Pheta

I’m sorry this is so off-kilter that I’m not sure what mental hoops you jumped through to end up like that. Laws are made entirely on morals. It’s why murder is illegal, theft is illegal, and insider trading is illegal. It’s always been about morality, and the key here is to get enough people to agree with you that it becomes a general consensus among the general public, or at least make it widespread enough to have it be important for the lawmakers.

You could create an initiative called “stop killing animals”, and you wouldn’t be a dick, you’d just be another extremist vegetarian. It’s not hard to see where vegetarians got the reputation from. If you tried to insist you hold a moral high ground without clearly explaining why you think something is wrong, and got angry that people don’t agree with you, then you’d be a dick.

The whole point is getting people to agree to these morals, and its difficult due to how entrenched a lot of people are in their own heads or scriptures. But the fact that the initiative is pulling these kinds of numbers proves that it’s not being a dick to ask for laws to back up customer rights that people feel are being violated.

As far as what you’re saying here:

I’m fine with having more consumer protection and making it clear if a company is selling ownership or temporary access. Right now it’s often not clear and that is definitely an issue. But completely making the sale of temporary access illegal is just strange.

I’m unsure of what you mean by ‘temporary access’. Are you referring to the practice where corporations are trying to take advantage of selling licenses for games? Courts in the US have ruled that if you bought a license, you own that copy of the license as it typically took the form of a storage media- like a game cartridge or a DVD. The only difference in modern day is that computers and storage media are cheaper than ever, so laws haven’t caught up with digital distribution.

Companies abuse this legal loophole by not damaging the ‘license’ for the game that you own, but by making the contents of the ‘license’ defunct and inoperable. That’s a heavily legal gray zone, even back in the early 2000’s, and the only reason they get away with it is because the average citizen doesn’t have the income to dispute these obvious violations of consumer rights due to income disparity. They know that, and it emboldens them.

As far as this part:

If you dont agree to temporary access, then don’t buy it. There are many games that are being sold DRM free, you own them completely, and they’ll work forever. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy something they don’t agree with.

I’m not sure if this is your honest thoughts, or put out there in good faith even. The argument ‘just don’t buy it’ is reductive and fails to address the problem. It always has been, and always will be. It’s the equivalent of ‘just find a better job’, ‘just earn more money’, or other bootstrap advice. The free market is incapable of policing itself. If your belief is that voting with your wallet is effective, that just shows how uneducated you truly are.

If they paid based on results, you’d be in sales. Everywhere else, you’re a wage slave. On the hourly side, they try to wring every second of work they can out of you, and anything else is a ‘loss’. It’s the same for salaried employees, the measurement is just different. Instead of work efficiency, it’s work hours. The rest is just politics.