Cheeky Devlin wrote:It's also the reason that the versions of GTA you get online just now are objectively lesser than their original releases. I believe the licence for music use in perpetuity is tends to be much more expensive. So Rockstar only paid for time-limited licences for the music in those games, meaning they've actually gone in and removed some songs from the game.
If this was just for versions sold going forward it would be shite, but understandable, however they've actually issued patches for existing customers effectively removing the music from copies that are already out there. So they are literally going into your games and removing content you paid for.
AFAIK you can't licence music in perpetuity, you licence it for 5 years use and relicense for every 5 year period after that to continue using it in the manor it was covered in the licence.
There's no legal reason a game that you've bought before should be patched and have content removed. That's a choice of the product creator to make it cheaper to administer their product beyond the licence expiry and it's probably not likely to be a problem for many games outside of GTA that still sell enough to warrant keeping on a store to sell, most will be pulled from sale instead.
It's only really become a thing now because we have moved over to digital products which enable something to be sold indefinitely which is not something that happens with physical product that are produced as new for X amount of print runs.