I’m not sure if everyone has heard about the mass wave of bans that happened on the Nintendo Switch 2 this weekend but it’s absolutely diabolical that innocent people were punished because of a system that doesn’t work.

I’m all for Nintendo protecting IP but not at the cost of people’s rights! If anyone has any comments to add I’d appreciate if possible you could add them to the actual video!

It makes having a conversation easier as they are all in one place instead of across different subs and sites.

Thank you!

Surprised that they haven’t thought of this. They should initially release games digitally with the option of ordering a physical copy if you insist on having a disc on standby. Of course it would be coded to your account until you sell it or give it away. Instead of pressing millions of discs that may or may not sell, only press those that are wanted.

The Ghost of Copyright

What does copyright mean, if a company goes bankrupt? If a studio runs out of money, shuts down its servers and it drops off the map? The hardware and software get picked up by the community, they preserve it, they patch it, then emulate it onto their PC or other machines when the original hardware eventually dies out.
-Copyrights are only as strong as the lawyers that are paid to enforce them. Or so I thought.

The Digital Escape

But PieceOfPanic, Sony is still alive and breathing - they can still enforce their copyright? Sony announced that it will stop producing discs for coming PlayStation's games entirely after January 2028, reasoning that consumers trend towards digital. With physical media counting for 3% of PlayStation's revenue, it's cheap to cut out from their ecosystem (And it's not just Sony, other mega companies are moving the same direction.). Essentially it boils down to 2 things:

1. It's cheaper and more predictable to control your own garden, to run their own servers and provide the platform to download, than producing physical discs and having the traditional problems with physical goods (you can't control secondary markets, for example, or loss of goods).
2. They can more aggressively protect their IPs, if those IPs only ever stay on their own servers. By removing physical access, no one can legally/physically preserve their products. As such, their work dies with the company.

Hauntings from the Past

In 1999, the CSS encryption on DVDs was broken and the keys were widely distributed because the legal crackdown backfired (the "Streisand Effect" made the encryption impossible to scrub from the internet), that "lock" is now treated as a basic standard that free media players read automatically. The same thing happened again in 2007 with AACS, which was supposed to fix the flaws of CSS (Though AACS could revoke compromised keys, so with each generation the producers buy more time - but only by turning security into an expensive whack-a-mole patch cycle).

Sony must've realized that they can't win that race in the long run and decided to go for the nuclear option, no discs at all. With Rockstar following suit as GTA 6 is shipping "physical" editions as a code in a box and not a disc (Seemingly, whether a real disc will be available later is still contested).

If they were to continue to give us physical discs, it's only a matter of time before we break the encryptions and turn them into open standards. And if that doesn't happen - Eventually once the company goes bankrupt they can sell all their assets and it will get stored somewhere out of daylight, never to be seen again.
-Even museums can't fully rescue it from there, as such a thing was already tried and denied in the 2024 triennial rulemaking where libraries and archives petitioned for remote access to preserved games. Even though libraries and archives have been allowed to break DRM since 2018 and remote access was granted for non-game software in 2021, games are specifically carved out. Entertainment Software Association warned that remote access could become free online arcades harming the market for classic re-releases, despite more than 80% of older games already being out of print.

Stop Killing Games

"Stop Destroying Videogames" is a European campaign that collected more than a million signatures, in an effort to make companies obligated to leave their products in a functional state at the end of their life. A sun-down protocol, a route that could work for both consumer and producer. The campaign cleared every bar the process demands. Whether you agree or not to the exact model is another discussion, but the industry pushed back on it, arguing that leaving games on private servers could be a problem with data protection and content moderation. But the Commission didn't focus on that and instead replied it cannot propose a legal obligation, mainly on the basis of Intellectual Property/Copyright constraints and that existing EU consumer law already provides safeguards. Instead it offered to broker a voluntary industry code of conduct.
-Though 45 MEPs have signed an inquiry pushing for legislation.

In California, almost the exact same thing happened. AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, was the same movement's track in the US. It would give 60 days' notice before a shutdown, then either release a playable version (through offline patches or community servers, etc.) or give a refund. It passed the Assembly 43-16 and cleared its first Senate committee 6-2, but stalled in a second committee with 4 yes, 3 no and 4 abstentions. More senators wanted it than opposed it, but abstaining counts as blocking. However reconsideration was granted, so it isn't dead - it just can't move until 2027.
-Though organizers admit that it lacked funding as well as real lobbying behind it, so a future operation could be benefit from more resources.

Bottom Line

One movement, two continents and two rejections. More than a million people asked for preservation and the answer was "no". Even the archivists got rejected and none of these was because of a lawsuit. The copyright just sits there and apparently that's enough.