I think the solution to this terrible behavior by Ubisoft, EA etc is what I said -- people need to stop putting up with it by not buying these games in the first place. You can't throw a law at every shenanigan these companies throw at their customers.
Oh yes, you absolutely can. Commercial law is so vast precisely because people have always misbehaved in pursuit of profit.
> people need to stop putting up with it
What I'm going to say might sound paternalistic to you, but it's the truth: most people don't really think that hard, generally speaking, and certainly not when it comes to satisfying their entertainment needs. That's why we have laws to protect the general public from predatory behavior in finance, hospitality, etc etc.
This is predatory behavior, and it's now enacted at a scale that makes it parasitical - fleecing more and more money from the general consumer. A public response would be absolutely justified, in the same way it's absolutely justified what we're currently seeing going down with Apple's and Google's appstores.
Otherwise we will continue to sleepwalk in the cyberpunk dystopia where corporations own our lives in practice, while being 'free to choose' purely in theory.
What you're saying makes sense, though I'd only add that it's not "now", it's been going on for ages. EA's endless series of franchises tells you everything you need to know about both EA and their customers, for decades.
But how can you possibly expect a law that takes away copyright of something they developed? That's insane, it'll never happen.
> But how can you possibly expect a law that takes away copyright of something they developed?
Apart from the theoreticals (expropriation exists, or we'd never get roads done), as I said above, it doesn't need to be retroactive. It's like laws for car manufacturers: new restrictions don't make old cars illegal, they just mandate how they should be produced going forward.
> But how can you possibly expect a law that takes away copyright of something they developed? That's insane, it'll never happen.
That shouldn't really be any harder than retroactively extending copyright, which has happened multiple times. Or is it just the rights of big corporations that can never be restricted again? If a new law makes certain undesirable behaviors illegal for individuals should that only apply to people born after that law? No.
Yes, retroactive copyright corrections will be harder to accomplish so, like the sibling comment suggests, we should focus on laws for new content for now. But we should also never froget that copyrighted content is NOT the property of the creator but of everyone. The I in "IP" is not redundant.
