[why_at]

Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.

>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.

[akerl_]

Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.

Having a rule that applies to game developers after they’ve done something, entirely unrelated to anything in their control, is frankly horrifying. “Sorry, you can’t ship any more breaking changes, your game hit a popularity threshold yesterday”.