I suspect Valve's plan is to embarrass the license holder in the hope that they back down. I doubt a court battle would be worth the money.

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yxhuvud 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Either that or just wait out the problem. As long as the linux gaming market keeps growing the incitaments for the hardware people to change their minds will increasingly be there.

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mschuster91 2 days ago | parent [-]

What the (hardware) people want doesn't matter, at least as long as the IP owners have the deeper pockets.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a pretty universal saying, and it also applies here - the rational thing for MAFIAA et al would be to give up and engage in universal licensing schemes similar to the lesson the music industry learned well over a decade ago. There, you have virtually every single mainstream artist/band available everywhere... Apple Music, Youtube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz and I'm sure I forgot a bunch. Piracy in music has all but vanished as a result.

We could have had that with Netflix, and a lot of IP catalogs actually were on Netflix, but because of naked greed it all splintered up, and everyone is running their own distinct streaming silos again.

	▲	yxhuvud a day ago \| parent [-]
		The thing about this kind of hardware standard is that the dominant hardware makers control the IP owners. Copyright is a totally different ballgame.

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mschuster91 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is, while Valve has balls of tungsten... MAFIAA et al have the money, much much more of it.

It makes a good underdog story, but unless Valve goes all-in and flashes a notification to every American Steam user "hey, write to your Congress reps to pass a law to fix this shit, and call their office every day until they publicly relent", no PR can force their hand. It took many years for Right to Repair bills to pass, and many of these only succeeded because the people pushing for it (aka farmers) are very well connected to their representatives and have very deep pockets of money.

The other solution is of course mass protests over civil disobedience to outright violence. That can work to force change as well, we've seen many a law changed in the past (most recently at scale during the Covid pandemic), but I don't see any big-tent movement going on against big-co extortion practices.