Stop Killing Games Legislation Rejected By EU
from the setback dept
Well, this is very disappointing. Over the first half of this year, we’ve talked about the resurgence of the Stop Killing Games movement, which aims to push various governments to legislate out the practice of video game publishers sunsetting their games and making them unplayable afterwards. The aims of the movement are simple: publishers can certainly sunset their games that require backend servers to work, but they should make them hostable and playable through fan-run servers if they do, should notify customers well in advance of the sunset date, or should make or alter the games so they can be played independent of the company keeping services running.
To that end, the movement managed to get enough signatures in the EU to get a parliamentary hearing, which was reported to have gone quite well. That’s why it’s a surprising to learn that the EU just ruled out issuing that kind of mandate to publishers. Instead, the EU wants this to be a voluntary process, and what it’s citing as the reason it can’t be done by mandate is breaking my brain.
The European Commission said on Tuesday it cannot require video games to remain playable after they are withdrawn from sale, but will work with industry and consumer groups on a voluntary code of conduct for managing games’ “end of life”. The Commission said copyright and other intellectual property rules prevent it from imposing an obligation to keep games playable. It added it would work with consumer organisations and authorities to raise awareness of existing rights.
“Active enforcement of these existing consumer rights can also incentivise the providers to offer video games with longer lifespans and explore solutions for meeting consumer expectations,” the Commission said in a statement.
Copyright law is my reason why mandates like this should exist. Like, American law, EU copyright law offers protection for a work for the author’s life plus 70 years. After that, the work enters the public domain. Unless, that is, we’re talking about video games that require backend support, in which case it never enters the public domain and instead just vanishes into vapor. And that, I have repeatedly argued, breaks the copyright bargain entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it breaks it so completely that works like that shouldn’t even get copyright protections without rules such as exactly what Stop Killing Games is advocating for.
And this plan for publishers to do all of this voluntarily? Don’t make me laugh. The very gaming companies that the EU wants to take this sort of preservation effort on voluntarily lobbied against codifying preservation efforts. Why would they do that if they were willing to do this all voluntarily?
Finally, the point of all of this is not merely to make games playable for longer. It’s to preserve them as close to infinitely as possible. That should be the aim of any cultural output.
Stop Killing Games hasn’t commented publicly on the decision yet. I doubt the movement will take this defeat lying down, however.
Filed Under: copyright, eu, eu commission, stop killing games, video games
Comments on “Stop Killing Games Legislation Rejected By EU”
TSKG have commented, actually. They’ve seen this outcome coming a mile away, as they noticed that industry lobbyists have had the ear of the EU Commission, and intend to basically bypass the Commission entirely and instead lobby to amend the Digital Services Act, as Stop Killing Games has significantly more support within the EU Parliament.
The EU Commission’s approval is required for new legislation, but not for amending existing legislation. Ross Scott remarked that the Digital Services Act is a pretty suitable home for SGK’s legislative goal, anyway.
The headline should be “EU commission privately met with the rich and sold themselves out”
The EU commission like most US politicians are whores that sell their country not their body so the rich can strip the country and the people.
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This “movement”, though, is basically people who sold themselves out to the rich (and still are) and are now trying to push slight reforms onto those abusers via the lawmakers. It’d be an improvement; but if they could stop paying to be abused, I suspect we could see much better results.
Yeah man, government is the enemy, actually.
I tried to tell you.
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Like, totally, man.
The reality of EU power structure
The EU parliament represents the citizens but has no power.
The EU council consists of the governmental leaders and only indirectly answers to voters through their national parliament.
The EU commission is appointed by the EU Council and beholden to no-one.
Lobbyists dominate contact with all three types but focus specifically on the latter two, since those are the smallest number of people with most of the power in the EU.
It does not surprise that the EU mostly does what the lobbyists get paid to push. : (
Re: Rights violation
This is a rights violation that I did not consent to. And Nor will anyone assist in resolving the problem. Why am I associated as EU when I am a 47 year old adult living in the United States.
A decade or so ago, a movement like Stop Killing Games would’ve been pilloried by pro-copyright lobbyists and such. It would’ve been called “pro-piracy” and villified by trolls who once defended copyright to its most ridiculous extremes. But notice how there’s barely any real argument against SKG right now, and the ones we do get could all be boiled down to “but capitalism”. I wonder if works falling into the public domain again had a dampening effect on pro-copyright extremism or whether [gestures at everything, including AI] made people realize that copyright is the least of our concerns in this world right now. Either way, seeing pro-copyright arguments dry up and disappear after decades of “piracy is killing industries” and “NAPSTER BAD” is hella funny.
“Stop Killing Games” really needs a new name.
Is it “Stop games from having all support dropped, causing the game to ‘die'” or is it “Stop making games where all you do is go around killing things”?
That’s a hypothetical question and I know what the actual intent of the name is, however, I can’t help but think about both interpretations anytime I see the name.
Irrelevant: I support both of my interpretations.
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Counterpoint: You can easily ask the people behind SKG or look at any materials associated with SKG to figure out the actual intent of the name, or you can figure it out by the construction of the name (“Stop Killing Games” implies “killing” is used as a verb), so no, it doesn’t need a name change.
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How so? If it referred to a game that featured killing, would it require a hyphen or something, like “Stop Killing-Games”? I think Jacob is right that the existing name could grammatically be used that way, though I’d never misread it as such.
If we’re gonna complain about the name, the bigger problem to me is that it suggests a goal of directly persuading the people “killing” the games to stop doing so. The apparent reality is that they’re focused on getting lawmakers to make those people stop. So more like “stop them from killing games”.
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Or it could just refer to “killing” as “murder”, since people who vehemently dislike games like the Grand Theft Auto games to the point of wanting them yanked off store shelves often refer to such games as “murder simulators”. Point is that nobody really refers to those games as “killing games”, so it’s very easy to deduce that “Stop Killing Games” refers to the act of “killing” a videogame.
I’m sure they’d like to have that happen, yes…
…but if they’re not going to do it voluntarily, being able to convince the government that it’s a consumer rights issue and pass laws to rectify such an issue is also useful.
🙄
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I also found it “easy to deduce”, but that’s very different from “implied”—which would preclude any alternate interpretation.
Ooh, a voluntary code! Well I’m sure that’ll solve the problem.
I just want to know if there’s any way that you can find people willing to be thieves in non-EU countries to keep the games alive. If Russian players can keep games alive and share them with their friends in Europe, maybe things could improve.