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We can own digital things as long as they let us properly download them. If you pay for a mp3 and have the actual mp3 file that you can do whatever you want with it, I'd say you own that.
They don't let us download everything though because digital things can just be copied and freely distributed, so there's often DRM.
Imagine if steam sold games and you got a full no drm copy of the game that didn't require any hacks to make playable, no concern about viruses from shady distributions etc. People buy steam games because it's easy, they have great sales making games cheaper, its safe, and they have all the other things like steam friends, chat etc.
But if steam just gave everyone a digital copy with no DRM that you could verify was safe and steam compatible, their sales would drop and more people would pirate.
So its a balance between DRM which steam is, and actual ownership.
By having something digital that represents digital ownership that cant be duplicated, you can solve the problem.
Steam could just publicly host the game for download but it only runs if you own the license. The license can't be take away from you and is freely transferable.
For games, the problem is still online games. I'm not sure that's ownable unless they also let you host your own servers and its bundled in the game. But for offline games it's possible.
I'll simplify: I don't want that future. Steam is currently acceptable because they provide a low-impact market, I think their 30% cut is reasonable, and offline mode is adequate. If that changes I'm done. GOG also exists and is a preferable model, but the experience isn't as polished.
I don't care if sales drop a bit, the early success of stuff like netflix and spotify and steam proves that most people will happily pay a reasonable price for access rather than pirate. It's only a "problem" for the capitalists and fuck em.
You can have everything steam has and still have a tokenized license that gives you ownership.
Steam is the worst acceptable format, is what I'm saying. Licenses and DRM are a thing we should move past not embrace.
They do seem to be the best of the implementations, but I really don't see how we can just move past it. You can't stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it's simply not possible. Making digital items that couldn't be duplicated was exactly what Bitcoin originally solved. It wasn't possible until 2009.
At least with tokenization you own access to that game now if it was done right, and steam knows you didn't pirate it and they got paid for it. Just because it's tokenized doesn't mean they did it right though. You could still do it and make it as terrible as existing DRM.
Edit: And what steam does is provide an easy to access and SAFE game. We could make safe games as well by providing cryptographic proofs for the game. They just can't make something like that freely available without being paid somehow. And then of course someone could alter the game to remove the DRM and host it again, but now you're into the is it safe area again, because it won't be cryptographically signed as valid.
"You can’t stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it’s simply not possible."
Yes, good, stop trying. Accept that some people are going to pirate. Fighting this just makes the user experience worse for everyone else.
It's not that simple though.
Steam doesn't suffer a piracy problem because what they offer and the cost they offer it at outweighs the DRM, and there are certain things you can't do on the pirated copy because of the DRM (online play / friends / social stuff)
If suddenly valve decided not to do any DRM and the games could be freely copied, played online and use their friend services, of course they'd have a piracy problem. Of course I'd share a copy to all my friends, who would all do the same. (edit: and at that point it's not even piracy anymore, it's just sharing with friends because you aren't circumventing anything)
Valve has found a sweet spot in this regard, but the DRM is important to their success, but we don't have ownership. We can also solve the ownership problem ~~now~~ in the future or at small/medium scale now..
Taping off the radio didn't kill the music industry, neither did Napster. Adobe did perfectly fine while small artists were using pirated copies of Photoshop. Sharing DRM-free software isn't going to bring about the apocalypse. It's already been happening for decades.
Providing a convenient storefront and launcher is enough for most customers if they think the price is fair. Gating multi-player, or achievements, or even hats behind some kind of proof of payment is going to catch a lot of people who might otherwise get a free copy.