Technology

I think in the case of forced agreements (both Roku not having a way to select disagree and disabling all hardware functionality until you agree, and blizzard not allowing login to existing games including non-live service ones) no reasonable court should be viewing this as freely accepting the new conditions.

If you buy a new game with those conditions, sure you should be able to get a full refund though, and you could argue it for ongoing live service games where you pay monthly that it's acceptable to change the conditions with some notice ahead of time. If you don't accept you can no longer use the ongoing paid for features, I expect a court would allow that. But there's no real justification for disabling hardware you already own or disabling single player games you already paid for in full.

It'll be interesting to see any test cases that come from these examples.

Somone said that it isn't and isn't enforceable to but no-one has the time money or will to fuck around with that.

The governments all around the world are probably in favor of it, because their big “donors” want it and it lowers costs for the judicial system for them. It’s a win-win from their perspective.

Have you found any good private server sublemmies? Whatever we're calling them?

So i'm not a lawyer but isn't there a law for unconsciability, When a contract is so one-sided, it's obvious that me the signer has absolutely no rights.The entire contract is voided.

Let me laugh if Blizzard's TOS change is because of a security breach they haven't disclosed yet.

That’s the hilarious(ly depressing) thing about buying a digital movie, for example, to me.

If you rent it, you get it for a certain amount of time.

If you ‘buy’ it, you also rent it, just for an undisclosed amount of time that they may or may not retroactively take away from you at any point with no warning or compensation.

Your use of the Platform is licensed, not sold, to you, and you hereby acknowledge that no title or ownership with respect to the Platform or the Games is being transferred or assigned and this Agreement should not be construed as a sale of any rights.

From the Blizz terms.

WoW has always revolved around having a server handle everything and your client is just the textures/models viewer where you tell the server what to do, I have been fine with this. But I do agree, it should say something else on the button. Other games that are not MMO shouldn't be a "license" to play. If you buy it, you can play it whenever and wherever. Features that are not multiplayer should work regardless. Some things just shouldn't be tied to a server. I really despise modern gaming because of this.

Anecdotal experience: Gran Turismo Sport recently lost its servers. When they went down, the Mileage Exchange shop went with it. This means all the cosmetics for cars. and a few unique cars, are now unobtainable for future players. PD could have patched the shop to be a complete list of everything and you buy it with the plethora of points you will collect in the future as you race. But no, they didn't.

At that point I tried to delete my account, but they made it impossible already. So they are "lucky" to "keep me" as a "customer"

If EULAs are going to be legally binding, there should really be some standard mechanism, an API, on systems to display one such that the system can record a copy and you can see differences and such. Otherwise, you're entering into a contract with some random party and only they have a copy or and see what changed across versions.

If such a display API is available on a given platform and isn't used, could simply make the EULA automatically non-binding.

I'm willing to believe that there are legitimately cases where one does need license agreements to fix issues that extend beyond standard consumer law, but the current situation is simply a dumpster fire. Also, some EULAs have been held unenforceable, so even from the standpoint of the software company, it's a mess as to whether their license is actually going to stand up; there are no clear lines to which a lawyer can conform to make their license hold up.

Some other possible tweaks:

• Require that prior to sale, existence of a EULA be prominently disclosed and be readable.

• I personally would much rather have industry adopting standard licenses than having every company creating ad-hoc licenses. Like, in the open-source world, the GPL and MIT licenses deal with a number of problems that open source software runs into, and I can learn once what each entails and quit looking at it. I'd rather have there be agreements for commercial software that work the same way. If industry needs flexibility, I think that it's reasonable to say that they don't all need to custom-craft solutions. I'd rather like legislation that encourages industry use of a limited number of widely-used agreements rather than hand-crafting them. Maybe add some kind of tax on non-standard EULAs, dunno.

• Disallow change-without-notice as a EULA condition; there should be no legitimate reason for this. If you got agreement once, you can get it again. Require that any change notice also provide a way to see the "delta" between the old license and the new license, just the changes.

It's not that easy. My Blizzard account is over 10 years old - never thought they'd go down hill so much. What's the solution, to never create accounts online anywhere? Even if a service looks good and you support it, a corporation like Activision can come along and have their asshole CEO infect everything.

Walking away from my account now means throwing away a lot of money spent on it.

Internet companies usually have clauses that they can terminate the agreement at any time for any reason, including "because they feel like it". They usually don't have to tell you why, either.

Same deal with all the "licensing" things and "digital goods ownership". In two words: you don't.

But it's been that way for ages.

As my lawyer used to tell me, "there is the contract and there is the law." Meaning anyone can say anything in a contract. If you have the legal ability you can find out what the law says about it.