Ownership vs licensing: bricked products and rented access

New York announced a game ownership bill that would require ownership rather than licensing. A top comment said they used to think offline modes and community servers were too expensive for developers, and no longer do. Meanwhile a custom server revives Neato robot vacuums, with the author explaining Generation 3 robots need nip.io workarounds. Legal experts warned that Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, and commenters said never to rely on robots.txt. The Anthropic thread on blocking Claude Code subscriptions from using OpenClaw fits the same frame: users feel they paid for capacity and the vendor redefined what they bought.

The pattern: people are tired of products where the vendor can change the rules or kill the service. Reverse-engineered servers and legislation are the two responses.

The nuance is cost. Supporting shutdown modes is real work, and a subscription that allows unlimited third-party harnesses is a real strain. Neither side's case is fake.