Yet another Hacker News

US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership

64 points DeepLogin 1 hour ago 36 comments

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

I like this but why stop at Video Games?

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

it's easier to formulate and pass something with a smaller scope, like this, and then expand/iterate on it to apply more broadly.

2OEH8eoCRo0 57 minutes ago | parent

I agree. I think this is why lobbyists will be flooding this guy very soon. They don't want the door cracked.

hk1337 51 minutes ago | parent

Maybe in one aspect but it also raises the question, "Why is Congress concerned with details like this?"

Just trying to point out what could be the opposition for this, not that it's a bad thing to pass.

ygjb 25 minutes ago | parent

Consumer protection is already clearly the focus of Congress, and with the demise of the Chevron deference in 2024, it seems that Congress needs to bind (such that they can) groups operated by the Executive Branch to uphold consumer rights explicitly instead of allowing regulators to navigate the commercial market.

The answer to Why is Congress concerned with details like this? is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience.

infamouscow 52 minutes ago | parent

It's easier to pass a bill for video games than try to cram movies and music in the same bill.

Brybry 34 minutes ago | parent

I doubt it will become law either way.

Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]

[1] https://www.congress.gov/quick-search/legislation?congressGr...

sippingabonedry 42 minutes ago | parent

I'm glad they're spending time and effort on issues important to everyday Americans' problems.

iugtmkbdfil834 41 minutes ago | parent

You sound dismissive, but gamers as a whole is a demographic that is hard to be ignored and happens to span groups otherwise counter to one another. Any politician who would not take advantage does it to their own detriment.

sippingabonedry 30 minutes ago | parent

He represents a poverty-stricken district. Nobody should give a fuck about gamers until their basic needs are sorted.

iugtmkbdfil834 28 minutes ago | parent

You know.. and I am just going to throw it out there: never going to happen. So we might as well do what can be done.

SoftTalker 20 minutes ago | parent

If your life is otherwise impoverished, a video game could be one of the few options for affordable entertainment, particularly if a viable market for used games exists (which is one of the things this legislation wants to mandate).

sippingabonedry 15 minutes ago | parent

So the way we fix poverty is free PlayStations for welfare bums? Holy fuck.

abeppu 12 minutes ago | parent

I see we've downgraded to no bread and virtual circuses.

moate 14 minutes ago | parent

So, to be clear, you believe government should focus on one problem at a time to the exclusion of anything else or am I missing something? That's never been how government, of any form up to and including the utopian visions that people keep in their dreams, has functioned.

I agree, we have much bigger fish to fry, but "I don't care about this issue so nobody should" isn't how you build a coalition to get the poverty addressed. A lot of politics is "hey Gamers, remember how I got you that thing you wanted? Well now I need support as I take on a bigger, more important topic". Inversely, saying "I don't care about your problem until another problem is resolved" tends to fray the group because you're quite literally telling people you don't respect them or their needs/wants.

You should check out the book "Let This Radicalize You", great primer on how to organize and get actual results vs doomering on the internet.

Addendum (reason for edit): Here's a list of other policy proposals and stances this guy is making: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/resources Draw your own conclusions, but he doesn't seem like he's 100% focused on gamer issues at present...

nearlyepic 6 minutes ago | parent

> Nobody should give a fuck about gamers

Buddy, gamers are a LARGE part of how Trump won his first term in 2016.

bayarearefugee 39 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to this law, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.

skinfaxi 37 minutes ago | parent

I sincerely don't understand this mentality. Legislators consider more than one bill per legislative session. We can (and must!) push along multiple axes, otherwise we will always be behind right?

bayarearefugee 36 minutes ago | parent

The house is engulfed in fire and we're sweeping the kitchen floor.

skinfaxi 35 minutes ago | parent

If this were the only bill being considered I'd agree with you. By this logic we would only focus on one issue at a time and others would get worse in the meantime, so we would always be behind.

1718627440 31 minutes ago | parent

Just because the fire department is insane doesn't mean that the cleaning crew needs to stop working.

Sohcahtoa82 37 minutes ago | parent

> the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.

Why would the people in charge focus on this? They consider it a feature, not a bug.

philipwhiuk 26 minutes ago | parent

Video games is about as big an industry as TV and movies.

abeppu 8 minutes ago | parent

You know how some engineering teams have a really difficult time prioritizing? Maybe in planning there's a big long list of project ideas some of which really need more discovery to define scope. There can be stuff that seems really important to a long-term vision but is also hard to estimate and higher risk of scope creep etc. And there's stuff that's cheap/fast/low-risk but doesn't solve the larger important problems? And even in the context of a company that is still burning through investor money, you fix _some_ of the smaller things even while you're still figuring out the bigger things, b/c otherwise you'd likely _never_ do the smaller things?

I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?

sippingabonedry 4 minutes ago | parent

I know some teams don't let work out-prioritize the party planning committee.

Sohcahtoa82 38 minutes ago | parent

> Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.

For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense.

In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.

phendrenad2 29 minutes ago | parent

That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code. Usually the source of any game that gets shut down is shared with games that are still live. Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also. I'm not saying that I have the solution or that your idea isn't good on some level, but we have to be realistic.

Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol

(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)

SoftTalker 14 minutes ago | parent

Well then they can simply not shut down the old games.

> Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway

Agreed.

saghm 5 minutes ago | parent

>> They need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server.

> Game companies are not going to give you their source code.

Okay but what about the thing they actually proposed?

dawnerd 28 minutes ago | parent

They should release either the server component or documentation for how it works and a way to unlock any protections around it. I’ve seen people argue before that releasing the whole backend stack would be an issue and I agree, but documentation shouldn’t be an issue.

pooloo 4 minutes ago | parent

I would prefer the standard for software, as a whole, to be open source after a while. Because there is a sustainability aspect, just like the rest of the tools in our world.

For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.

The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...

cosmic_cheese 27 minutes ago | parent

I dunno, there’s plenty of projects that turn MMORPGs into self-contained single player RPGs and/or simulate other players with bots, so I don’t really see any reason why they should be excluded.

chneu 21 minutes ago | parent

I don't think they're saying exclude them, but expand the legislation to include a common scenario.

wang_li 3 minutes ago | parent

I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.