Backbytes: Digital goods - here today, expunged tomorrow

Games company Electronic Arts demonstrates how digital goods work - and how easily they are taken away

In the digital age, we have digital money, digital music, digital TV and films, and digital games. And what the digital gods give, they can also take away.

Especially with the magical wave of a legislative wand somewhere in the world.

That's the claim of gamers in Myanmar, the country better known as Burma, who have just had all the games that they had expensively built-up in their Electronic Arts' (EA) Origin library effectively expunged when they updated (or were updated) to the latest version of Origin, the software that manages gamers' libraries of EA games.

Yep, just like that, without so much as an apology. The best that gamers in the country could get out of EA was that new US laws meant that they had no choice but to revoke their customers' rights to play the games that they had bought.

Gamers in Myanmar are, quite rightly, a little bit miffed about this combination of high-handed behaviour from US legislators, on the one hand, and EA on the other.

The gamers were caught in the crossfire of a US trade embargo against Myanmar, which also barred access to online services to residents of the country, too. EA, being a patriotic, all-American company decided that this meant that it would stop its customers from being able to play the games that they had purchased, too.

But imagine if it were, for example, your digital wallet with your month's digitally remitted pay, your life savings or the deposit on a house, and it could simply be wiped out at the stroke of a keyboard due to a badly worded or misinterpreted law, halfway across the world (or done quite deliberately)?

EA claims that, since the embargo has now been lifted, it will reconsider at its leisure whether it might condescend to allow customers in Myanmar to have access to the games that they have already purchased. The company should instead, perhaps, consider why it revoked access to those games in the first place.

Especially as the sanctions were lifted at the beginning of September - before EA imposed its own trade embargo on its customers in Myanmar...