PC Game Streaming, Potential Piracy?

[Subyman]

I was thinking recently about all the new streaming tech that is coming out for Steam and such and it had considering the potential for people to "rent" out their PCs with tons of games installed on them to other people. Say I had a decent rig and while I wasn't playing, I would lend it to others to stream my games. Sure there are the same issues as Onlive such as latency, but it does bring up an interesting question.

Someone can come over to my house and play my games on my TV/console/PC, but can I use that same PC/console to send the feed directly to their house without meddling in piracy laws. None of the core files would leave my system which could bypass piracy laws.

The obvious next step would be a company paying you for them to borrow your GPU computing power to lend to someone else to play games while you aren't.

FWIW, this is only a philosophical question and future use question, not if it can be implemented now.

 

[BrightCandle]

Supposedly its limited to your local lan, but obviously a bit of vlan software and that problem is worked around very easily. Its very possible you could do this today without any great difficulty. You would be in breach of the terms and conditions I suspect, that is one loop hole I am sure they have closed.

 

[Ig]

We only get a personal use license for software. It's just like showing a movie in public. Even if I own a DVD/BD, that does not give the right to play it at a community center's movie night.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Thanks for the idea. I shall now go build my rental shed where people will line up around the block for days just to play the games i have loaded in my basement.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

From my unprofessional legal understanding the act of displaying movies/audio to the public doesn't apply to games, if you do it for free I think that'd be fine, it's not illegal for example to play games with friends on your console with coop or multiplayer, or even let them play.

The issue of streaming for a profit is a different matter however, I think making money via proxy such as this would require you entering into a specific agreement with the copyright holder as you're making money off their work.

 

[Morbus]

I do whatever I want.

And this kind of idiotic questions (I'm not calling the OP an idiot, mind you) just gets so far up my nose, I keep doing whatever I want.

 

[splat_ed]

The biggest drawback to this is you could only have one customer at a time - unless I've misread it, I thought you can stream to one PC and if you go on another it picks up where you left off...

 

[Subyman]

The way I see that it would work would be there would be a company that you would run a program on your computer for. You'd activate it much like the bit coin mining program and it would tell the company that your computer is ready for use. Someone else would connect to that company and select a game then the company would connect that person to your idle computer to play the game. The person playing would pay a small amount. The company takes a cut and gives you, the person that owns the computer, a cut of the money.

They'd be a middle man smoothing out the transaction between the person with the computer and the person wanting to play. I'd imagine lending your computer during the period when you aren't using it could net a decent amount of money over a long period, at least enough to make signing up and firing up the program worth it.

It would be interesting to see if that would snake through the piracy laws.

 

[ImpulsE69]

It would be like Onlive, but local.

 

[Subyman]

It would be like Onlive, but local.

Nah not local. This would be over the internet as well. The difference would be the computing power would be through a commission system instead of having a huge private cluster like Onlive. It would resemble a botnet, but with willing and paying participants.

 

[alcoholbob]

We only get a personal use license for software. It's just like showing a movie in public. Even if I own a DVD/BD, that does not give the right to play it at a community center's movie night.

Wouldn't that constitute fair use? Assuming you aren't charging for tickets.