Unless some groundbreaking new study has been published during the last 5 months (which was the last time I checked up on the respective literature), then I can't see where you are coming from. Care to point me to the studies that claim generalized statements like "the stimulus is blameless" to be "indisputable, scientifically proven fact" even for games that apply motivational psychology in the way WoW does?

For this debate yes, because, as I've said before.

"But the right to transfer a service contract without the agreement of the other service party to a third person is hardly what I would call an "Inalienable Right". "

Therefore this isn't protected by consumer protection laws.

While e.g. resale of retail games (which is covered by consumer protection laws that cover goods, for the complete mindfuck) is what you could all an "Inalienable Right".

And "jailbreaking" a phone is only legal in Germany once the contract has expired (afaik, would have to look into this) because you are again voiding a legal contract. You were free to enter that contract. Nobody forces you to get an iPhone.

Consumer protection laws don't only cover inalienable rights, in fact they don't cover them at all as they don't need to, that's the whole point.

If a contract asks you to give up a legal right, the contract may or may not be valid, depending largely on legal precedent and the right in question. I've provided a relevant example of legal precident for a very comparable case, and you've provided an example of a court upholding a consumer's right to resell an intangible product. Note that the iPhone ruling wasn't about people altering anything physical about the product, they were altering intangible elements of the product. The court ruled that the company couldn't use copyright laws to prevent people from changing something intangible that they had purchased.

What legal right am I losing with my Steam SSA?

I'm sorry I edited to much in the post above.

Still have some problems with it.

Why is the content of a book a good but not the content of a disk? It's in all important aspects the same thing, only a different technology. I even need a device to access the content of a book (glasses). :)))

I think the disctinction is clear to me but still arbitrary and not well defined. Even information must be physically stored, otherwise it's not existing. To conclude everything is physical in this world. And everything physical is also information if you know how to read it.

I have nothing against the distinction of physical goods and non-physical (whatever they are called). So what are they called if they aren't called goods?

This is about law, not about philosophy. Simpel as that. A lot of laws are based on the fact that goods must be transferred/moved. You can't transfer "digital goods". (They are copied and deleted).

It's a legal (and economic) defintion, nothing to do about it. It is wildly discussed on how we will handle this digital age legally. But for now, that is were we stand.

I am fine with it. And I am sure it will advance over time.

Now I understand it better. The core is that you can make copies so much, much easier, but also that you have to make copies of "digital goods" in order to transfer them efficiently. (What if I would send my hard disk via mail.)

It's all about DRM again.

I like the name "digital good".

Well, that depends heavily on the country you happen to be in. This is about the most comprehensive report you're ever likely to find regarding consumer rights for digital products in the UK. I have no idea about Germany, and I'm pretty sure such documents don't even exist for Cambodia, they aren't all that hot on rights here these days ;)

I tried but I couldnt read thru the whole thing but I heard that a while back there was a guy that tried advertising his Steam account on Reddit or another one of those "mass community" systems and one of the devs noticed it.... they decided to be nice and just suspend his access to his account for a month or two

From what I've heard the UK is a step (or several) further in all this "digital consumer age" than us. Germany is very conservative when it comes to copyright laws.

Because our economy is based a lot on "innovation" a new concepts (We're not that good with all that "service" stuff ;-) ). And a lot of our laws try to prevent "idea theft". That isn't really what I would call a "modern way of thinking". Quite ironically this now clashes with a very consumer friendly court system. But it is changing. The "pirate party" (I'm not kidding) is gaining massively in popularity and the big parties have taken notice.

I must say I admire people who fight for consumer rights and better laws. They probably spent so much time to fight with big cooperations or lobby groups and in the end they personally almost never benefit from their own work. But us customers always profit a lot from them. So I want to show them my respect at this point and salute them! :)

Yeah, just a few further steps ahead of the UK on invasion of privacy (police sanctioned / written viruses to spy on people for example).

I'm not sure how restrictive the Digital Economy Bill actually ended up being though. I think it was a bit toothless in the end. I've heard of very little about it actually being used to pursue infringers.

Just stop buying new games. I know that's easier said than done, but I know it can be done. I've spent several hundred dollars over the past two years on games, and have 100 games on my backlog. I finally hit the critical point during the Steam Holiday sales this past Christmas and realized, just like you, that I was spending way too much, that I'd spent way too much, and that here I was trying to spend even more when there were so many games I needed to play.

Like other posters have said, I was spending 2X the amount of time searching for sales than I was actually playing the games I'd bought. Since about the middle of the first week of the Steam sale, so somewhere in the middle of December, I haven't bought a single game. Sure, I still haven't been able to kick the habit of checking the sites or seeing the new games or the new sales, and there have been a couple of sales so dirt cheap that before my newfound self-control I would've bought in a heartbeat, I didn't do it because I'd force myself to look at the mountain of games I already had.

I read what another person said and I agree that even if you sold everything, in time, you'd still come back to buying games because basically what you're doing is what alcoholics do when they suddenly feel guilty: they go through their house and throw away all the booze and say that's it, they're done without actually working on the problem in their own mind and heart and depending on how long they can go without it, they always return to the booze. No, buying games isn't technically as addictive as alcohol or drug abuse since it's not physiologically taking over your body as alcohol or herion do (at least so far that's what they're telling us), but that doesn't mean it can't affect particular persons in the same manner (people like you and me).

So just stop buying games. Play what you've got. Slog through them. Go to howlongtobeat.com and input all the games you've played and beat and set up your backlog. It shows you in real days/hours how much time on average it'll take to play and beat all the games you've got. I'm somewhere in the 83 days range. Think about that: 83 days. That's almost 2000 hours on average just to beat what I've already bought. And I'm seriously considering on buying another game? Heck no! That's what you've got to do in your head. Because I'm sure what's happened to you (again, because it happened to me), is that you're no longer even enjoying your games when you play since it just feels like a job to play them, or you feel obligated to play them since you've already spent the money on them, which means you're no longer having fun doing what was once a very fun hobby in playing games. And that's not a cool thing to happen, just as I realized it wasn't cool for me.

If I'm wrong in assuming what happened to me has or is happening to you, I apologize in advance. Gaming is just such a fun and immersive hobby that transcends reading and movie watching, that it was such a letdown to myself when I realized I was no longer having fun gaming because of my non-stop purchases, that I don't want others to lose their passion for gaming because of feeling overwhelmed with how many games they've got and how much money they've spent on it.
Good luck!

I'm not aware of any credible therapist or psychotherapist that considers the difference between physical and psychological addiction to be of any meaningful importance. Dependency issues are diagnosed by behaviors and effects, not through tests, and with good reason. Probably the worst addiction of them all OCD doesn't have any obvious physical component until you start looking at the brain.

You're apparently lucky enough not to have to deal with addiction. I don't personally think it's right to denigrate those that have without good reason.

Ultimately, addiction is relatively simple. If you can't stop doing something that's destroying your life, you know that it's destroying your life, you can't stop doing it without getting sick, then you may have an addiction on your hands. Differentiating between physical and psychological addiction is in my experience frequently used by people wanting to rationalize their own pot use. I'm sure there are others that use that flawed line of reasoning, but I don't usually come across them.

I think you got it right Scribe81. I keep looking at all the neat rpg's to buy, yet I have almost twenty to play yet and am only maybe 1/8th into the one I am playing now. Yet it's tough to not buy!