People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game.
AKA, we want to mint NFTs for each game sold, which allows a user to prove they own it. People hate those words, but we think that the tech has real value and a use-case in the market for solving inequity between publishers and users.
This nonsense of revoking a license after a user bought it is just an extension of the larger problem that the games that you "buy" you don't actually own and can't do anything with.
Your idea does nothing to force the service provider to retain your account, or even to provide you with access to the game media. Proof of ownership isn't the issue here. Ubisoft isn't denying that the user purchased those games. They almost certainly know exactly which games were purchased. I more or less trust the game services I use to keep a record of what I own in their central ledger. They could still deny me access, as they're doing here. Maybe some regulation should address this, but I think the market will probably handle it.
Wouldn't having legal proof of owning a license to an IP, entitle you to then use a copy of the files covered by those IP rights, regardless of how or where you acquire them? (E.g. if you buy a license to Windows, you don't need to download the installation media for Windows from Microsoft in order for your licensed installation of Windows to be legitimate. You can get the Windows installation media from anywhere.)
You don't need a "game service provider" if you have legal dispensation to torrent the game. And, that being the case, you could replace a centralized service like Steam with the game-media equivalent of an app like PopcornTime: just a convenient way to browse for, and download, torrents of the IP you already legally own.
You don't need NFTs for that. The proof of ownership is just a receipt. It could even be made verifiable by adding a digital signature signed by Ubisofts public key. Still, NFTs are not needed here.
You're right, you don't need an immutable ledger of visible IP licensing rights if that's all you want to accomplish.
But presumably, in a "legal piracy is commonplace, Steam goes out of business" scenario, the studios producing the games would still want to make the games verify your license ownership against something — e.g. to make sure that you're only using your license for one concurrent "seat", rather than using it to activate thousands of copies of the game (like a regular product keys — which usually are "local digital signatures" — would enable.)
Presuming that no central corporate authority could 1. profitably exist in such a market 2. with the right incentives, then a distributed immutable ledger would be a good alternative for storing those licenses in a verifiable manner. (Think of it as an IP licensing activation server run by "everybody." Each time a game wants to run, it would use your signing key to submit a TX incrementing a counter representing the current active uses of the license. Basically, a distributed, cryptographically-verifiable semaphore.)
Perhaps, but since the premise of the solution is that Ubisoft must be legally required to provide a certain service to the current bearer of the token, then it seems overkill to put this on a distributed database system with a complicated consensus model. If Ubisoft is already legally required to recognize it, then surely they can also be required to host a service for moving ownership or maintaining a usage counter in a publicly verifiable manner. Still, NFTs are not the solution here.
Legally obligating each studio to run a centralized service for license verification would be no better than requiring the publishers/distributors to run such license-verification services; in both cases, the backends would die with the economic actor.
The nice thing about an NFT (per se, a deed), is that you still own it, and it still has legal effect, even after the entity that originally created it ceases to exist. A distributed ledger will remember that Ubisoft granted you an IP license for X, even after Ubisoft stops existing as such, with all their assets sold off or lost. And any games built to check that distributed ledger, will continue to find your license there, and start up just fine.
But those games are running on hardware that you control. You therefore also control what version of the ledger the games can observe, and you can choose to show it an old version or a fork that has been mined with a tiny amount of PoW, so things like activation counters wouldn't actually give you the guarantees you are claiming. Perhaps for online gaming, the peers could require proof of ownership via the central ledger. But I would imagine that everyone would just apply a crack to disable those checks, because spending crypto fees whenever you join a server just to protect the IP rights of a defunct company is such an overkill solution, and frankly I find the use case highly contrived. I don't think it is realistic to assume that gamers will accept that what used to be a simple license check now involves downloading and verifying gigabytes of ledger history.
Just use off-ledger verifiable receipts. If Ubisoft goes under and sells off its IP, then the buyer should be legally obliged to run a similar ownership service with the digital receipt being the proof of ownership OR release the games to public domain without license checks.
The problem isn't getting the media, the problem is the license.
If you get Windows and MS has blocked your key, it doesn't matter that you own the key: Windows will talk to their server and the server will say "that's not a valid license I don't care who owns it"
Likewise, it doesn't matter where you get a game from, unless you break the DCMA and modify the binary, DRM enabled games will phone home to the "game service provider" to verify your license.
It's been a long time since games locally verified licenses, that's why you don't see keygens and also why they all require launchers to function
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If they take down the servers or block you specifically, proof of ownership does literally nothing...
> Likewise, it doesn't matter where you get a game from, unless you break the DCMA and modify the binary, DRM enabled games will phone home to the "game service provider" to verify your license.
If you own the license, then downloading a pre-cracked derivative work of the installation media also isn't illegal (provided that the cracker has put the crack itself in the public domain!)
To resume the analogy: Microsoft might not like it that you're using a pre-cracked version of Windows that doesn't phone home; but if you're using that pre-cracked version of retail Windows with a valid retail Windows license, then there's nothing they can legally do about that, even if they somehow find out. (This situation has come up many times in the past; pre-cracked versions of software are sometimes used in industry because of other customizations done during the cracking process that make them more robust for embedded use-cases.)
Now, of course, the cracking itself may have been illegal under the DMCA, but there's a simple fix for that: the cracking just has to be accomplished by someone who's not a US citizen. The DMCA doesn't apply to things that foreign nationals get up to.
(But really, the thing you'd want here is legislation that requires that games that "phone home" to check for IP licensing status, do so to some disinterested third-party IP licensing registry — which could be a blockchain-like immutable ledger, or even just the sort of "IP clearinghouse"-like services that modern commercial music sampling is built on.)
This is wrong on so many counts my head is spinning.
Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that.
You're also making a copy of illegally distributed software (not just cracking that's a problem, distribution is too...), which opens you up to liability, since again, your license doesn't cover that.
And to top it all off, you're still not going to get the full functionality of the game if you just crack the software, multiplayer still requires their servers (and before I get the default reply of "I don't care about multiplayer", the fact the most played games are largely multiplayer indicates most people do)
> Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that.
That's where DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions come into play. If I own an IP license for software X; but there are technological barriers in place preventing me from using the software for the purpose I paid for the license to enable; then computer programs that "fix the problem" to allow me to use the license I paid for, are explicitly a protected class of software under the law.
And the license, or Terms of Service, or anything else, can't say anything to the contrary (or, well, it can, but such terms would be legally unenforceable for reasons of public policy — similar to e.g. contracts stipulating that workers will work without legally-mandated protections, or a contract from a public educational institution granting access to a resource but not to legally-mandated accessibility aides for that resource.)
And that is enshrined explicitly in multiple existing exemptions related to abandonware, which would pertain in exactly the case where a service like Steam goes defunct and all the licensing schemes of its distributed games stop working. The various cracks to get those games working again? Legally exempt!
> multiplayer still requires their servers
Given that two existing DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions are:
> Computer programs that enable wireless devices to connect to a wireless telecommunications network when circumvention is undertaken solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and such connection is authorized by the operator of such network;
and:
> Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay;
These clauses, read carefully by a competent lawyer, could be argued to in combination have a spirit that would extend to include a new exemption: of alterations to online games required to allow them to connect to the "telecommunications network" embodied by a white-room reimplemented private server for the game.
The short version is, please don't ever represent yourself in court.
Your license allows you to copy/install/etc. a piece of software. It will not apply to a cracked version of the game and you'll be no different than someone who didn't buy the game.
That's not even DCMA.
And the whole thing about "white-room private blah blah blah" really made me cringe.
It's a complete non-sequitur. 3rd part private servers have existed for ages and they involve insane amounts of work per game. It's not a solution to the actual problem: not being able to use official servers.
Not to mention "white room reimplemented" is nearly impossible. That's why these projects repeatedly get taken down. They resort to breaking copyright to provide functionality for a client that was never designed for.
Even modifying the game to have a concept of "connect to a server other than official.server.endpoint" is breaking copyright.
> People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game.
How do you legally enforce that proof of ownership?
How does a NFT change anything to a license agreement between the publisher and the buyers?
The user can already prove they own the game. Ubisoft accepted the proof. The problem is they've chosen to configure their servers to reject sending the game client messages consistent with this proof.
They could, if they wanted, configure their servers to send network messages approving his login. But they choose not to.
If a company opts-in to using your NFT as the authority, they can at any time opt-out(just like Ubisoft did here) so it provides no extra guarantee. And companies that don't accept your NFT as proof will ignore it when it's presented as evidence.
they had a database entry linking his account to a purchase. it's not like his access to the game was forgotten. they just chose not to honor it. a blockchain proof isn't any more compelling than the info they already had + his payment records.
There is already proof that a user owns it, ranging from company sales records to receipts of purchase. Nobody seriously disputes the purchase and the company would not dispute it in a court of law. The problem is that you own something the company has a right to terminate.
People aren’t losing their receipts here, the games are being taken away even if they have them and can prove they bought it. More durable receipts won’t fix it.
> Unfortunately, there’s also a clause in the ToS that no credit will be given back to the user in cases of account termination or suspension. The company’s support page also cites the General Data Protection Regulation compliance and freeing database space as the main reason why they delete unused accounts.
Again, how would NFTs fix this problem?
A solution to the problem described in the article would be a very trivial service that just logs in on behalf of the user at whatever cadence necessary to preserve account "activity", not NFTs...
You can carve your game purchases onto a stone tablet if you want to, but it doesn't make any difference unless there's someone that actually honors that NFT.
Is this "Ultra" going to mint NFTs for my Ubisoft account purchases? If it does, who honors my Ubisoft Store NFTs once Ubisoft terminates my account? Is it Ubisoft, is it Ultra or is it even Steam? And if it doesn't, what is it minting? Stuff I buy on Ultra? Because at that point the NFT might just as well be an email receipt, since I'm now relying on Ultra to actually stay alive and honor my NFTs until I die.
AKA, we want to mint NFTs for each game sold, which allows a user to prove they own it. People hate those words, but we think that the tech has real value and a use-case in the market for solving inequity between publishers and users.
This nonsense of revoking a license after a user bought it is just an extension of the larger problem that the games that you "buy" you don't actually own and can't do anything with.