TimothyOilpants

You make a fair observation, and I appreciate the level-headed read of the thread. However, I would argue that the argument hasn’t drifted; it has just moved from the philosophical foundation to its practical application. The legal framework of software licensing does not exist in a vacuum. EULAs, copyright law, and the strict legal distinction between software and physical media are the mechanisms society built to enforce the exact moral philosophy I outlined at the start.

When John Locke argued that a creator owns the fruits of their intellectual labor, he established the moral baseline. When a modern developer writes a EULA stating you are only buying a temporary license to execute their code, they are simply legally codifying that Lockean principle. The law treats software differently than a physical painting or a book precisely because the law recognizes the philosophical difference between a static object and a living digital ecosystem that requires ongoing human labor.

So, we haven’t abandoned the moral argument for a legal one. The current legal framework is just the practical enforcement of the creator’s moral authority. If we agree on the legal reality of how software is licensed, then we fundamentally agree on the ultimate conclusion: the consumer does not possess the moral right to demand permanent ownership of another person’s ongoing intellectual labor.

You are demanding I prove a negative to win an argument about software licensing. That is the exact moment you lost the plot.

I do not need to prove the universe is apathetic. The burden of proof rests entirely on the person trying to claim that physical reality possesses a moral framework. Until you can demonstrate that a black hole, a carbon atom, or a quasar holds ethical standards, the scientific baseline is inanimate indifference. But more importantly, it is a massive red herring. The metaphysical state of the cosmos has absolutely zero bearing on the legal mechanics of copyright law and your failure to read a Terms of Service agreement.

You claim you aren’t backed into a corner, yet your final response completely abandoned the actual topic of the debate. You stopped talking about server maintenance, live-ops infrastructure, and intellectual property because you had no technical or legal counter-arguments left. You retreated into metaphysics and tone policing because the mechanical reality of digital ecosystems completely dismantled your claim to permanent ownership.

As for accusing me of sounding like an AI prompt; if presenting structured, coherent logic without emotional rambling reads as artificial to you, that says a lot more about the quality of internet discourse you are accustomed to than it does about my arguments. When someone runs out of actual points, they attack the formatting.

You can claim you are just entertained and doomscrolling to save face, but you spent this entire thread trying to frame a standard licensing dispute as a hypocritical betrayal of humanity, only to end up arguing about whether the universe cares about you.

Enjoy your doomscrolling. The End User License Agreement remains legally binding whether you philosophically agree with it or not.

Enjoy your perpetual victimhood and expect no further response from me.

You are cornered, so you are retreating into semantics. Let’s strip away the philosophical tap-dancing and look at the actual mechanics of your argument, which completely collapses under its own weight.

First, claiming that observing the universe’s indifference is a subjective metaphysical claim is absurd. It is the exact opposite. It is the empirical observation that inanimate matter and physical laws do not possess moral agency. Gravity and entropy do not have feelings or ethical standards. Acknowledging that physical reality lacks a moral compass is not a subjective belief; it is the baseline of objective science.

Second, you challenged the assertion that a shift to digital-only media has zero impact on human survival, calling it blatantly subjective. No, it is a biological fact. Human survival requires caloric intake, hydration, and protection from the elements. A corporation revoking access to an entertainment license does not deprive you of any of those things. To equate the loss of a digital game with actual harm or a threat to human prosperity is a massive category error.

Third, you argue that consumers were sold media under the impression of obtaining ownership and that society broke a promise to them. Who exactly made that promise? The software industry certainly did not. For forty years, practically every piece of commercial software came with an agreement explicitly stating it was licensed and not sold. The fact that millions of consumers ignored the legal text because they liked the feeling of holding a plastic cartridge does not mean a promise was broken. It just means the public was willfully ignorant of the transaction. A consumer’s failure to read the manual does not constitute a moral failing on the part of the creator.

Fourth, you bring up Stone Age barter systems to prove that ownership has always existed. No one ever argued that physical property did not exist. You could own a physical tool in the Stone Age, just like you can own a physical plastic case today. But you cannot permanently own the ongoing, continuous labor of another human being. Modern digital ecosystems require ongoing human labor to maintain. Demanding perpetual ownership of a live digital service for a one-time fee is demanding uncompensated labor.

You accuse me of asserting subjective beliefs as reality, but my entire argument is built on documented copyright law, the physical realities of server maintenance, and the historical text of software licenses. You are the only one arguing from a place of emotion. You are upset because the illusion of physical media ownership was shattered, and instead of accepting the legal and technical reality of how digital infrastructure actually works, you are trying to frame a standard licensing dispute as a hypocritical betrayal of human rights. It is not. You just didn’t read the terms of service.

You’ve expressed a lot of contradictory opinions and wishes, but you have not countered any of my premises with facts or logical argumentation.

I’m sorry that you find that so frustrating.

You are shifting the goalposts from the legal reality of consumer ownership to the entirely separate topic of digital preservation. It is true that GoG provides an incredibly consumer-friendly service, but you are still conflating a generous licensing model with actual ownership. When you download an offline installer from GoG, you are still bound by their End User License Agreement. They are simply choosing to distribute their intellectual labor without the enforcement mechanism of DRM. It is a fantastic business model, but it is a distribution choice made by the publisher, not an inherent right held by the consumer.

You also claim that to allow offline preservation, publishers literally only have to do “nothing.” That is completely false. Disentangling a modern game from its backend architecture, stripping out telemetry, removing third-party matchmaking APIs, and compiling a standalone offline installer requires significant, active engineering labor. You are once again demanding that a studio perform uncompensated work just to satisfy your desire for a permanent archive.

Furthermore, the idea that a publisher withdrawing access to a game is some unprecedented cultural crime completely ignores the history of art. For centuries, masterpieces have been purchased and locked away in private collections, corporate vaults, or family estates, completely inaccessible to the public. Often, creators themselves choose to destroy their own work, withdraw it from circulation, or refuse to publish it because they are dissatisfied with it. It is the absolute, fundamental prerogative of the legal owner of a piece of art to decide if, how, and when the public gets to view it.

If a publisher decides a game is no longer financially viable, or if they simply do not want it to exist in the public sphere anymore, they have the absolute moral and legal authority to pull the plug and lock it in the vault. You are paying for a temporary window of access to their intellectual labor. You do not have a moral right to demand they engineer a permanent offline off-ramp just because you are afraid the exhibition might eventually close.

You are confusing physical possession with intellectual ownership. You absolutely own the plastic cartridge, the silicon board, and the physical state of the ROM chip. Because it is an offline, physical object, no one can remotely delete it. But you do not own the code, and you never did.

Under copyright law, ownership of a copyright is strictly separate from ownership of the material object the work is stored on. You own the material object. Nintendo and Square own the 1s and 0s.

You claim you never agreed to a EULA for Chrono Trigger. You didn’t have to click an “Accept” button on a screen because the 1990s operated on shrink-wrap licenses. If you look at the back of the original Chrono Trigger box and inside the manual, the publishers explicitly laid out the terms of your limited license to use their intellectual property. The law didn’t require your signature; breaking the shrink-wrap seal on the box or booting up the cartridge was legally recognized as accepting those terms of use.

Your house metaphor actually proves this point perfectly. If you buy a house, you own the wood, the drywall, and the land. But you do not own the architect’s copyrighted blueprints. You can paint the walls inside your house, but you cannot legally take the architect’s design and build an identical replica of that house on another lot.

You possess a physical artifact that grants you perpetual, offline access to execute a licensed piece of software. That is a great feature of the physical media era, and it is exactly why no one can take it away from you. But claiming you own the actual 1s and 0s because you hold the plastic is like claiming you own a novel’s copyright because you bought a hardcover at the bookstore.

You claim that creators shouldn’t put their work on a pedestal, yet you are putting your own ideological purity on a massive pedestal. If you are truly running a Stallman-approved, 100% proprietary-free operation, the reality of your published games is going to be incredibly restricted.

Let’s take a look at the EULA and dependency chain of these games you’ve been making since your teens. Unless you are coding in assembly on a custom-built Linux kernel running entirely open-source hardware drivers, your work is fundamentally built on proprietary licenses.

What engine are you using? If it’s Unity or Unreal, you agreed to strict proprietary licenses just to download the executable. Even if you use Godot (which is open-source under the MIT license), it allows for proprietary commercialization, something Stallman actively despises because it permits developers to lock down their derivatives.

Are you using standard audio formats? Proprietary physics middleware? Closed-source anti-cheat or matchmaking APIs? The moment you compile your game using closed-source developer kits (like those required for PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo switch), you are legally bound to enforce proprietary terms on your end-user.

How do you distribute these games? If you sell your games on Steam, Epic, or the App Store, you are forcing your players to agree to restrictive, proprietary EULAs and DRM wrappers just to click the “install” button. Steam’s subscriber agreement is the exact opposite of everything Richard Stallman stands for.

If you are actually distributing your games entirely for free, strictly under a GPL-style copyleft license, and hosting them on a self-owned server for players running purely Free Software operating systems, then congratulations, you have maintained your ideological purity.

But if you charge money for your games on a commercial storefront, use commercial engines, or allow your game to be played on Windows, your players are bound by a web of proprietary licenses that you implicitly approved by choosing those platforms. You can’t champion Stallman’s absolute view on copyright while simultaneously profiting from the proprietary tech stacks that make modern game distribution possible.

You are attempting to mask a highly subjective, culturally specific worldview as an objective universal truth. Your entire argument rests on a foundation of ethnocentrism and philosophical contradictions, projecting your modern consumer habits onto the entirety of the human race.

You claim you are not confusing biological utility with objective truth, but then immediately define your standard for truth as: “for me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong.” That is not objective truth. That is utilitarian pragmatism. Gravity is an objective truth; if you jump off a cliff, it will pull you down whether it harms you or not. Reality does not bend to accommodate human comfort, preference, or survival.

By declaring that reality is only what you can “sense and experience in my lifetime,” you have completely abandoned objectivity. You are arguing for a self-serving, subjective moral framework while simultaneously trying to enforce it as a universal law for all of “humanity.”

The most glaring flaw in your argument is your claim that owning purchased things is something humans have done “for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence.” This is profoundly ethnocentric and historically illiterate.

You are taking a highly specific, modern, Western capitalist paradigm, the individual commodification and perpetual ownership of goods, and projecting it backward across all of human history and across all global cultures. For the vast majority of human existence, property was often communal, tied to land stewardship, or dictated by complex systems of patronage and social hierarchy. The idea that an individual has an inherent, natural, almost biological right to permanently own the intangible intellectual labor of another human being for a one-time transaction is a recent cultural anomaly.

When you claim that changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” for humanity, you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.

Finally, you are completely misusing the concept of nihilism to dismiss a legally and structurally accurate argument. Pointing out that a shift from physical to digital software distribution has zero impact on biological human survival is not “nihilism.” It is basic perspective.

Acknowledging that the universe does not care about End-User License Agreements does not mean “nothing matters.” It simply means that your inconvenience over a corporate software transition is not a cosmic moral tragedy. You can find profound meaning in human achievement, art, and philosophy without holding onto the delusion that you are morally entitled to permanently own the digital labor of a development team.

You are perfectly entitled to your subjective preference for physical media. But stop pretending your consumer inconveniences are objective moral imperatives for the human species.

That is literally the argument. That if a developer or publisher decides to stop publishing a digital title that your license is no longer usable…

When you buy a painting, a book, or a horseshoe, the creator’s labor ends the second you buy it. The object just sits there, existing on its own. Software doesn’t do that.

Because of the reality of how technology works, code doesn’t just sit in a vacuum forever. Operating systems update, hardware architectures change, server protocols shift, and security certificates expire. If software is left completely alone, it eventually breaks (a concept known in IT as “software rot”).

To keep a game, especially a modern one, functional and playable for a decade or more, engineers have to actively maintain it. They have to patch it for new operating systems, migrate server infrastructure, and update APIs.

So, when someone pays a one-time fee of $60 and demands that their software remain perfectly functional until the end of time, they aren’t just demanding ownership of a static object. They are demanding that a team of engineers continuously update, patch, and maintain the infrastructure for that code indefinitely, without ever being paid for that ongoing labor.

That is what “engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity” means. Pretending that software is a static object like a book ignores the reality that demanding permanent functionality from code requires perpetual, unpaid maintenance from its creators.

You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.

When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.

Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.

This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.

I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.

Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.

I see what you’re getting at, but your argument is built on an illusion of ownership that has never actually existed in the video game space.

You claimed that “owning a game IS owning the code… Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code.” That is fundamentally false. In the software industry, end-users have never owned the code, the pattern of 1s and 0s, or the game itself. You only ever purchased a non-exclusive, revocable license to execute that software.

The physical disc or cartridge was never the game, it was just a plastic delivery vehicle that doubled as a physical DRM key. The First Sale Doctrine gave you the right to resell that piece of plastic, but it never gave you ownership of the intellectual property printed on it. EULAs have made this explicit since the 1980s.

If you acknowledge that gamers only ever purchased a license to play, then the shift to digital-only isn’t some grand moral failing or a theft of consumer rights. It is strictly a logistical shift in distribution. The transaction hasn’t changed, you are still just buying a license to execute code. The only difference is that studios are delivering that license over a network instead of burning it onto a piece of plastic.

You can certainly argue that losing the ability to trade in used plastic discs is inconvenient or annoying. But calling an operational shift in supply chain logistics “immoral” is applying heavy ethical weight to a simple reality: you can’t lose ownership rights you never possessed in the first place.

Some facts:

• Video games offer orders of magnitude more, and higher fidelity, content then at any point in history.
• Video games are accessible to more people, in more parts of the world, across more platforms than at any point in history.
• In 1996 there were 100,000,000 active video game players, 30 years later in 2026 there are now 3,600,000,000. That represents a 3000% increase
• Adjusted for inflation, video games are the cheapest they have ever been.

You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.

Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.

Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.

But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.

If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.

If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.

You are making a massive leap in logic by equating the development of human rights and medicine with the legal mechanics of creative ownership. No one is arguing we should go back to the dark ages just for the sake of tradition. The point is that the fundamental nature of intellectual labor did not change just because we invented a way to print it on plastic.

You claim that we could not own music or performances until the technology existed, and then suddenly we could. But that is legally and factually false. Even after the printing press was invented, or the phonograph, or the Hokusai woodblocks, the consumer still did not own the art. You owned the paper. You owned the wax cylinder. You owned the block of wood. The rights to the creation itself always remained with the creator or their publisher. You are still confusing the physical container with the intellectual labor itself.

But the biggest hole in your argument is that you are still completely ignoring the reality of the medium. You bring up Homer and the Iliad. The Iliad is an ancient oral tradition and a piece of public domain folklore. It is a completely irrelevant comparison to the modern reality of proprietary software and closed digital ecosystems. You’re comparing living, breathing digital infrastructure to static objects. The Mona Lisa, Dante’s Inferno, and woodblock prints. Those are static, finished products. Once Dante finished writing, his labor was done. You can read his book for a century and it requires zero additional effort from him.

Modern software and video games are not static objects. They require active, daily labor to function. They need continuous server hosting, security patches, database management, and network infrastructure. Hokusai did not have to pay a monthly server bill to keep his woodblock visible in your house.

If you buy a copy of a modern digital service and demand the right to own and access it forever for a single upfront fee, you are demanding that the developers provide uncompensated labor and pay for your server access out of their own pockets for the rest of your life.

You can champion the preservation of art all you want, and on that front, almost everyone agrees with you. Archives and historians need legal pathways to preserve digital history. But archival preservation is not the same thing as consumer entitlement. You bought a license to access a digital venue. You did not buy the right to force engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity.

When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.

Again, you are fully entitled and within you legal right to sing those songs to your heart’s content to relive the glory days; that does not mean that you are entitled to a high fidelity recording of the original work in perpetuity simply because you paid to listen to it once at a club…

You are conflating predatory always online DRM with actual live-service architecture. You are entirely right that tacking forced online requirements onto a single-player game is a terrible product choice, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality of ownership.

If a classical painter decides to hang their masterpiece in a pitch-black room, or a sculptor insists their work only be viewed through frosted glass, it makes for a miserable audience experience. But it is undeniably their right to do so. The creator always dictates the terms of engagement. Even if you are playing a completely offline game, you still do not own the code. You only bought a license to execute it. Feel free to go look at the EULA from ANY video game you’ve EVER purchased; you never owned the game, only a license.

Furthermore, demanding that developers just release server binaries treats backend architecture as if it is public property. Backend infrastructure is full of proprietary code, licensed third-party middleware, and security architecture that a studio cannot legally or safely hand over to the public. When a developer chooses to release server tools, that is a generous decision they made regarding their own intellectual labor. You do not have a moral or legal right to demand the keys to a developer’s proprietary backend just because you want to host it yourself. Whether it is a live-service giant or an offline indie game, the creator still gets to choose how their work is distributed.

You’re absolutely right that Locke isn’t gospel, so let’s strip the 17th century philosophy away entirely and look at the modern reality. You don’t need Locke to tell you that server hosting, database management, and daily security patching require ongoing human labor and cost money every single month.

You also make a great point about historical patrons owning the art they funded. In modern digital media, the publisher or the studio IS that patron. They funded the millions of dollars to build it, so as you pointed out, they own it. The consumer paying a $60 entry fee isn’t the patron; they are just buying a ticket to access the patron’s digital venue.

If you demand perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront payment, you are demanding that the patron provide uncompensated server space and engineering labor for you for the rest of time. That isn’t consumer rights; that’s just entitlement.

The fact that you bought a ticket to watch a movie in a movie theater does not entitle you to watch that movie whenever and however often you want.

You mention bards adding their own twists. That actually proves my point. The audience didn’t “own” the bard’s unique performance or get to take it home; they just experienced the bard’s specific intellectual labor for the evening. A video game or software platform isn’t a public myth; it’s a highly specific, unique execution of labor.

Furthermore, you’re right that books and paintings have been sold for centuries, but those are static objects. When a painting is sold, the artist’s work is done. Modern digital ecosystems are living things that require active servers, database management, and ongoing engineering. If you demand perpetual ownership for a single $60 payment, who is morally obligated to provide the uncompensated labor to keep those servers running for the next twenty years?

The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit.

Strawman. What I said is that the creator of art has full moral authority over when and how it is consumed, if at all. If you have a private sketchbook in your room right now, are we all entitled to its contents as the common property of the human race simply because it exists?

…artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.

False equivalency. What you are describing would be a unique performance and a completely new creative expression. A fairer question would be whether some hypothetical historical musician would agree with your suggestion that if they had 10 songs written down in a journal somewhere, that the rest of humanity was entitled to read, or hear them performed at their leisure and demand.

You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is…

Another false equivalency. You are confusing private property and personal property. Intellectual property (which would be a form of private property) does not exist; all ideas which benefit humanity should be shared freely. What we are discussing is the capitalization of intellectual labor, and the moral authority over all labor belongs to the individual who executed said labor. The knowledge required to write a song, or make a clay pot has utility to humanity and should be shared freely. If I use that knowledge to actually MAKE a clay pot you are not entitled to its use simply because you also exist.

It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made.

I disagree 100%. Copyright should have only ever been used to prevent anyone other than a living creator from profiting off a unique creative work. This is why we have fair-use, and time bound public domain exceptions. Fundamentally I disagree with capitalism and commerce more broadly, but that is outside the scope of this conversation. As long as we are operating under those models, then copyright should protect commercial use of original works until the original creator is dead, then the work should enter the public domain.

One last question looking at you profile: do you have all your woodworking plans available for free online?