear you have put on the car.
If you took a rental car for 5 minutes and returned it I doubt anyone would charge you with anything.
I’ve spent well over $2k on guitars, accessories, DLC, etc, for Rocksmith 2014. For five years I’ve been using it to learn bass guitar, and absolutely love it.
One day Ubi is going to turn off the servers, and I am simply going to cry.
There is no alternative I’m aware of, the new version is AI garbage from what I’ve heard, and I enjoy the thing I have and the songs I’ve paid for.
If they are not going to provide an offline mode, or the server code, then I will 100% make it my mission to pirate the game and make it playable offline.
Why not do it now, there’s nothing stopping you from buying the whatever new content you want and importing it. Why wait for them to take it away from you?
Honestly? I’m lazy. I play on my PS4, and have it all done up for that, the cables, pre amp, audio D-A for the sound bar / headphones, etc. Its what I know, and it works.
Haven’t owned my own PC in like 20 years (I’m a programmer and work always just gives me a beautiful laptop).
I recently bought a gaming PC that was top of the line 5 years ago, and am slowly turning that into a linux gaming PC. It’s going to be a while before I can actually use it, and in the mean time the PS4 still works when I get home and just want a whiskey and jam night.
So I actually read the article, even though there are huge outstanding questions on the nature of ownership, that’s actually not what the court argument is about:
Replying to Ubisoft’s argument that the statute of limitations is up, the plaintiffs responded with their own photos of The Crew’s packaging, which states that the activation code for the game doesn’t expire until 2099; that’s an example of how Ubisoft “implied that [The Crew] would remain playable during this time and long thereafter,”
Well yeah… software as a service is a thing but Ubisoft is straight up lying…
My two cents: no one is expecting online services to be up forever, so imo the correct solution is open source the game after the company meets their 10 (or 20) year obligation which should be clearly pointed out during the initial rental agreement (shouldn’t call it purchase)
If a company decides to stop hosting it’s online service they should be required to open it up for third party hosting. By ending their support they are admitting the profit capture is over so if another company wants to host it for profit so be it.
Perhaps the real problem is the length of copyright. The direction copyright has gone is the exact opposite of the speed of technology.
there are huge outstanding questions on the nature of ownership
There really aren’t, though. There is only the well-established and correct understanding of it as embodied by things like the Uniform Commercial Code, and lying criminals trying to gaslight us into letting them steal our property rights.
Ubisoft: ‘You don’t own your games.’ Me: ‘Cool, so when I uninstall The Crew, I’ll send you an invoice for storage fees since it’s technically YOUR property.’"
Also, The Crew was supposed to last until 2099? Bro, Ubisoft can’t even keep their servers alive for a weekend, let alone 76 years.
Let me know when they recognize your claim and you have managed to collect from Ubisoft.
Well, I stopped paying ubisoft long ago.
Certainly doesn’t help that their launcher is significantly worse than even EA’s. That’s a feat.
I mean… yeah, we don’t. And we know it. That’s kind of the whole issue. But it’s obviously more nuanced or we wouldn’t have a problem with the system. We kind of want ownership, or more of it. More say in what we can do with the things we buy.
Licence is a separate category from ownership. Clear distinction in marketing, sales, and operation would help a lot with these conflicts. Selling them with the same techniques, channels, and methods gives players a false sense of permanence even if they’re labelled as services.
Not sure what that distinction would look like. But it should look more honest.
Honestly, that’s probably where GOG fits in. They grant you a license to download the full game without DRM. I don’t know if they already do this, but if a game is planned to be delisted, they could warn players and allow them to download a final copy that should work whether the listing exists or not.
In that way, you have a coexisting license and ownership of what you pay for.
If a game gets delisted from the store you can still download it if you have bought it. On GOG’s discord they have a channel to warn when a game gets delisted.
That’s awesome! Now, if only they could get better Linux support…
Not sure what that distinction would look like. But it should look more honest.
Just look at all MMOs. Everybody knows the game will only last as long as the servers are alive and that all you’re downloading is a game client. Even if it’s a one time purchase and no subscription (e.g. Elder Scrolls Online), its very clear you’re only buying access to the game (usually part of the game content, other parts cost extra), not the game itself.
If you don’t want to loose access to games and you are European you can sign the following petition https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home . If 1 million Europeans sign that the European commission has to deal with this practice
we have to ramp this shit up, it’s less than halfway there… and it’s due 31st of july !!
I would be more open to the “you don’t actually own your games” thing if I wasn’t being sold a digital thing that will definitely get pulled out of my hands at some point, for more than the cost of the physical copies we used to get ($70 minimum now, vs $40-50). And even in the case of The Crew, you got fucked regardless of having a physical copy or not.
I pay for GamePass knowing that I don’t own the games on there. It’s a subscription just like the Sega Channel was.
Online services going away is fine. That’s been a thing that’s happened for years with other games. But the game should still remain playable in some fashion. If it becomes fully inaccessible at the end of life, customers have a legitimate reason to be upset.
Online services going away is fine. That’s been a thing that’s happened for years with other games. But the game should still remain playable in some fashion. If it becomes fully inaccessible at the end of life, customers have a legitimate reason to be upset.
It’s not even just that. Society at large has an even more legitimate reason to be upset, because the whole social contract by which we agreed to even grant the publisher copyright in the first place was predicated on the work eventually entering the Public Domain. Destroying the work to prevent that from happening is more truly “theft” than “pirating” copies of it could ever be!
The server component of online games ought to be required by law to be submitted to the Library of Congress for eventual release to the public.
It wasn’t like they were gonna go “oh sorry, our bad, have your game back”.
You will own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy.
Fucking France, man…
Fine but if I give money for games it will only be to indie studios, otherwise I’ll sail the seven cyberseas.
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