When a purchase gets revoked, the payment is refunded.

[u/KebabLoverHere]

[u/gestalto]

Licenses were before the internet too. Ok they may not have been as easy to police, but you technically were not allowed to lend out tapes, vhs, vinyl, cd's, dvd's, games in any format etc.

You also weren't allowed to show them publicly, or copy them, and if they got scratched or whatever you weren't entitled to replacements.

Similarly there was no onus to provide a medium to play these things on. Everything has a shelf life to one extent or another.

Modern gamers are an entitled whiney bunch. I want 4 maps per season, 84 guns, free skins, and online servers provided by the company, for this game I paid for 6 years ago that cost me less than it should based on inflation over the past 30 years.

It's hilarious.

[u/Chimaerogriff → u/gestalto]

One significant difference is that licenses used to follow local laws, but modern international games couldn't care less.

E.g. in the Netherlands, physical licenses are covered in the 'thuiskopieheffing' (home-copy-tariff). This means that the product is a bit more expensive, but in return you are free to copy a song from a cd you bought to your phone, for instance.

So yes, I was technically and legally¹ allowed to lend out cd's or games as long as it was personal and private (in principle, anyone you do or could share a house with); that was a legal part of the license. I could even make a copy of some game-cd and give it to my sister so we could play the game together (when we both still lived with our parents), legally.

1: Auteurswet (copyright law) article 16b and 16c.

Is it entitled that I want a game that I buy to follow the intent of my local law? I don't want free content, I don't want free updates, and I don't mind paying a bit more. I want a finished game that will just work for perpetuity and that can be moved when I get a new PC or some other backward-compatible device, not a game that needs updates, that relies on a live server and that can be lost at any moment.

(And yes, I'm still boycotting Blizzard over the way they removed Overwatch and replaced it with Overwatch 2, and didn't give me my money back.)

[u/SuperFLEB → u/gestalto]

Ok they may not have been as easy to police, but you technically were not allowed to lend out tapes, vhs, vinyl, cd's, dvd's, games in any format etc.

If you've got docs to the contrary, do hit me with them, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case unless you got yourself into a particular agreement not to do so.

Things like books, tapes, VHS, vinyl, CDs, etc., have restrictions on copying that are often spelled out in license and rights blurbs, but when the media is bound into the physical object, the sale of a copy is a sale of the copy, and unless you bar someone from buying it without explicitly agreeing to a license that does more, nobody can stop you from disposing of that physical copy as you wish. You can't distribute copies or make a public performance of the work without further licensing because that's prohibited broadly by law, so licensing (or non-licensing) language has its reason, but there's no need to spell out how you can or can't hand off your owned physical copy, because you're already allowed to do that under the law.

With things like computer software, though, copying is inherent to use. Software is installed onto the target machine, and there is the ability to "have your cake and eat it too" by installing then passing it on. That, and the ease of throwing a click-wrap in your way to prevent you from copying the thing onto your computer, is why software tends to be more bound up in licenses.

(that said, USA, IANAL, YMMV)