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This is cool that Jeff did anything at all but it would go a long way if he used his main channel with a larger reach.
Is it a dumb question to ask why so many Americans are advocating for UK/EU legislation?
US law allows companies to enforce essentially any terms of service or end user licence agreement they want when selling products or services and rewriting laws to add an exception for video games is never going to happen.
Stop Killing Games believe existing EU laws don’t allow this and are alleging some TOS and EULA of game companies are in violation. They want the EU parliament to review that and hopefully clarify the laws to ensure game companies aren’t “depriving citizens of property”.
From the petition:
We wish to invoke Article 17 §1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [EUR-Lex - 12012P/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] – “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss.” – This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.
The hope is that companies won’t make two versions of their games. One that complies with EU law and one that doesn’t. No idea where that comes from. GDPR is EU law and many companies created two versions of their service to avoid needing to follow it for everyone. Some companies, including game studios, even dropped their EU customers entirely instead of complying.
It’s also become YouTuber drama bait at this point and is an easy way smaller channels can get extra views.
I see. It’s easier to ask them to enforce existing laws than to make new ones.
Because the EU is such a large market that consumer protections there often translate to these trickling down to Americans.
Because the european market is large enough to affect the whole gaming industry.
And the US market isn’t?
The conditions in the US are much more difficult to get the government to regulate that games be kept in a playable state. However if this initiative succeeds then the industry would have to apply the same rules globally in order to keep the legal stuff simple.
Not only that but I’m pretty sure your average US congress person is so old that they think gamers are playing something that looks like an Atari 2600 but is called a Nintendo Playstation and is almost as popular as the Sony Xbox.
Quite frankly I’m not surprised “Don’t leak your war plans on Signal. Tell ya what let’s just ban WhatsApp for congressmen.” Happened.
American Governments are so tech illiterate that in order to stop internet piracy they once crafted a law called SOPA which effectively banned the internet by forcing a takedown of anything that violated any copyright at all, making no exceptions for fair use such as satire, fan art, or education… a net so incredibly wide that the only website left would have been .govs
Like Wikipedia would have to go because it explains what Spider-Man is and Disney owns that. That’s how strict SOPA was.
Real fucking law that nearly passed and only didn’t because the entire net threw the biggest shitfit in the history of shitfits.
Not only is the average congress person THIS tech inept (which is why watching them try to pull gotchas on Mark Zuckerberg in congressional hearings, something that should be easy as hell, is cringe-inducing)
But America is so blindly loyal to capitalism that corporations are basically writing their own consumer protection laws.
This is a recipe for Congress basically sitting back and doing whatever Microsoft says they should do and ignoring everyone else. Meaning consumer protections on video games is a no go.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Send the links to everyone you know people!!!
