Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.\u00a0Rent the man a spot on the river, and\u00a0make him tick a box on\u00a0a multi-thousand-word end-user\u00a0license agreement meaning that any fish he catches,\u00a0ultimately, still belongs\u00a0to you, and you\u00a0stand to get very, very rich indeed.<\/p>\n
\nWe live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is the business model that now dominates the digital age. Neo-feudalism,\u00a0technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism: it gets called all sorts of things, but the basic idea it has in common is that\u00a0the\u00a0rules of property ownership, as we have tended to understand them for most of the history of capitalism, are\u00a0shifting under our feet. We think\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0buying products. In practice,\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0locking ourselves into subscriptions where the power rests with the vendor\u00a0and the things we think we own are merely licensed to us.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s\u00a0why\u00a0a petition about videogames currently before the European Commission deserves our attention. A campaigning group called Stop Killing Games\u00a0was formed\u00a0in protest\u00a0after Ubisoft shut down\u00a0the servers for an\u00a0online car-racing game called\u00a0The Crew\u00a0in 2024.\u00a0That meant, in effect, that without warning or right of appeal, everyone who \u201cowned\u201d that game\u00a0ceased to. It\u00a0became\u00a0unplayable. As one\u00a0player complained:\u00a0\u201cYou buy a physical copy of a game, you bring it home and install the game, you play it for some amount of time. Then all of a sudden the publisher completely destroys all copies of the game worldwide, including yours.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nerdy silly nerds, you may think. Who cares if they\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0waste more of their time playing some\u00a0daft\u00a0car game that came out\u00a0more than ten years ago?\u00a0I sympathize with the instinct.\u00a0But I urge you to look not at the specifics of the instance, but at the general principle. This is a bellwether\u00a0issue.\u00a0We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe. Manufacturers reserve the right to remove or disable useful features\u00a0from things we have already paid for \u2013\u00a0or\u00a0add useless\u00a0or\u00a0profit-maximizing, rent-seeking\u00a0features\u00a0\u2013\u00a0remotely.<\/p>\n
Versions of these\u00a0issues\u00a0are to be found all over the place.\u00a0They are present in your pocket, where Apple<\/a>\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0just sell you an iPhone, but\u00a0retains\u00a0the right to\u00a0determine\u00a0which software you may or may not install on it\u00a0and what repairs you may perform on it. They are present in your desktop. Not so long ago, users of the Microsoft Office suite of programs\u00a0\u2013 MS Word, Excel, Outlook etc \u2013 had the\u00a0unwanted,\u00a0enraging, impossible-to-delete\u00a0AI\u00a0assistant \u201cCopilot\u201d foisted on them, and were quietly and without consultation upgraded\u00a0to a more expensive subscription for the privilege.<\/p>\n
They are present in agriculture. If a farmer buys a tractor and it breaks down, he can\u2019t repair it himself: unless he uses (expensive) approved parts, the tractor might tell the parent company it has been tampered with and a kill-switch can turn it into a giant agriculturally-themed paperweight.\u00a0They are\u00a0present in motoring, where certain\u00a0hardware\u00a0features\u00a0present in\u00a0modern\u00a0cars\u00a0\u2013 higher bhp or better acceleration\u00a0\u2013 can only be\u00a0unlocked with a premium subscription.\u00a0They are present in your Kindle library, where a couple of years back Amazon reached in and remotely\u00a0deleted\u00a0from users\u2019 libraries\u00a0copies of (of all things)\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/a> after they discovered a rights issue with the edition. Poof. Gone.<\/p>\n
These issues are not, it bears saying,\u00a0completely clear-cut.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0the nature of software that patches and upgrades will be necessary from time to time. Sometimes \u2013 as with Microsoft Office \u2013 a subscription\u00a0model makes more sense than a one-off purchase for just this reason.\u00a0Buying a bit of software, even if you buy a hard copy of it, is a tiny bit different in kind from buying a physical object.<\/p>\n
To return to the Stop Killing Games case, in\u00a0Ubisoft\u2019s\u00a0defense, it\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0reasonable to\u00a0expect\u00a0that their selling users an online game\u00a0should\u00a0bind them to keep dedicated servers for that game running in perpetuity\u00a0at their own cost.\u00a0It has long been standard for companies to\u00a0discontinue\u00a0tech support, or making spare parts, for old products since before the digital age.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0on the petitioners\u2019 side, it is reasonable\u00a0to expect to have *some* rights in a product you have paid for.\u00a0That is\u00a0Stop Killing Games\u00a0are asking for.\u00a0An \u201cend-of-life\u201d software patch that would let the game be played offline or on private servers,\u00a0for instance,\u00a0is the sort of\u00a0proposal that\u00a0is being made as\u00a0a reasonable compromise.<\/p>\n
At the moment, though, the blurred lines between hardware and software \u2013\u00a0between ownership and\u00a0subscription,\u00a0or\u00a0holding something under license\u00a0\u2013\u00a0are being exploited\u00a0strongly\u00a0to the advantage of big tech and strongly to the disadvantage of you and me. And that is, well, a bit fishy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1013493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3159],"tags":[507,547,55942,53,16,15,1644],"class_list":["post-1013492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-microsoft","tag-mobile","tag-ownership","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-video-games"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116715403801739085","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1013492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1013493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1013492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1013492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1013492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}