Tuesday 10 July 2012

Sharing cloud service accounts

The move to cloud services linked to an individual account means that the days of "family" accounts for a lot of things are passing away. Or maybe that just happens when you have more than one computer in the house, dedicated for use by a single individual. You can't use one Steam account in a situation like that, which means you also can't do the perfectly reasonable thing of sharing games among the family. The real problem, from Valve's point of view (let's say) is that a family sharing an account for quite legitimate reasons looks the same on their end as two conspirators sharing an account to avoid buying two copies of one game.

That kind of control is never going to account for all the reasonable ways we are used to treating our property (such as lending, giving away, selling on, remixing) without also allowing other unreasonable actions (unauthorised duplication, scalping). It's time to choose: are you going to eat your cake, or are you going to admire it? The one thing you can't do, as a company, is tell everyone that the good people will never notice it while the bad people can't get around it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's my birthday today!
PPS - It's okay, you don't have to bow or curtsey.

2 comments:

Robin Gravel said...

Happy Birthday

John said...

Thanks, Robin!