Game Streaming Platforms and Technology (xCloud, PSNow, GeforceNow, Luna) (Rip: Stadia)

So you're saying the only way you can legally cloud stream a game is to install your own hardware, you're own OS, you're own Steam client & you're own copy of the game. Then put that all in your own datacenter. What's next you need to own the fiber too? You can own own the whole chain to the streamed device. I guess if I was renting the smartphone I would be illegally streaming it to a device I don't own?

Tommy McClain

That's basically the only real legally practical way to stream a game unless another party was given permission like we see with the Google Sadia platform.

With a rented smartphone you're still not sharing copyrighted content with another party at the end of the day.
 
That's basically the only real legally practical way to stream a game unless another party was given permission like we see with the Google Sadia platform.

With a rented smartphone you're still not sharing copyrighted content with another party at the end of the day.

Let me just say I disagree & think that if you what you propose is true then this will have ramifications for the whole industry & not just games. All uses of remote desktop will be affected.

Tommy McClain
 
Let me just say I disagree & think that if you what you propose is true then this will have ramifications for the whole industry & not just games. All uses of remote desktop will be affected.

Tommy McClain

It's not been a problem now for many other streaming platforms because unlike GeForce NOW other platform vendors actually have permission to host such content.

What I've said has been true for many years now so it's not some new revalation to take in and it's not going to change the grand scheme of things.

If Nvidia actually tried to cut a deal with the publisher's then they wouldn't be in this mess.
 
I’m not sure what’s the issue.

Your personal software license doesn’t extend the right for you or anyone else to commercialize the software.

Yes, you are allowed to download the software to different hardware to play at your convenience. But your license doesn’t extend to Nvidia by giving them the right to manage the software at your convenience while extracting a fee from you for doing so. The problem isn’t the user of GFN, it’s Nvidia.

You may have an issue that copyrights allows such controls. But Nvidia is the last company to complain.

Nvidia isn’t the most sympathetic figure. They use the copyrights of their drivers to limit the use of their consumer gaming gpus in data centers. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Anyone thinks Nvidia would have no problem with someone buying off the shelf RTX gpus and starting a similar service to GFN without gaining a commercial license from Nvidia? I doubt it. So Nvidia should be the first to accept the rights of publishers to require a commercial license.
 
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It's not been a problem now for many other streaming platforms because unlike GeForce NOW other platform vendors actually have permission to host such content.
Are you referring to any others than Stadia, PSNow or XCloud? Because those three are also the content holders and store front for the game where you have to buy it.
 
Here's an interesting excerpt from a supposed Nvidia employee:

So I worked on GFN and Nvidia Games, and the way it was explained to me is that the issue is the game files being loaded on a server. Even if you plan to load those files so that someone with a license can play them, you possessing and broadly distributing the game data on a half million servers is not within the terms of a standard license, so we needed a special license.

We used a number of giant steam/origin/ect accounts with every game purchased for dev testing on a single instance at a time. However, we couldn't push to any servers without an explicit contract signed.

Would it stand legally? No idea, but our lawyers seemed to think the publishers would have a good case. If you have any further questions, I can try to answer them if they don't break NDAs, but I'm not an expert in most of the service.

Also a similar case was raised in American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo in the supreme court. Aereo offered a remote DVR streaming service which sounds not too disimilar to GeForce NOW but once broadcasting companies caught wind of this they filed a lawsuit and the judges ruled by a vote of 6-3 that this was a gross violation of copyright law.
 
I think you misunderstand. It's not Nvidia that will sue the Publishers, rather the people who own the games will likely file a class action suit against the publishers preventing them from playing games that gives the best gaming experience.

Currently the main problem for non compliant publishers is, even if a few publishers see no problem and let their games be played on Geforce Now it strengthens the argument that some publishers recognize that consumers do have game ownership and can play in any setting that gives the consumer the greatest gaming experience.

BTW, ABC vs Aereo is not even closely related because ABC owned what was being "transmitted publicly" or recorded.
Interesting to see that the court also ruled that "The Court has said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product."
 
I think you misunderstand. It's not Nvidia that will sue the Publishers, rather the people who own the games will likely file a class action suit against the publishers preventing them from playing games that gives the best gaming experience.


There's no legal precedent to support your argument and what is the 'best' gaming experience is subjective.

Currently the main problem for non compliant publishers is, even if a few publishers see no problem and let their games be played on Geforce Now it strengthens the argument that some publishers recognize that consumers do have game ownership and can play in any setting that gives the consumer the greatest gaming experience.

Once again ownership =/= copyright so just because some publishers are okay with Nvidia copying their content does not mean that it should be true for all publishers. It just means that some publishers won't strictly enforce copyright.

BTW, ABC vs Aereo is not even closely related because ABC owned what was being "transmitted publicly" or recorded.
Interesting to see that the court also ruled that "The Court has said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product."

[/QUOTE]

GeForce NOW's hosted copyrighted content is also being "transmitted publicly" and at the end of the day the supreme court ruled by a vote of 6-3 that Aereo was in violation of copyright law so publishers could easily make a similar case against Nvidia.

Also here's the full context of your quoted statement that you conveniently left out.

In his decision, Breyer was clear to note that the high court did not mean to meddle in that area.

“We have said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product,” he wrote. “And we have not considered whether the public performance right is infringed when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works, such as the remote storage of content.”

It means Nvidia can still face prosecution since they're still "publicly transmitting" copyrighted content without consent. Also the good news for publishers is that many of the judges who ruled in a majority are all still there sitting at the supreme court, 5 out of 6 of them to be exact so the publishers can very much stake this fight out to the highest court if they wanted to because the supreme court stands a very good chance of ruling in favour of them currently.
 
I think you misunderstand. It's not Nvidia that will sue the Publishers, rather the people who own the games will likely file a class action suit against the publishers preventing them from playing games that gives the best gaming experience.

Currently the main problem for non compliant publishers is, even if a few publishers see no problem and let their games be played on Geforce Now it strengthens the argument that some publishers recognize that consumers do have game ownership and can play in any setting that gives the consumer the greatest gaming experience.

BTW, ABC vs Aereo is not even closely related because ABC owned what was being "transmitted publicly" or recorded.
Interesting to see that the court also ruled that "The Court has said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product."

Pubs aren’t stopping gamers from buying the best hardware to play their games. Pubs aren’t stopping you from renting hardware to play the game. What they are doing is stopping Nvidia from offering you a service powered by their hardware and the pubs software without compensation.

Conflating GFN with hardware rental is like conflating buying a bus ticket with renting a bus. You can’t do anything with GFN if you don’t provide or aren’t provided software licensing rights which means the subscription fee is inherently tied to the hardware and software. You are not renting hardware you are subscribing to a service.

One publisher’s behavior doesn’t oblige other publishers to behave in the same manner. That would be like suing your neighborhood to be able to park freely in everybody’s driveways just because one neighbor allows you to freely park on their property.
 
And how is paying a couple of hundred bucks over the course of a few years any different from paying a couple of hundred bucks up front?

Devs/pubs are still getting their money and access to games is still the same as when playing on your pc at home.
 
Pubs aren’t stopping gamers from buying the best hardware to play their games. Pubs aren’t stopping you from renting hardware to play the game. What they are doing is stopping Nvidia from offering you a service powered by their hardware and the pubs software without compensation.

Conflating GFN with hardware rental is like conflating buying a bus ticket with renting a bus. You can’t do anything with GFN if you don’t provide or aren’t provided software licensing rights which means the subscription fee is inherently tied to the hardware and software. You are not renting hardware you are subscribing to a service.

You are subscribing to a service that rents you hardware access. Again, this is GeForce Now. It is Steam running in a Windows VM. The user logs in to Steam which allows access to their own games. The only software company owed licensing by Nvidia here is Microsoft, and they are presumably in compliance there.

You can’t do anything with GFN if you don’t provide or aren’t provided software licensing rights which means the subscription fee is inherently tied to the hardware and software.

I cannot follow any reasoning in this statement at all. Yes, you can't do anything unless you provide the software licensing rights, in the form of a Steam account and the games licensed to it. That's where it ends. Nvidia certainly isn't providing game licenses on its own. But somehow that means Nvidia is on the hook for the user's licenses?
 
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You are subscribing to a service that rents you hardware access. Again, this is GeForce Now. It is Steam running in a Windows VM. The user logs in to Steam which allows access to their own games. The only software company owed licensing by Nvidia here is Microsoft, and they are presumably in compliance there.

I cannot follow any reasoning in this statement at all. Yes, you can't do anything unless you provide the software licensing rights, in the form of a Steam account and the games licensed to it. That's where it ends. Nvidia certainly isn't providing game licenses on its own. But somehow that means Nvidia is on the hook for the user's licenses?

That’s like saying when you pay a membership fee to a gym with basketball court that you are renting the court itself when using it just because you brought your own basketball. Thats an overly broad use of the term “rent”. The gym is simply letting you use its equipment to provide you a service. GFN uses a subscription in conjunction with a software license to provide access. That small caveat doesn’t create a hardware rental model.

The subscription isn’t a hardware rental fee. If the sub was a rental fee, Nvidia would give you broader control over the hardware. All Nvidia does is spin a game up from a library on its hardware for you to use. A library that Nvidia controls.

You don’t rent streaming hardware from Netflix or Hulu. You don’t rent cars from Uber. The provision of hardware when paying for a service doesn’t inherently involve renting. Rent as definition is often described as the possession and use of something in return for payment. You never really have direct control of the hardware.
 
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Conflating GFN with hardware rental is like conflating buying a bus ticket with renting a bus. You can’t do anything with GFN if you don’t provide or aren’t provided software licensing rights which means the subscription fee is inherently tied to the hardware and software. You are not renting hardware you are subscribing to a service.

And that service provides you access to the Steam application running on a PC. Simple.

The only valid claim developers have is that Nvidia is caching local copies of game files. If you had to download the game from Steam servers to the machine each time it would literally be a remote desktop situation. If anything this is a Valve and Nvidia issue.
 
In his decision, Breyer was clear to note that the high court did not mean to meddle in that area.

“We have said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product,” he wrote. “And we have not considered whether the public performance right is infringed when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works, such as the remote storage of content.”
Thanks, this cements my argument even more! The ruling does not apply to "owners" or "possessors" meaning consumers who have bought the product and own it. It also does not cover when the consumer pays for "remote storage of content".

Your interpretation is exactly what the judges state how not to interpret the ruling, in other words the judges have not
"we have not considered whether the public performance right is infringed when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works, such as the remote storage of content.”

I suggest we leave the legalese to the lawyers and courts.
 
Don't internet servers and other infrastructure within the whole pipeline cache data? All Nvidia has to do to cover their asses if they wanted to take the pubs to task on this one is make sure their shared storage of the games is implemented as much as possible as a generic cache system, and use that angle in court.
Also, I don't know what their UX is like, but it should be as generic and broad as a VM too. Even if it's meant to be gaming focused, one should be able to log into MS office 365 and use it to make excel spreadsheets if so desired. That would make their hole case easier to deffend as well.
 
The only valid claim developers have is that Nvidia is caching local copies of game files.

There must be more to it than that because I feel like one could sidestep this by either pairing the streaming hardware in close proximity to Valve's CDNs (such that the installations could rapidly be retrieved and dumped with every session), or Valve could opt to classify Nvidia's storage as a CDN under whatever the existing distribution/publishing terms are between Valve and devs. Surely the crux of the matter is not the duplication of data or where it resides, but the end-user usage of the content.
 
One publisher’s behavior doesn’t oblige other publishers to behave in the same manner. That would be like suing your neighborhood to be able to park freely in everybody’s driveways just because one neighbor allows you to freely park on their property.
The publishers will likely go their own individual ways regarding Geforce Now support (some agree/disagree). If things go to court in a consumer digital media rights and ownership case, it will a benefit for consumers if publishers are divided on GFN usage and game ownership.
 
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one should be able to log into MS office 365 and use it to make excel spreadsheets if so desired.

I was just thinking this earlier, albeit I imagined it being a blank desktop with a notepad.exe icon on it. To be fair though, GFN is providing access to the full Steam client, which includes their built-in browser functionality. Am able to load youtube, this thread, and probably google doc's spreadsheet if you're trusting enough to enter your google account credentials. (edit: And I believe I violated GFN's ToS in several different ways by doing this.)
 
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Surely the crux of the matter is not the duplication of data or where it resides, but the end-user usage of the content.
The end user has the license to access and play the game. If streaming itself was the issue then it would be a problem for me simply because I play games streamed to my Shield. Publishers aren't going to deny my right to do that. I concur that there only issue I see possibly is the remote use of the game files

The publishers that pulled out did so because they want done kind of commercial contract and thus a piece of the pie. They want money from Nvidia.
 
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